BERN. A new national council on poverty began work in Bern on Monday, and said it would speak for people living in poverty to politicians and to the administration. Eleven members who have experienced poverty themselves, drawn from every part of the country, sit on it. Six specialists from politics, research, public offices and non-governmental organisations will advise them. The Federal Social Insurance Office presented the body to the press. The pilot runs until 2028.
The office’s figures are the reason the council exists, and they are worth keeping separate. Almost 750,000 people in Switzerland are described as affected by poverty, and it is this group the council says it will represent. A wider circle, about 1.45 million people, is at risk of poverty. The launch was accompanied by the hope that the second number will now change. A committee does not change a number. It can change whether the people inside the number are in the room when the social security system is discussed.
What the council is for
The brief, as set out on Monday, has four parts: the social security system, the stigma attached to poverty, health, and access to the law. None of those is a new topic in Bern. All four are places where people with money and a lawyer move faster than people without either. A council made up of people who have needed the system, rather than of people who administer it, is a different kind of witness. It is still a witness. It does not replace parliament, the cantonal social services, or a court.
The body is backed by a network of foundations and civil society organisations. That support will matter if the pilot is to last until 2028, because a council with no staff and no route into the federal offices will publish statements and then stop. The useful test, over the next two years, is whether a consultation, a bill or a cantonal practice changes after the council has spoken, and whether anyone in the administration can point to the paragraph that moved.
The numbers households already feel
Poverty statistics and household mood are not the same series, but they are not strangers. Consumer sentiment stood at minus 45 in October, and the weakness was in people’s reading of their own finances, not in their reading of the economy as a whole. Prices rose 1.5 per cent in October, the fastest rate in almost three years, with heating oil and road fuel doing much of the lifting. A council that talks about health and access to the law will be heard, or ignored, by households that are currently doing a simpler sum: the premium, the rent, the tank of oil.
The 1.45 million figure is a statistical threshold, not a queue outside a Bern office. People cross it and recross it as hours, rents and illness change. A pilot that runs to 2028 will cover at least two of those winters. If the council is still introducing itself in the second winter, it will have used the first one on procedure. Monday’s press conference was the introduction. The work it named has not started in any document a reader can yet quote.