The budget that the autonomous communities allocate to health, education and social services has grown by 34.4% in the country as a whole in the 15 years between 2009 and 2024, and in the Canary Islands it was above the average, increasing by 48.2%.
The growth has occurred with large territorial differences: more than double in the Balearic Islands (71.8%) and less than half in Catalonia (12.2%), and in the Canary Islands the increase was 48.2%.
The latest report from the State Association of Directors and Managers in Social Services, made public this Monday, states that, after the years of the financial crisis and the cuts, spending on social policies began to rise in 2013 and has increased to a greater extent between 2019 and 2024 as a result of the management of the pandemic.
In those five years alone, the autonomous budget for these purposes has increased by 34,542.30 million euros, although the evolution of this increase has been "very uneven" among the different communities.
The association points out that having had general state budgets until 2023 has led to an increase in investment in social policies.
It also points out that the budget dedicated to social policies has been trending downwards since 2010, when it was 67.4%, more than 8 percentage points more than the 59.1% in 2024, and calculates that if the same percentage had been maintained last year, nearly 17,000 million euros more than actually spent would have been allocated to health, education and social services.
Balearic Islands, Navarra and the Valencian Community, the ones that have improved the most
Since 2009, all the autonomous communities have increased their investment in all the areas analyzed in the report, in a prominent way the Balearic Islands (71.8%), Navarra (57%) and the Valencian Community (52.1%).
Compared to these territories, Catalonia and Castilla-La Mancha are the two autonomous communities with the lowest increase, 12.2 and 16.3%, respectively, followed by Galicia (30.9%), Madrid (31.5%) and Aragon (33.2%), all of them below the average (34.4%).
In absolute figures, these percentages translate into increases per inhabitant of 1,429 euros in the Balearic Islands or 1,346 in Navarra compared to 153 in Catalonia or 450 in Castilla-La Mancha.
In 2024, the highest spending per inhabitant on social policies corresponded to 4,500 euros in Navarra and 4,344 in the Basque Country; and the lowest to the three with the largest population: 2,703 in Madrid, 2,941 in Catalonia and 3,158 euros in Andalusia.
The highest percentages of autonomous spending on social policies in 2024 compared to the total budget of the autonomous community corresponded to Murcia (64.7%), Castilla y León (64.6%) and Andalusia (64.5%) and the lowest to Navarra (47.6%), Catalonia (49.3%) and the Balearic Islands (54.6%).