Leader of the PS Socialist party, José Luís Carneiro, has proposed the creation of a national programme for recovery, stabilisation and climate resilience to respond to the impact of the Kristin depression.
In a press conference today after a meeting of the national secretariat at the party’s headquarters in Lisbon, he called for the extension of the state of emergency for between three to six months, explaining that the set of measures he was presenting (which will be sent to the prime minister) has, as its main objectives, the rapid restoration of safety, mobility and habitability conditions, the mitigation of economic and employment losses, and the restoration of the ecological integrity of affected river basins and soils.
According to the document, the PS proposes extending the situation of calamity (with all its benefits) beyond next Sunday, which, says Carneiro, is “insufficient to respond to all the needs”: rail services, for example, have not yet managed to fully return to normal function, and thousands of households remain with electricity.
To help people whose homes have received major damage, the PS wants to see the creation of a programme to help families with total or severe losses through enhanced support for structural repairs.
The party also suggests the creation of a permanent financial fund for state financing and centralisation of humanitarian aid donations.
As for support for businesses, Socialists want to see compensation for losses of activity and structural damage with non-repayable grants (not the credit lines currently offered) and the postponement and exemption of tax obligations.
In the field of recovery, resilience and climate reorganisation, the PS wants an “exceptional simplified reconstruction regime for destroyed permanent housing, subsidies for repairs and domestic re-equipment, reconstruction of public facilities such as schools, health centres and old people’s homes.
José Luís Carneiro told journalists that he agreed with the government’s proposal for a “lay-off” scheme in companies, adding that it is also necessary to guarantee the protection of workers who continue to work in companies that remain open despite the drop in production.
On how the government would finance this package, the PS leader suggested that the “financial resources presented by the government” were “sufficient” to implement it.
José Luís Carneiro’s proposals will add to pressures on the government which is still trying to find solutions to more immediate/ basic questions, including how to reopen the no less than 150 seriously damaged schools in Leiria, where thousands of children simply cannot go to school right now – leaving working parents with yet another problem on their hands. As the mayor of Leiria has stressed, a ‘pandemic-style’ return to online teaching is out of the question as so many homes are still without power…
With drones flying over Leiria now in an attempt to map all the damages (the iconic forest, recovered after the fires of 2017, has once again suffered untold devastation), Leiria municipality has created a new site (https://estragos.pt/) for people to upload details of damages that they know of. This way, the council hopes to get a complete picture (albeit slowly) of everything that needs fixing.
Source material: LUSA
