Brussels, 30/04/2010 (Agence Europe) - New regulations on social security coordination come into force on 1 May 2010. These new rules will facilitate intra-EU mobility for workers, and also for young people and retired people, job seekers, etc. This chimes with the objectives of the EU 2020 strategy: employment and mobility, Cristina Arigho, spokeswoman for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion Commissioner László Andor, told press. The new rules will also allow those who move to another country to retain all their benefits. There will be no new entitlements, Arigho said, but existing employment, pensions and other allowances will be retained and guaranteed.
Above all, the reform will bring about substantial changes to the way coordination works in the future. Member states will also have to develop an Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information (EESSI) system) over the next two years. This will allow social security information to be exchanged between countries. The new regulations will not bring in new rights and that will mean that rules can be simplified. By 1 May 2012, all EU member states should be using the EESSI to exchange information between social security institutions and for all areas covered by the coordination. Training is being carried out in all member states. The Commission is lending its support to these activities. It is preparing easily accessible information for users, for example, the on-going information campaign on the European Health Insurance Card.
An explanatory brochure, “The EU provisions on social security - Your rights when moving within the European Union” (2010; 57pp, ISBN 978-92-79-14197-3) is available in all official EU languages from the EU Publications Office in Luxembourg (http: //ec.europa.eu/social).
In statistics published on Friday 30 April, Eurostat reveals that EU unemployment stands at 9.6%. With this coordination, would for example, an unemployed Irish national receive his/her unemployment benefit if he/she tried to find work in another country? Arigho said that this was already the case: “If you are an unemployed Irish person, you get unemployment benefit. In the past, if you decided to go to Paris, you could get your benefit for a period of three months under the French system. But for this, you had to register with the relevant French authorities within seven days, assuming they knew you were in Paris. Now it's six months. So you can get your benefits from Ireland for six months”.
According to Eurostat, in 2008, some 11.3 million EU citizens, or 2.3% of the overall EU population, lived in a member state other than the one of which they were a national. So far around 190 million European Health Insurance Cards have been issued (38% of the population). 10% of Europeans say they have lived and worked in another country (inside or outside the EU) at some point in their past. 3% have lived in another country but did not work there. 17% of Europeans are considering working abroad at some time in the future: 12% of these are considering doing so in the next year, 47% in the next five years. A majority of Europeans (60%) think that people moving within the EU is a good thing for European integration, 50% think it is a good thing for the labour market, and 47% think it is a good thing for the economy. (G.B./transl.rt)