The one-stop shop for minimum living income and guaranteed income will be operational in 2026

BarcelonaIn one year, in 2026, the Generalitat will open a one-stop shop to manage both the minimum vital income (IMV), the benefit created by the Spanish government during the pandemic, and the Catalan guaranteed citizen income (RGC). But after the summer, the new virtual platform will be launched to handle the files for this last benefit. The Minister of Social Rights and Inclusion, Mònica Martínez Bravo, has announced that today, her department is working on technical issues so that people who have the right to collect these social benefits have to suffer less paperwork and less bureaucracy.

The Spanish government has transferred the management of the IMV, by virtue of the agreement with ERC for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, but will still have to wait a year for there to be "full management", as the minister said on Wednesday in a parliamentary appearance. The one-stop shop should make it easier to request social aid that requires the provision of several documents that the administration itself already has. It will also be used to eliminate the procedures in which the official on duty enters the data manually and algorithm and artificial intelligence programs will be applied to avoid this. Human errors that end up harming users.

This simplification of procedures is also intended to increase the beneficiaries of the IMV, a state benefit that, in the words of Martínez Bravo, is "wasted" in Catalonia, since up to 67% of potential beneficiaries do not receive it for different reasons5, but0 .000. Of these, 17% do receive the RGC, a benefit conceived as a complement to reach a minimum decent survival and that, in practice, is not for the vast majority.

"There is room to go with the IMV, but sufficient resources will have to be put in place for the benefit to go further," said the councilor, who at the same time defended that the guaranteed income should fulfill "a complementary function", which would also save money for the coffers of the Generalitat, since it would have to pay less.

The minister has announced that the department will hire 174 people to streamline the management of the IMV and will also reinforce the face-to-face information points for all those people who, although the virtual procedures will be simplified, need help to fill out the forms and process the documentation.