10 years after the NOTRe law, why are we still talking about administrative millefeuille?

For fifty years, France’s public deficit has been growing, slowly but surely. At the end of 2024, it reached 6.1% of GDP. Last year, 160 billion euros were added to the public debt, which today stands at… 3,303 billion euros. A dizzying amount, attesting to the financial rout in progress.

Is it the fault of local authorities, as the former Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, suggested last September before the Assembly? No. Because the debt accumulated by communities only represents 7.8% of the public debt, when 83.5% concerns the State and 8.7% Social Security. This observation does not prevent the French administrative millefeuille, which could be defined by the stacking of decision-making levels and standards created accordingly, from becoming a symbol of the ills of our nation. Because it always brings more complexity and it seems impossible to reform. However, there have been attempts at simplification: the NOTRe law, passed in August 2015, was to clarify the skills of the territorial levels. Earlier, in January of the same year, another had reduced the number of regions from 22 to 13. However, the results are what they are. Today, each councilor has an anecdote to tell about a system that has become impenetrable.

1. A decision-making hodgepodge

This is the rule: each local administration is obliged to vote for a balanced operating budget. Enough, a priori, to guarantee sound management. But it is also authorized to borrow money to invest, and therefore go into debt. These sums amount annually to a bill of 250 billion euros for the public authorities. In addition, the latter also pay a lot for their operation: no less than a third of the community budget comes from grants paid by the State, or, in 2024, 105.4 billion euros. If these communities function poorly, the bill can quickly rise for the State, and consequently, for the taxpayer.

However, everything indicates that the system is going wrong. A particularly indigestible table, from a government site, presents all existing public policies – housing, transport, etc. – indicating which levels can intervene on each of them. A quick reading allows us to understand that the four main strata – municipalities and intercommunalities, department, region, State – have this latitude in almost all of the 23 areas. “Hallucinating,” says Benoît Perrin, the general director of the association Taxpayers Associated, who often uses this document with his interlocutors to show the aberration of the situation. Because this decision-making hodgepodge creates a mountain of difficulties. An example from the field, gleaned during a report in Decize, in Nièvre: last November, the mayor, Justine Guyot, desperate to see doctors desert her territory, brought in around twenty practitioners of foreign origin to sound the alert. She explains the impossibility of finding a dermatologist in the area. A woman listens attentively to the conversation. She works for Burgundy-Franche-Comté and says that the region offers the Nivernais teleconsultations from dermatologists working for the Chalon-sur-Saône hospital (Saône-et-Loire). The councilor had no idea, even though she had been protesting for months in the media against medical deserts. Moral of the story: the more decision-making levels a country has, the more information is lost.

2. Endless delays

In Mandelieu-la-Napoule (Alpes-Maritimes), where eight residents lost their lives in a flood nine years ago, we have been waiting for the construction of a storage basin since… 2011. The land has not even been acquired yet . This inertia drives the city’s mayor, Sébastien Leroy, mad with rage. The culprit? This famous administrative millefeuille, he assures. “Yesterday, we had a mandatory meeting with all the associated public figures,” says the elected official. There was the prefecture, the departmental direction of territories and the sea, the urban community, the departments, the chambers of commerce and industry of the Côte d’Azur, and many others. Everyone gave their opinion. All this to launch a public inquiry lasting several months which will determine whether this project is of general interest. What everyone already knows. But it is obligatory. It’s unimaginable how stupid everything is becoming! » The project had already lost five years because of the Regional Directorate of Environment, Planning and Housing (Dreal), a state administration. The organization had demanded the identical relocation of a neighboring stud farm in the future basin due to possible flooding of the meadows. Which was too complex and expensive. “We had to explain that these pastures would only possibly be flooded a few days a year and that the horses would then remain in the stable,” protests the mayor.

The State, adds Sébastien Leroy, creates administrations that it no longer controls and which often pursue contradictory objectives. The councilor fears the day when floods will once again plunge his town into mourning: “As every administration wants to be right, we sacrifice the general interest. In this pond story, the norm prevails over human life. »

3. Ruinous complexity

In a report delivered last May, Boris Ravignon, the mayor of Charleville-Mézières (Ardennes), quantified the cost of the tangle of skills between the various decision-making layers. He and his co-authors questioned 226 communities and 88 prefectures or decentralized departments of state services about their time spent coordinating with other levels. To arrive at an assessment of 7.5 billion euros per year. “This is a low estimate, because we were not able to question certain state administrations,” adds the elected official. The tangle has become so intangled that administrations sometimes have to hire people solely responsible for coordination between levels. “However, the more players you have in a project, the longer the deadlines and the higher the costs. This is called transaction costs,” explains Romain Pasquier, political scientist at Sciences Po Rennes.

Two years ago, the Hermès house wanted to set up a leather goods factory in a former foundry in Charleville-Mézières. Today, the luxury brand has not taken possession of the premises, because it was necessary to modify the local town planning plan, retouch the development protection plan, ask the department, then owner of the premises, to resell to Hermès, and carry out three mandatory public inquiries to assess the environmental impact. “However, this is an already artificial site… With a local exemption power granted to the prefect, we could have gone much faster,” regrets Boris Ravignon, its mayor. In his eyes, the exemption becomes the only way to complete a project within a reasonable time frame. As proof, the emergency law that had to be passed to rebuild Notre-Dame de Paris: “If it had not overwritten the existing procedures, the reconstruction would have taken three times as long. »

4. The culture of stacking

How did we get there? “Because France never deletes anything in its administrative history,” underlines political scientist Romain Pasquier. Even the sub-prefectures still exist, although we know that they are no longer of interest. In our country, we create organizations to solve problems. Except that the problem is the organizations. »

The fault also lies with the State and communities, who are reluctant to lose skills. Especially those that bring in votes. “It is no coincidence that all communities are involved in sport and culture,” quotes the specialist. The citizen is more sensitive to it than to social assistance for children. » This is also the case for economic development, in theory devolved to the regions. The NOTRe law calls on the departments to abandon this competence, but they refuse. Even if their resistance does not pay off, communities interpret their skills as they see fit. The departments thus use “territorial solidarity” to justify their actions in economic development.

Finally, when the authorities decided to reform the millefeuille, they failed. The Court of Auditors thus demonstrated that the merger of the regions in 2015 had not produced any savings. Partly because the salaries of agents were aligned with the old region which had the best salary scale – the fear of social movements, say the evil tongues; partly also because there was no elimination of duplicate positions: it is very difficult to dismiss tenured civil servants under French law. Finally, in the regions resulting from the mergers, the number of advisors has not decreased. Which means so many compensations and mandate fees to pay.

5. Lack of prioritization

What if, ultimately, the problem was less the number of levels than their hierarchy? Each has an optimal size to best carry out certain policies – it would be absurd to grant the railway question to a municipality. “Decentralization has done a lot of good,” says city councilor Boris Ravignon. I am old enough to remember the state of colleges when they were managed from Paris. It wasn’t brilliant. » For him, the State must clarify everyone’s skills. “There should be a hierarchy between the levels,” approves Romain Pasquier. Like in Germany, where when meetings get bogged down around a project, it is the Länder who decide. » In the meantime, this lack of hierarchy encourages a lack of responsibility. “Napoleon said that one bad general is better than two good ones,” grumbled the mayor of Mandelieu. Today, not only do we have forty generals but they are all bad. »