The State will financially compensate the autonomous communities only when, as a result of the relocation of unaccompanied foreign minors, approved on Tuesday in the Council of Ministers, they host more than corresponds to them by population.
This is clear from the royal decree law, published this Wednesday by the Official State Gazette (BOE) and which comes into force this Thursday, which articulates a mechanism for referring young people from arrival communities with their strained care resources, such as the Canary Islands and Ceuta, to other regions.
The text provides for this model, which will mean the transfer during the first year of 4,000 minors from the Canary Islands and 400 from Ceuta, the provision of a fund attached to the Ministry of Youth and Childhood that in 2025 will have 100 million euros.
According to the decree law, this will serve to "fully compensate" the communities for the costs caused by the overcrowding caused by the minors transferred from another region if these exceed the ordinary capacity of their protection and guardianship system.
But overcrowding will not take into account what each autonomous community determines - at present, many claim to have their systems saturated by having more minors in care than places - but rather the so-called "ordinary capacity", calculated as provided for in the text.
To arrive at this figure, provided that the communities do not unanimously determine otherwise in the Sectoral Conference on Childhood and Adolescence, it is necessary to divide the total population of the country by the number of minors in the entire territory and, subsequently, divide the population of the region by the number obtained above.
In addition, the text establishes that this financing will be received as long as a number of reception places above the average of the total number of existing places in the State as a whole per 100,000 inhabitants is accredited.
According to the latest government estimates, published in October of last year and based on figures for the reception of minors of any nationality, the only communities that were hosting young people above what corresponded to them according to their population - in addition to the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla - were Catalonia (+1065), the Basque Country (+498) and Navarra (+85).
The weighting of criteria
Another of the details reflected in the text is the way in which the criteria for the distribution of minors to the autonomous communities will be weighted, which are the following:
- 50% of the minors, depending on the population of the communities.
- 15%, inversely to the unemployment rate of the host regions, according to the Labor Force Survey of the last quarter.
- 13%, according to the gross disposable income per capita of the households of the host autonomous communities, published by the National Institute of Statistics.
- 10%, inversely, depending on the "structural dimensioning of the reception places system" estimated by the Ministry of Youth and Childhood, that is, the difference in existing places compared to the desirable average of having one place for every 2,500 inhabitants.
- 6%, in inverse proportion, according to the community's effort in caring for young migrants, understood as the average number of children in care in the last six months and the ratio of minors per 100,000 inhabitants of the community's population.
- 2%, depending on the dispersion of the population.
- The text includes two other criteria designed not to overload certain territories due to their geographical characteristics, specifically the Balearic Islands and Melilla, so that 2% of young people will be relocated to non-insular territories and another 2% to areas that are not a border city.
