A report from the Court of Auditors places a staggering figure on a reality local elected officials have known but could never name precisely. In its 2026 Public Annual Report, dedicated to “Territorial Cohesion and Territorial Attractiveness” and released on March 25, 2026, the institution on Rue Cambon calculated the amount that local authorities spent in 2024 on cohesion and territorial development policies. The result: 316 billion euros. And neither the State nor the local authorities can say what this money actually produced.
The figure alone is dizzying, but it is its total lack of traceability that worries the financial magistrates. Added to this are 18.5 billion euros for the budget mission “Cohesion of Territories” and about 15 billion in derogatory tax expenditures (rural revitalization zones, urban free zones, overseas exemptions). The report adds yet another line item, distinct from the previous one: a funding envelope of 18.5 billion credits for the budget mission “Cohesion of Territories” (71% of which is devoted to housing aid), to which are added 15 billion euros in tax expenditures, 10.5 billion under the transversal “Territorial Planning” policy document, and another 2.24 billion euros in specific tax expenditures. A stacking of budget lines that, when added together, still do not tell the same story depending on who does the counting. The Prime Minister, in his reply to the Court, even proposes a completely different figure: the State has “for nearly fifty years continuously devoted an annual financial effort of around 70 billion euros to policies that contribute directly or indirectly to territorial balance.” Two institutions, two methods, two results. That says a lot about the reliability of the counting.
Key takeaways
- 316 billion euros spent in 2024: but where did this money really go?
- Financial magistrates are seeking a trace, a file, any indicator: nothing exists
- A gaping territorial divide persists despite decades of policies meant to bridge it
Why 316 billion euros tell no coherent story
The issue is not merely a miscalculation. It is structural. The Court highlights a structural flaw: territorial policy rests on a constellation of actors—the central state, the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT), ADEME, the National Agency for Urban Renovation (ANRU), the Interministerial City Committee (CIV), local authorities—and on too many schemes to be effectively managed. In concrete terms, a single euro can pass through several gateways before reaching its final destination, and be counted at every stage. This is exactly what another part of the report reveals: local authorities spent 316 billion euros in 2024 on their services, but this figure is inflated by double counting: when a department pays a subsidy to a municipality, the amount appears in both budgets. The headline figure of the report is not even net of internal reallocations between levels.
This lack of clarity isn’t new; it has been documented for years by the same court. In its 2023 annual report, focused on a narrower scope centered on economic aid, the Court noted that “the tracking of economic action expenditures, especially aid to businesses, is compromised by failures at several levels,” identifying two failures. The first stems from the accounting nomenclature (M 57), which prevents knowing the amount of aid paid to a given sector. Three years later, the diagnosis has not changed; it has simply expanded to all territorial cohesion policies. The second flaw identified in 2023 concerned the enumeration of aid: the census of aid granted across the regional territory is incomplete because the response rate to regional questionnaires is far from 100%. The Court observed that in 2020 the Pays de la Loire region had only received 15 responses out of 77 concerned authorities. An entire region unable to know what three-quarters of its own institutional partners were doing on its territory.
An emblematic mechanism revealing the problem in its entirety
Among the mechanisms cited by the Court is the France Ruralities Revitalization zoning (FRR), the heir to the former Rural Revitalization Zones (ZRR). Its scope measures the magnitude of the problem: 57% of French communes are covered by the FRR zoning, a device designed to support rural areas considered vulnerable in France. More than half of communes, therefore, theoretically benefit from a mechanism meant to stimulate their economic attractiveness. But what is the real effect? Evaluations of its predecessor, the ZRR, already hinted at the limits of the exercise: the exemption did not yield the expected job creation effects, but it did contribute to maintaining jobs in some cases, largely because of their concentration in certain areas. A mixed-to-uneven bilan, never really settled, renewed year after year without anyone reassessing the scheme as a whole.
This absence of a common nomenclature is not a technical detail confined to public accountants. It prevents any meaningful steering. The Sages denounce a “sprinkling” of schemes among a multitude of actors, making evaluation impossible. In the field, this translates into wealth gaps that nothing seems to correct effectively despite the sums spent: GDP per capita ranges from €32,652 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté to €69,288 in Île-de-France, and the territorial fracture remains wide. Wealth produced per inhabitant is twice as high in one region as in another, despite decades of so-called balancing policies.
What the Court recommends, and what still blocks progress
Facing this reality, the financial magistrates do not merely point a finger; they lay out a roadmap. The Court recommends guaranteeing a basket of essential public services and moving from a dispersed spending logic to a coherent national strategy. Three axes structure this proposal: “guarantee access to essential services”; “support territorial development”; “improve the coherence and clarity of public action.” On paper, the ambition is clear. In practice, it runs into an obstacle that the Court itself identifies as the main brake: the fragmentation itself remains a major hurdle.
There remains a question that the report does not explicitly resolve, but which looms large: how long can a public system keep committing such sums without ever producing the indicator that would allow judging its effectiveness? The Court of Accounts had already, in 2023, quantified about €8.5 billion per year between 2014 and 2020 the portion of direct economic aid to businesses, a much smaller amount than the current €316 billion but just as hard to trace accurately due to a lack of suitable accounting tools. The move to a tenfold scale apparently did not solve it; it simply made the problem more visible.
Sources: senat.fr | maire-info.com | igedd.documentation.developpement-durable.gouv.fr
