In Spain, 29.2% of households with minors live below the poverty line, according to the latest available data, from 2024. Year after year, it appears among the European Union countries with the worst figures in this area, a community. Faced with this situation, the Government is committed to taking steps towards a universal child-rearing benefit, a type of aid available to most EU countries and which academics and child protection organizations are demanding to alleviate these figures. Sumar proposes that all families receive 200 euros per month for each child, until they turn 18, regardless of their income. Although, asked about this at the press conference after the Council of Ministers, the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero (PSOE), has cooled those expectations, saying that first it would be necessary to evaluate the existing instruments to combat child poverty and, where appropriate, unify them into a single benefit.
This Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved an institutional declaration, on the occasion of International Children’s Rights Day, which is commemorated this Thursday, which outlines the possibility that a universal child-rearing benefit could be a reality in Spain. Although it does not go as far as the Government’s minority partner would like.
“Economic inequality also conditions entire lives from childhood,” the document reads. “For this reason, the Ministry of Youth and Children continues to promote policies to combat child poverty,” the text reads. Such as compliance with the —a program to combat the social exclusion of minors— and the extension of the child support supplement to the minimum vital income (IMV) —a help that is de facto received by those who have children and are beneficiaries of the IMV, but which can also be requested by families who do not receive this help, but who do not exceed certain incomes. All of this, the statement says, “while moving towards a child-rearing benefit designed from parameters of universality and fiscal equity.”
Montero stated: “My opinion is that to reformulate any other benefit in terms of child poverty we have to evaluate the performance of the instruments that we have put in place at this time, very large, and that in any case, if we have to improve in a single benefit, we would have to recast all these complements in some other benefit, whatever it may be called.”
Montero specifically mentioned the IMV’s child aid supplement, although in Spain the bulk of aid to families, not just vulnerable ones, comes through tax deductions when filing income tax returns. “If not, we are constantly duplicating instruments or placing them overlapping one another, and the impression is that they do not obtain the performance we are looking for when they are distributed like this,” he added. So if they had to be improved, he considered, it could be through a universal child-rearing benefit, “or any other improved one that we already have in place.”
Already in the last legislature, Ione Belarra ( Podemos ) proposed for the first time a universal child-rearing benefit, which she wanted to include in the family law, without success due to the reluctance of the socialist wing of the Executive. This Government, a coalition between the PSOE and Sumar, which is currently being processed in Congress and has been stuck for months, and which includes a child-rearing income of 100 euros per month for families with children up to three years old, although not universally.
Currently, a large part of these households already receive this aid, through a refundable tax deduction for working mothers, because it was expanded in 2023 to also include cases that until then were not contemplated, such as women who collect unemployment benefits, for example. But it still doesn’t reach all the houses.
That is precisely the problem: not all households file their income tax return. Precisely the most vulnerable are left out. The minimum vital income is designed for them and also the child support supplement of the minimum vital income (which amounts to 115 euros for children up to three years old). But many of those who could qualify for these benefits, not exempt from bureaucracy, do not even request them.
As well as the stigmatization of those who have to request help for people in vulnerable situations, children’s organizations and experts defend the existence of a universal child-rearing benefit. According to sources from the Ministry of Youth and Children, this formula would allow the current assistance model to be put aside and would reduce the child poverty rate by half.
Sumar, a coalition led by Yolanda Díaz, has put this measure on the table on several occasions as one of its priorities regarding the General State Budgets. Some accounts that the Executive plans to present by 2026, despite something that complicates its approval.
In the EU, 17 of the 27 members have a universal income for upbringing, as argued multiple times by the Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, who defends that the measure be accompanied by a tax reform. Spain is the Member State that has the least capacity to reduce child poverty through aid, as highlighted by Unicef last year, when the organization also highlighted that the country only invests 1.5% of GDP in social protection of children and families, compared to the 2.4% European average.
The OECD has invited Spain to explore the path of universal child-rearing benefit. As highlighted in a campaign a couple of years ago by the Children’s Platform, which brings together the main organizations defending children’s rights in Spain, in countries like Germany, 219 euros per month are received for each child and in Ireland, 140, up to the age of 18.
In 2024, Save the Children, Unicef and the Children’s Platform carried out a simulation of how much it would cost Spain to propose universal child support, through a refundable tax deduction, with different amounts, with net costs that would range from 3,180 million euros annually to 8,668 million.
The institutional declaration approved by the Council of Ministers states that “no child or adolescent should have their future limited by their economic or housing situation.” For all these reasons, the Ministry of Youth and Children is promoting a State pact for the eradication of child poverty.
