Cabinet wants to apologise for affected children's benefits affair
NOS News•Monday, June 30, 3:11 PM •Updated Monday, June 30, 3:37 PM
Cabinet wants to apologise for affected children's benefits affair
Share this article
The cabinet wants to apologise to all young people and children affected by the removals in the benefits affair. This is what the outgoing NSC State Secretaries Struycken (Legal Protection) and Palmen (Recovery and Allowances) write to the House.
As a result of the relocations, the children and young people experienced additional damage due to the problems that arose in their families. The cabinet wants to explicitly acknowledge their suffering, the state secretaries write. In addition, the cabinet wants to talk to the young people about measures to support them.
Struycken and Palmen respond to the report with their intentions “Legacy of Injustice” of the Committee on Allowances and Outsources. This showed that recoveries by the tax authorities often led to poverty, debt and stress. As a result, the problems in families became often even bigger. Due to shortcomings in youth assistance and youth protection, financial problems were not sufficiently recognized and displacements followed that could have been prevented. The committee has already called for recognition.
Recognition
Palmen, now Secretary of State, was an official at the time of the benefits affair. She warned earlier and pleaded for compensation for the victims in 2017, but she was not listened to. “These young people still carry the negative impact with them every day,” she writes. The cabinet therefore wants to help them with “what they need most”. She tells the young people: “We see and hear you and recognize that a lot of suffering has been caused by the government.”
The cabinet wants to work out what the apologies and help will look like with “the partners and organizations involved and young people themselves in a careful process”. In any case, the outgoing cabinet plans to set up a national support center and set up new regulations for children displaced from home.
Some of the many thousands of victims of the benefits affair have been displaced from their homes. It has been unclear for years exactly how many children it is.
According to the CBS, all affected parents together have more than 68,000 children, but the Ministry of Finance is talking about more than 100,000 children. According to a CBS estimate, 2,090 children of affected parents were forcibly removed from home. The Ministry of Justice and Security says that 3,532 children were removed from their parents.
The recovery of the affair has still not been completed. In March, a committee concluded that the recovery is still seems unclear and impractical. The cabinet then promised to do everything in its power and aim to ensure that all more than 41,000 affected parents were helped by 2027 at the latest.
.avif)