Education Budget: €748 mil. planned cuts scrapped, partly at expense of Health Budtget
The coalition parties and four opposition parties have reached an agreement on scrapping 748 million euros of the planned cuts to the Education budget and where to find that money instead. The money will partly come at the expense of the Public Health budget. The Education budget is still being cut by 1.2 billion euros, NOS reports.
The deal between coalition parties PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB and opposition parties CDA, SGP, ChristenUnie, and JA21 took weeks. Deciding which cuts to scrap - the fine for studying too long is going, as are cuts to teacher salaries. The social service period is staying - was easy. Figuring out where to get that money instead, took time.
Part of the money will come from the Ministry of Public Health, which will have to hand in 215 million euros. Among other things, medical specialists will have to pay a higher contribution for further training and refresher courses. Specialists will also face cuts to their “excesses” in salaries, CDA leader Henri Bontenbal said on Wednesday evening, after the deal was reached.
The opposition parties wanted to cut the healthcare deductible by less, but that was unacceptable for the PVV. Cutting the deductible by half was a big part of Geert Wilders’ election campaign.
There will also be 173 million euros in cuts on “equipment costs” at various Ministries. Bontenbal mentioned company cars as an example. And the budget for the public transport student card will be cut by 75 million euros. The parties involved believe that the students won’t notice this because fewer students use the card and they have been traveling less since the coronavirus pandemic.
Bontenbal said he was relieved that they had reached a deal. “At some point, you want to achieve something or put an end to it. It is still not the budget we wanted, but we have made a bad budget less bad.”
PVV leader Wilders is also satisfied. “The education budget has been saved. We can live with this.” He called the additional cuts to other Ministries “acceptable.”
The opposition parties not involved in the deal are still extremely critical. GroenLinks-PvdA, DENK, PvdD, and SP, among others, point out that the Schoof I Cabinet is still cutting the education budget by over a billion euros. Several parties called it a historic mistake.
Education institutions and organizations are also unhappy. According to student union LSVb, the cutbacks will cause courses to disappear and teachers and lecturers to be laid off. Future generations will pay for this, the LSVb said. The only thing the student union is satisfied with is that the fine for not graduating in the set time is off the table.
The umbrella organization for Dutch universities, Universities of the Netherlands, is also unhappy. “Scientific research is the big loser in this deal. That is particularly bad for the future of the Netherlands because knowledge is our most important raw material,” chairman Casper van den Berg told NOS. Universities will continue to resist the cuts, he said.
Now that a deal has been reached, the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, can vote on all the Ministries’ budgets on Thursday. After that, the Eerste Kamer, the Dutch Senate, will have its say.
The coalition does not have a majority in the Senate, which is why this deal with opposition parties was necessary for the education budget to be approved. If the Senate rejected the budget, the current budget set up by the Rutte IV government, which spent a lot on education, would have remained in place.
