The ADE proposes new financial mechanisms for a consular network “in persistent deterioration”

Eduardo González The Association of Spanish Diplomats (ADE) has published a proposal to improve the financing of the Spanish consular network and, therefore, to alleviate the “persistent deterioration” it has suffered “for years due to insufficient budgets to meet the continuous increase in demand for consular services.” In a document published this Monday, the ADE states that, “as a result of this systematic underfunding, the consular network is in a deplorable state, with an acute lack of personnel and material resources that seriously affects the quality of services provided to citizens, despite the commendable efforts of all public employees in the network to maintain the highest level of services as much as possible.” Regarding human resources, he continues, the permanent staff at consular offices has remained "practically unchanged for more than twenty years, despite the fact that during that period the number of Spaniards residing abroad registered with our consular offices has more than tripled, rising from just over 900,000 at the beginning of the 21st century to more than three million today." For years, according to the ADE, attempts have been made to alleviate the lack of new permanent positions by systematically resorting to temporary contracts. As a result, in the largest consulates, "the temporary employment rate in some cases exceeds 50%, compared to the target of eight percent for the General State Administration (AGE) as a whole." “The situation is no better in the central services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: in 2023, more than a third of the positions (467 out of a total of 1,373) were vacant, largely due to the fact that the salaries offered are not competitive within the General State Administration itself,” the document states. Furthermore, it continues, “the salaries of locally contracted personnel (PLEX collective) in some positions abroad are considerably below the local market.” Regarding real estate, the report draws attention to the state of the Consulate General of Spain in Mendoza (Argentina), which has been forced to suspend its activities due to “significant pathologies existing in several of the building's walls, which have not been resolved over the years,” and warns that, “unfortunately, the poor condition of many of the buildings that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has abroad is not something new, nor is that of the Consulate General in Mendoza an isolated case.” A study carried out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself in 2019, according to the ADE, "revealed the serious infrastructure problems existing" in the consular network and warned that several consular offices and embassies "do not comply with Spanish occupational health and safety regulations, lack the necessary protection in highly unsafe countries, and are unprepared for contingencies such as earthquakes in countries with high seismic risk." "The situation, far from improving, has continued to worsen since 2019, and the General Inspection of Services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recommended relocating headquarters in several cases in recent years, without any such changes having occurred to date," the ADE states. "This lamentable state of affairs is not surprising considering that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had approximately €13.5 million annually available in 2023 to maintain more than 500 buildings worldwide, many of them historic," it continues. The deterioration of the Foreign Affairs buildings "continues to worsen and poses a serious risk (as recently seen in Mendoza) both for the people who work there (often in overcrowded conditions) and for the public who visit them, in addition to the terrible image our country is given abroad," it adds. As a result of all of the above, the Association asserts, "the service offered by our consular network to Spanish citizens abroad and to foreign citizens who visit our consular offices has deteriorated to alarming levels, and procedures that under normal conditions should take a few weeks or months are dragging on for many months or even years." The document admits that the digitization process underway at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ("about which there is still hardly any concrete information, beyond the digitization of the Civil Registry") may partially alleviate this situation, but also warns that "it will not resolve the structural problems plaguing the consular network." Recommendations For all these reasons, the ADE document considers "imperative and urgent a major investment effort in facilities, many of which do not meet the necessary conditions of accessibility and safety for staff and the public, not to mention the representativeness and image of the State before its citizens and those of the countries where our consular offices are located." Under these circumstances, "a considerable number of consular offices will have to change locations, given that the expansion, renovation, and improvement of the buildings currently occupied will not be sufficient or will be unfeasible" and an "even greater number of buildings will have to be urgently renovated in order to eliminate the risks that currently exist for the public and the staff working there and to adapt them to regulations on safety and health at work, occupational hazards, and customer service, which many buildings currently flagrantly fail to comply with." The ADE also recommends "increasing the staff of the consular offices in the worst situation (especially those in Latin America, where the number of registered Spaniards will increase dramatically as a result of the Democratic Memory Law) with permanent personnel, ending the systematic use of temporary reinforcements to meet permanent needs" and considers it "necessary to increase the number of diplomatic and other civil servant positions in consular offices, which some offices urgently require." The recommended measures also include "a substantial and urgent salary increase in many countries (the United Kingdom, Nordic countries, Germany, France, the United States, Australia, etc.) where the salaries of locally contracted staff (PLEX collective) have fallen far below the local market." Financing these urgent measures Furthermore, and "in order to finance the considerable investment effort required to remedy the current problems of our consular network and make it sustainable in the long term," it will be necessary "to consider innovative financing formulas, since it is unrealistic to think that this effort (which will extend over several years) can be covered exclusively through budgetary means, although it will obviously also be necessary to increase budgets steadily in the coming years," he continues. In the opinion of the ADE, "the easiest and most logical solution, and the least burdensome for the public coffers, is for a percentage to be determined (based on the economic evaluation of the necessary investment effort) of the substantial income generated by our consular network (approximately €120 million in 2019) to revert to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the maintenance and improvement of said network." In this regard, the Association has verified, through a comparative study of consular networks, "that several neighboring countries have mechanisms of this type," such as Italy. "If we want to ensure that the public treasury does not lose its current income from the consular network, an increase in consular fees can be considered, so that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can have the necessary funding without the Treasury seeing its historical consular income diminished," proposes the ADE. "There is ample room for this, as the comparative study also showed that the average level of fees in all the countries analyzed was much higher than the fees in force in Spanish consular offices," it adds. An additional possibility regarding fees is "the creation of new fees that are allocated from their creation to the maintenance and improvement of the consular network," continues the Association, which states that "other consular networks (for example, those of Portugal, Italy, or Poland) charge fees for procedures that are free in the Spanish system." “The principle of reciprocity could also be applied in countries with much higher rates than ours,” a principle that “has been applied for several years in visa matters and has increased revenue exponentially in countries like Australia,” the study adds. Another possible way to increase consular revenue without raising fees, it continues, is the creation of new consular offices in countries where there is a high unmet demand for tourist visas or the increase in visa issuing capacity at existing consular offices in those countries, "since consular offices whose main task is issuing visas (as opposed to those that primarily serve large communities, which tend to be deficit-ridden) generate significant surpluses for the public coffers." "However, the Treasury's policy in recent years has been to authorize spending on the creation of new offices only if similar ones close in parallel, which means that this potential demand, which would be enormously beneficial to our tourism industry and our economy, is being wasted," laments the ADE. “Paradoxically, then, the Ministry of Finance's refusal to authorize the modest investment required to open a new consulate deprives the State of additional revenue that would rapidly multiply the initial investment,” it adds. In this regard, the ADE asserts that “the decision regarding the different possibilities just outlined is exclusively political,” because “nothing in our legal system prevents the decision to allocate part of the consular revenue to the maintenance and improvement of the consular network that generates this revenue,” nor “anything prevents an agreement with the Ministry of Finance to allocate revenue from the tax levied on its provision to the credits of a service.” In this regard, the ADE recalls that Article 7 of the Tax Law provides that “fees will tend to cover the cost of the service or activity that constitutes its taxable event.”

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