Until a few days ago, when a Catalan family could not pay their electricity bill, the supplier company was obliged to consult social services before cutting off their electricity. If a situation of vulnerability was confirmed, there was no cut-off. This was the precautionary principle, one of the pillars of the Catalan law on energy poverty of 2015. Now the Constitutional Court has annulled this obligation, considering that it encroaches on state competencies. The decision puts an end to one of the most ambitious protections against energy poverty that existed in the State. But it also forces us to face an uncomfortable question: why do we continue to wait for a family to reach their limit before identifying that they need help?Without this obligation, protection depends mainly on the social bonus, the state discount on the electricity bill. The problem is that, to benefit from it, you need to know it exists, process it, and prove you are entitled to it. And we already know what happens when access to a right depends on this process: many people fall by the wayside. In Catalonia, about eight out of ten households that could benefit from the social bonus do not receive it.This does not mean that the model that is now falling was perfect. The same family could obtain a different response depending on the municipality where they lived, due to differences in criteria, and in a large part of the territory these social reports of poverty risk were issued drop by drop. Protection depended too often on the capacity of social services or, simply, on the place of residence. But, with all its limitations, it had a virtue rarely seen in our social protection system: it was one of the few doors that did not require the family to find them first.. In Catalonia, nearly eight out of ten households that could benefit from the social bonus AOC to detect situations of energy poverty by cross-referencing data between administrations. The technology is there. The institutional capacity, too. What is not yet automatic is the decision to use it.The ruling removes a valuable protection, but also forces us to look beyond the mechanisms we have lost. We know that the main loophole in energy protection is not legal, but administrative: thousands of households continue to not receive the aid they are entitled to. We also know how to fix it. The question is no longer whether we have alternatives, but whether we are willing to apply them.
