ZAGREB, 4 Feb 2022 - Workers Front (RF) MP Katarina Peović said on Friday that she had put forward to the parliament a conclusion and regulations with a set of measures asking that citizens' income threshold be taken into account when allocating vouchers for energy products and their value be raised from HRK 200 to 400.
Peović said the proposed measures should be discussed by the parliament urgently as they were related to current energy price hikes and her party considered them very important "class measures."
"We believe inflation is a class issue because the rising prices will not affect everyone in the same way, which is why the burden of the crisis should be distributed justly," she said.
Peović said that energy vouchers were defined in a such a way that only users with minimum allowances and persons with disabilities registered with social welfare centres received them, with their income threshold having been set at HRK 800 (€106).
Peović noted that electricity vouchers are used by more than 60,000 people while there are more than 600,000 pensioners whose income is below the poverty threshold, which is why her party has proposed that in the allocation of the guaranteed energy voucher one should take into account the fact that the income threshold is set at 60% of the national average, amounting to HRK 5,710 for a family of four and around HRK 2,700 for single-member households.
"We believe that everyone with income below that amount... should be entitled to energy vouchers, which should be increased from the current amount of HRK 200 to 400. Also, in addition to electricity vouchers, one should also introduce vouchers for heating and for natural gas, which we believe should have a lower, 13% VAT rate, just as electricity," she said.
Peović said that public services such as the HEP power provider, too, should help by giving up a part of their profits, which in 2021 for HEP amounted to HRK 1.4 billion so as to enable the subisidising of utility bills.
