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The assessment to introduce an automatic registration for a second child and subsequent children to receive child’s allowance (“kinderbijslag”) in Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba will be concluded this year.
Dutch State Secretary of Social Affairs and Labour Jetta Klijnsma stated this in a letter that she sent to the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament on Monday in response to a July 5, 2016, reminder of Parliament’s Permanent Committee for Social Affairs and Labour about concluding the assessment.
This assessment, carried out by the Social Affairs and Labour unit of the Caribbean Netherlands National Government Service RCN, concerns the possibilities to automatically request child’s allowance when a family registers its second and subsequent child(ren) at the Census Office.
Klijnsma stated that the assessment was expected to be concluded before the end of this year. She promised to inform the Parliament no later than the first quarter of 2017 about the results of this analysis which would facilitate parents on the islands so they don’t have to register each child separately for child’s allowance. Currently, the child’s allowance has to be requested separately for each newborn.
A motion, drafted by Members of the Second Chamber Tjitske Siderius of the Socialist Party (SP) and Steven van Weyenberg of the Democratic Party D66, to facilitate an automatic registration of the second child and subsequent siblings for child’s allowance, was adopted by a majority of the Parliament in November 2015.
The motion was presented as part of the handling of the law to introduce a general child’s allowance for the Public Entities Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba per January 1, 2016. The motion originally requested the Dutch Government to inform the Parliament on the progress of the introduction of an automatic registration before the summer of 2016.
In a letter dated July 4, 2016, the State Secretary had explained that the Census Offices in the Public Entities were required to have timely and dependable information about all the registration’s mutations (changes) in order to introduce the automatic system as requested by the Parliament. She stated that the Census Offices were not experienced in using a system of monthly mutations.
Klijnsma also noted that the sometimes complex family situations whereby the situation at home for the first child was sometimes not the same as a subsequent sibling. In some cases, the care of a newborn was placed in the hands of someone else than the biological parent. Klijnsma emphasized that the local authorities would always have to verify the situation before proceeding to pay child’s allowance for a second and subsequent child(ren).
The Daily Herald.