The Junta de Andalucía had, and has, six months to respond to any request for assistance. 182 days which, however, have tripled on average. Much more than, 330 days. But delays sometimes go far beyond any of those measures. In Granada, a woman requested it in 2017. The concession was signed 949 days later. The notification still took several months, so the family found out 1,057 days after requesting it, or what is the same, two years, 10 months and 19 days. These benefits are charged from the time they are granted and not from the time, if the requirements are met, they are requested. This delay in granting meant the loss of more than 30 months of aid.
The woman’s family demanded payment from the seventh month and the Andalusian Administration denied it. In the end, the matter ended up in a contentious administrative court that ruled that the Board must review its refusal to reverse the payment and issue a new ruling. It is only the beginning but, says José Ramón Márquez, the family’s lawyer, it can pave the way for the Administration to be forced to respond financially for the delay in its decisions.
The story of this Granada family, who prefers to remain anonymous and speak only through their lawyer, begins on October 24, 2017. The mother, then in her early 80s, applies for dependency benefit. At the end of April of the following year, six months pass without a response, but it is at the end of May 2020 when the Ministry of Equality, Social Policies and Conciliation resolves positively, and it is in September of that year when they communicate it to the family: It takes three and a half months for the family to find out. One more gap that, in addition to being common, only adds confusion to the deadlines for possible appeals.
The woman received the benefit from 2020 until her death in 2022. The notification, her lawyer explains, included “three or four months of payment for the delay but not the 32 that actually took, 26 of them outside the legal deadline to respond. ”. For this reason, even while the affected woman was alive, the daughters, recalls Márquez, decided to demand payment of the benefit from the moment in which the Andalusian Board should have resolved. The Administration refused and the lawyer initiated a different process: a property claim against the Junta de Andalucía for its poor functioning.
This new process is, in summary, as José Ramón Márquez explains, a request for the Administration to respond for its poor functioning: “If it had to respond in six months and it takes 32, we put up with the delay in time, but not with the monetary delay. You must pay from the first moment,” he insists. The Board, now alleging that this request was made after the deadline, once again denied the payment, which at 387.64 euros for 26 months barely exceeds 10,000 euros.
After this second refusal, the family went to the contentious administrative court. In her ruling, the judge writes that the Board’s resolution, which says that the request arrived after the deadline, simultaneously recognizes “undue delays and the Administration’s duty to repair it.” The judge also recognizes that the Board did not take into account “the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, nor the non-business days” and that, therefore, it is not true that the family’s claim was out of time. For this reason, it forces him to return to the matter, go “into the depths and resolve it.”
For the family’s lawyer, the debate is now whether the Board will continue to admit what it has already accepted, “that it arrived late and must compensate, limiting itself to discussing only the amount or if it decides to fight everything, whether to pay or not.” Technically, the sentence, like all of them, must be carried out in 20 days, which have already passed without the family having any news.
This newspaper has consulted the matter with a spokesperson for the Ministry of Equality, Social Policies and Conciliation. At this moment they have the sentence “under analysis”, so they cannot advance the meaning of the decision. They do remember that this specific request was made “when the PSOE was in the Junta Government, which upon leaving left behind a chaotic and obsolete dependency system.” There were then, they say, more than 200,000 people on the waiting list with a delay of 1,275 days. Now, five years after the PP took over the Andalusian Government, this spokesperson comments: “We have changed the previous procedure, which required five applications and, with it, many possibilities of error that sent the file to limbo in each problem.” The department explains that they found more than 1,800 files with more than 1,000 days of waiting that now have their benefit.
For Martín Durán, president of the , the ruling recognizes that “on the one hand, the right of dependency is not extinguished with the death of the person.” “And on the other hand, undue delays by the Administration are finally beginning to be demanded and penalized,” he adds. “The Administration has a responsibility and it must be demanded and it must fulfill it,” he adds.
