The Government of the Canary archipelago has increased by 1,084 million euros the budget it dedicates to finance health, education and the rest of social policies with respect to 2009, which means an increase of 21.59% with reference to the year of the beginning of the cuts throughout Spain due to the banking crisis that followed the bursting of the real estate bubble.
This is stated in the report "Social investment by communities" of the Association of Directors and Managers of Social Services, which analyzes with official data from the Ministry of Finance and the National Institute of Statistics (INE) the evolution of regional items allocated to social policies in twelve years.
At the end of 2022, the Canary Islands allocated 61.36% of its regional budget to social policies, two and a half points above the average of the rest of the communities (58.78%).
In this report, the Canary Islands comes out well and badly, depending on the reference taken for the analysis. In fact, it is among the communities in Spain that make the most effort in social policies in proportion to the total expenditure available in its budget, but it is at the bottom of the table in per capita expenditure.
For example, according to this report, the Canary Islands is the fourth community that spends the highest percentage of its budget on Health, 34.6% (almost 4 points above the average, 30.8%), but the twelfth that spends the least euros per inhabitant on that competence, 1,585 euros (48 euros below the average).
The same occurs in Education, where the Canary Islands is the sixth community that makes the most effort in that area in proportion to its resources (20.6%, just the average), but also as the third with the least expenditure per inhabitant, with 942 euros (86 below the average).
In Social Services, the autonomous community spends 6% of its budget, 276 euros per person. In both cases, it is at the bottom of Spain, in the second to last and last position, respectively.
Social spending in Spain has fallen by more than 8 points since 2010
However, in this case the report recalls that the three communities that close the table of spending on social services (the Basque Country, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands) have decentralized these competences in their regional councils, consells and cabildos, so that the comparison with the rest of the autonomous regions is not homogeneous.
The balance of these three areas is the same: social policies have a weight in the budget of the Canary Islands higher than the average, but its per capita expenditure in these competences is the fourth lowest in the country, with 2,808 euros, only above Madrid (2,939 euros), Catalonia (2,781 euros) and Andalusia (2,792 euros).
In Spain as a whole, the budget that the autonomous communities allocate to social policies -Health, Education and Social Services- has gone from 67.4% in 2010 to 58.8% in 2022.
The analysis shows that despite the fact that covid demonstrated the importance of spending on essential public services of health, education and social services, the increase in spending on these policies managed by the communities has only been 13.5% between 2019 and 2022: 7.9% in health, 17.7% in education and 28.8% in social services.