A head-turning figure: 18.5 billion euros. This is the amount of credits the State allocates each year to the budgetary mission “Cohesion of Territories,” according to the Court of Audit’s annual public report published on March 25, 2026. And yet, despite this colossal sum, no one within the state machinery can precisely say what this money actually yields on the ground, territory by territory.
The finding is all the more troubling because the mission does not stop at these 18.5 billion. There are also 15 billion euros of tax expenditures, largely comprising of VAT and tax reductions in favor of housing and housing access, as well as 10.5 billion under the transversal policy document “Territorial Planning.” Even just on the first block of credits, 71% are devoted to housing assistance, leaving only a slim share for everything else: rural areas, urban policy, digital planning, territorial engineering.
Key takeaways
- Where do these 33 billion really go? The State itself does not know
- A multitude of agencies, zero common language: the portrait of a paralyzed administration
- Regional wealth gaps are widening despite decades of spending
An accumulation of schemes, no dashboard
The Court of Auditors does not mince words. In its report, it denounces a system where “public spending devoted to cohesion and the attractiveness of territories is particularly difficult to grasp, given its fragmentation among numerous public actors.” The term that keeps appearing in the financial magistrates’ writing is unequivocal: the “sprinkling.” A word that captures the problem well. Dozens of schemes are watered down, but no one measures the rain that actually falls on each parcel of territory.
The mechanism is clear once it is unfolded. The credits pass through a multitude of operators with sometimes overlapping missions: the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT), the Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME) for its territorial component, the National Agency for Urban Renovation (ANRU) for priority neighborhoods. The Court denounces a “sprinkling” of schemes among a multitude of actors—State, ANCT, ADEME, ANRU, local authorities—rendering any evaluation impossible. Each agency has its own indicators, its own criteria, its own timetable. Result? It is impossible to overlay the data to obtain a consolidated view of the real cost per commune or per catchment area.
This absence of a common language is not a mere technical detail. It prevents any serious steering of public policy. How can one adjust a budget envelope, reorient a scheme, or shut down an ineffective program if one does not even know what it produced? The Court also offers a broader diagnosis of the State’s trajectory in this area: France has shifted from a planning state, bearing a long-term vision, to a distributing state, unable to measure the return on its investments. The drift occurred over several decades, without any government directly tackling the problem.
Tax facilities, the absolute blind spot of evaluation
The portion of tax expenditures linked to the mission deserves particular attention, given how opaque it is. Rural revitalization zones (ZRR), urban free zones in the priority neighborhoods of city policy, exemptions specific to overseas territories: added to this are 18.5 billion euros from the budgetary mission “Cohesion of Territories” and around 15 billion in preferential tax expenditures. These tax and social security exemptions, intended to attract businesses and jobs to fragile areas, escape nearly entirely from monitoring.
The problem is not new, but it remains. Earlier parliamentary work had already pointed to this shortcoming: in 2020, a cross-ministerial task force concluded that the tax and social exemptions attached to these schemes had not demonstrated full effectiveness in creating businesses and employment in the territories. Six years later, the Court of Audits’ diagnosis confirms that little has truly changed in substance. The zones continue to exist, exemptions continue to cost billions, but the real impact on local employment remains a statistical unknown.
What strikes is the mismatch between the budgetary magnitude and the paucity of tracking data. We know how much each tax niche costs the State budget. We do not know what it yields in terms of jobs created, companies maintained, or local economic dynamism. It is somewhat like a company spending millions on advertising without ever measuring its return on investment, year after year, without anyone raising concerns.
Territorial inequalities that persist despite spending
While credits pile up without a clear bilan, the gaps between French regions remain perfectly measurable. And they are dizzying in another way. GDP per capita varies from €32,652 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté to €69,288 in Île-de-France, a ratio of more than two between the extremes. This territorial fracture, the Court deems “gaping,” and the finding inevitably raises questions about the real effectiveness of the €33 billion annually supposedly aimed at reducing it.
In light of this observation, the financial magistrates do not merely call out the problem. They propose concrete avenues: guarantee a base level of essential public services across the entire territory, and above all shift from a logic of multiple doorways to a coherent and guided national strategy. Concretely, this would require merging the performance indicators of the various operators, imposing a common territorial identifier for every euro spent, and conditioning the maintenance of tax niches on periodic mandatory evaluation. These recommendations, if implemented, are far from trivial: they require giving up a long-built administrative architecture, agency by agency, scheme by scheme. Yet it is not the accumulation of resources that has ever failed France’s policy of territorial cohesion; it is the collective ability to measure, year after year, whether these resources truly change the lives of residents in Charleville-Mézières, Guéret, or Fort-de-France.
Sources: senat.fr | program-evaluation.ccomptes.fr | assemblee-nationale.fr
