During the debate on the surcharge scandal, Prime Minister Mark Rutte again asked the victims to be patient in dealing with their damage. Opposition MPs vehemently denounced the prime minister. They also expressed their fear of a recurrence: the benefits system is anything but gone.
The debate lasted until after midnight, the opposition did not have a good word for the slow handling of this shameful affair, for which the previous Rutte 3 cabinet had to resign. ‘Is the prime minister going to look at the parents? And tell us, MPs and parents, how he thinks the recovery is going?’, said independent MP Pieter Omtzigt during the debate. ‘Processes and procedures are more important than helping people. Why does the Prime Minister accept this?’ SP Member of Parliament Renske Leijten asked the Prime Minister. Stephan van Baarle (DENK): ‘It is time for a real new management culture. Without this cabinet, but above all without this prime minister.’
The debate was interrupted several times by emotional parents in the public gallery, despite Rutte’s admission that great suffering has been caused. “We can’t take away the pain,” he said in the Chamber. ‘When I went home, many parents were crying in the hallway. They were comforted by Renske Leijten. It was a very emotional debate,’ says political reporter Mats Akkerman.
One of the stumbling blocks that the Chamber stumbles over is that new documents keep emerging that show that the government could have intervened much sooner. Three times in six months already, documents have surfaced that have not been shared with the parliamentary committee of inquiry.
Billions of documents
Prime Minister Rutte defended himself by pointing to the large amount of documents. ‘There are 25 million documents on the network drives from Social Affairs and Employment. Finance involves 19 million documents and the Tax and Customs Administration, including Allowances, involves 4 billion documents spread over 9,000 servers and more than 100,000 areas of cooperation,” said the prime minister.
Rutte says that this is by no means a valid reason that the pieces remained under the table, but he wants to outline what an ‘insane amount of pieces’ are involved. He therefore does not rule out the possibility that some things will come to light in the future. So more corpses can come out of the closet.
“We did not understand why the State Secretary suddenly resigned on December 18, but now we understand”
Menno Get out quickly
Independent Member of Parliament Pieter Omtzigt points to a ‘total bomb’ that the then State Secretary Menno Snel received on December 17, 2019: an email stating that the Tax and Customs Administration of Benefits does not comply with the law on 21 points. ‘We didn’t understand why he suddenly resigned on December 18, but now we understand and we get that three years later,’ says Omtzigt.
Emotions
Prime Minister Rutte specifically addressed the parents in the public gallery, some of whom reacted emotionally. Nevertheless, according to political reporter Mats Akkerman, the prime minister was not really in danger during the debate. ‘Some parties, such as the SP, DENK and MP Pieter Omtzigt are completely done with Prime Minister Mark Rutte. They’re fed up. But there are also parties that say: an entire cabinet has already resigned over this. What does it add if another cabinet resigns two and a half years later because of the same affair?’
‘Rutte in Ruttian style: We are going to see how we can accelerate in a way that does not lead to delays.’
Small bright spot
Despite the extremely slow handling, according to Prime Minister Rutte, there is a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel. “The tunnel has shortened a bit,” he said. It is expected that all files of the parents will have been assessed by 2025, two years earlier than originally thought. But that does not mean that the financial damage has been completely dealt with. ‘Members of parliament want to know whether that process can be accelerated,’ says Akkerman. ‘Rutte said about this in his Ruttian: We are going to look at how we can accelerate in a way that does not lead to delays.’
