The use of consulting companies can be regulated for native authorities, to the good displeasure of the Senate | EUROtoday

It's a stone within the Senate backyard. The authorities and the National Assembly agreed that using consulting companies by native authorities with greater than 100,000 inhabitants ought to, as for the State, be regulated. This provision, launched through an government modification, was voted on Thursday 1^er February by the deputies within the invoice governing the consulting expenditure of public authorities. Adopted at first studying, it due to this fact issues the areas, departments in addition to municipalities (42 of them) and 145 public intermunicipal cooperation institutions.

The textual content examined got here from the Senate, the place it was adopted in October 2022. It was then solely a query of the supervision of consulting companies ordered by the State. Because it’s inside it, the truth is, that the second chamber had detected, in a damning report revealed in March 2022, the large and rising affect of consulting companies on public affairs. In 2021, the State spent greater than 1 billion euros on these missions, double the quantity recorded earlier than the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017.

The invoice handed in 2022 within the Senate strengthened transparency obligations, prohibited sure practices, resembling free companies, imposed an analysis by the administration and elevated the prevention of conflicts of curiosity. The authorities had already tried to increase the scope of those measures to native authorities. But the senators had been against it.

“I believe that they must be included within the scope of the proposed law,” affirmed the Minister Delegate accountable for relations with Parliament, Marie Lebec, in the course of the debates within the National Assembly on Thursday, on behalf of ” transparency “. “Let’s take the instance of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine areaillustrated Sacha Houlié, Renaissance deputy for Vienne : six million inhabitants, a territory as huge as Austria…” Brief, “real states”, agrees Jean-Paul Mattei. The deputy for Pyrénées-Atlantiques, president of the MoDem group in the National Assembly, considers that “everyone must apply the same rules of transparency since it is public money”.

Seeking to rob the senators

In the ranks of the Socialist Party, the deputy for Saône-et-Loire Cécile Untermaier is on the identical line. Conversely, the Horizons deputy (the motion of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe) from Seine-Maritime, Marie-Agnès Poussier-Winsback sees this “a red line”. “Local authorities will not be the Stateshe considers. In the previous, there are safeguards and controls in any respect ranges. We are going so as to add mistrust and heaviness whereas we preserve saying that we have to simplify. »

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