In 2015, the range of tasks of the municipalities was significantly expanded through three major decentralisation operations in the areas of youth care, social support and labour participation. For these tasks, municipalities received 10.2 billion euros in 2015 via the integration allowance Social Domain. This transfer consists of 3.8 billion euros for the Youth Act, 3.5 billion euros for the WMO 2015 and 2.9 billion euros for the Participation Act. Since municipalities were already responsible for most of the tasks in the Participation Act, 7.2 billion euros of the integration allowance social domain related to new tasks in the social domain. The new tasks for local authorities amounted to around EUR 5.6 billion. This is because part of youth care (around 1.6 billion euros) was the responsibility of provinces and was therefore already included within local government.
A detailed explanation of decentralisation in the social domain can be found in the publication ‘The Dutch local government: A lot of central funding, a lot of decentralised spending.’ (Dutch only). Back to article