Pledge of the City of Zürich to the European Pillar of Social Rights: Ensuring access to municipal services for all

Summary

The City of Zürich commits to improve access to all its municipal services with a special focus on vulnerable groups. Limited access can affect people with disabilities, older people, people experiencing poverty, refugees or migrants, for example. Among those, migrants with irregular status are particularly vulnerable. In this vein, Zurich commits to: 

• Invest CHF 4.5 million in a project that aims to ensure secure medical care for all persons without health insurance (including migrants with irregular status). The pilot ends in 2024 and the city will transfer successful lessons learned into regular operation. 
• Allocate CHF 3.2 million from 2022 to the first quarter of 2026 to prepare for a ‘Zurich City Card’, which will enable Zurich residents (including migrants with irregular status) to have access to municipal and private services (e.g. bank account, mobile phone subscription etc.). Zurich also implements “practice tests” to improve the accessibility of municipal services for vulnerable groups.
• Provide temporary financial assistance for migrants in emergency situations. This specifically concerns migrants who fear to apply for regular aid for various reasons, such as loss of permit, and migrants with irregular status (5.4 million over 3 years).  Implementation will begin as soon as (and only if) the appeal filed against the projects is rejected.

Impact

All of these projects are expected to significantly improve access of vulnerable resident groups to the municipal services of the City of Zurich. The specific actions referenced in this pledge will particularly improve socio-economic inclusion of vulnerable resident groups in the City of Zurich, including (undocumented) migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Lessons learned

To ensure successful introduction and uptake of such measures the cooperation within the municipal administration among relevant municipal departments as well as with civil society actors is key. 

A challenging factor for the roll-out of such progressive municipal actions is the potential conflict with superordinate political levels.