The compensation “will be concentrated on claims likely to affect the solidity or hinder the normal use of the damaged building”. neenawat555/stock.adobe.com
“A new mechanism” will allow the compensation of victims located in municipalities “having suffered an abnormal succession of droughts (…) but whose intensity does not meet the current criteria.”
The criteria for recognition of the state of natural disaster will be “flexibility“in the case of drought for”better take into account the slow and progressive nature of the phenomenon of soil drought-rehydrationwhich causes damage to houses, according to the report of the Council of Ministers on Wednesday.
The phenomenon of shrinkage-swelling of clay soils (RGA) affects a good half of the metropolitan territory and causes landslides that destabilize the foundations of houses and generate cracks in the walls. This government ordinance, issued under a law of February 2022, “as well as the implementing texts that will accompany it by the summer, will make it possible to increase the number of municipalities eligible for recognition of the state of natural disaster compared to the current situation.“, underlines the government.
Relaxation of criteria
Several months ago, the program Cash Investigation had pointed out the difficulty of obtaining compensation in certain cases with situations sometimes bordering on the absurd. In addition to a relaxation of the recognition criteria, “a new mechanism“will allow the compensation of victims located in municipalities”having undergone an abnormal succession of droughts of significant magnitude, but whose intensity measured year by year does not meet the current criteria».
The executive also wants tobetter consideration of the situation of adjacent municipalities» to those who have had the recognition of the state of natural disaster, the current system means that a house located in a municipality can be compensated while a house located a few hundred meters away is not. To avoid a cost slippage for CCR, the public reinsurer responsible for compensating natural disasters and which expressed concern in a recent study of these developments, compensation “will be concentrated on claims likely to affect the solidity or hinder the normal use of the damaged building».
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In other words, the government responds favorably to a track mentioned on several occasions by the federation of insurers which questioned the need to compensate for damage “purely aesthetic“. In 2022, the cost of damage to individual houses due to drought is expected to be around 2.5 billion euros, a record since the creation of the regime.Natural disasters» in 1982.
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