Agenda: supporting families with children, building schools and kindergartens, extending the right to obtain ownership of land under the Far Eastern Hectare and Arctic Hectare programmes, supporting oilseed producers, introducing a consumption management mechanism for participants in the wholesale electricity market, and supporting the energy infrastructure in Crimea.
Mikhail Mishustin’s opening remarks:
Colleagues, the Government continues to support families with children.
At the initiative of the President, low-income families that have children aged from three to seven years receive monthly payments. Today we will allocate an additional 29 billion roubles to regions for such assistance. Taking into account these funds, about 300 billion roubles will be allocated from the federal budget this year for such significant purposes.
We pay special attention to large families. Earlier, almost 74 billion roubles were allocated for monthly benefits for the third child and subsequent children. We will increase financing by more than 6 billion roubles for the current year.
It is important that people receive their funds in a timely manner. I would ask the heads of regions to closely monitor this personally.
Another issue concerns education. Following the President’s instruction, we are carrying out renovations in schools and kindergartens and building new ones.
Today we will consider the issue of allocating an additional almost 4.3 billion roubles to six Russian regions (Altai, Mordovia, Ingushetia, Tyva, and the Pskov and Kurgan regions) this year in order to complete the construction of 22 schools and seven kindergartens for over 17,500 children in a timely manner.
Such a support measure will allow us to create more seats in general education schools and preschools, as well as solve the problem of triple-shift schools, which still exist in a number of places in our country, by the beginning of the next academic year. All children should receive quality education and develop in comfortable conditions, regardless of where they live.
We will also review legislative amendments specifying the procedure for allotting land plots under the Far Eastern Hectare and Arctic Hectare programmes. New regulations should help the participants formalise their rights. The President specially noted the need to support people who are ready to work on these land plots.
It became possible to start developing land plots in Arctic territories over 12 months ago. About 10,000 people have submitted such applications. Over 108,000 Far Eastern residents have received one hectare each. The Far Eastern Hectare programme was launched over six years ago. Most often, people build homes, set up agricultural businesses or engage in other entrepreneurial activity. Anyone using these land plots for over five years can either privatise them or sign 49-year lease contracts.
As it often happens, people started doing this before the five-year deadline expired. Many of them simply don’t have enough time. There are plans to extend the right to privatisation or leasing of cultivated land plots until 1 March 2023.
The bill obliges the authorities to inform participants in the Far Eastern Hectare and Arctic Hectare programmes about this by email, via personal accounts on the Government Services website or by other methods. This notification should be received six months before the contract on using the land plot expires.
These changes will help protect the rights of people who are actively developing their land plots in the Far East and other territories.
We will also discuss support for agriculture, which is developing successfully. Russia continues to harvest more crops for vegetable oils.
In late 2021, Russia ranked the fifth-largest supplier of sunflower oil on the global market. According to preliminary forecasts, we can become the main exporter of sunflower oil. Russia will saturate the domestic market by over 200 percent, and this exceeds our Food Security Doctrine’s requirements more than two-fold.
To help Russian farmers remain competitive, we have budgeted subsidies to stimulate oil crop production.
Many agricultural producers are facing difficulties due to more complicated logistics and a number of restrictions imposed by unfriendly countries. We decided to increase allocations for subsidies to support them, in excess of 4.8 billion roubles. The funds will go to 43 oil crop-growing regions.
We expect that these subsidies will help farms maintain profitability, so that they will not have to reduce the area of land under oil crops next season, and Russian consumers will always have a wide choice of high-quality products they need available on the market.
The Government meeting agenda also includes ways to streamline the electric power industry.
As the President noted at the international forum yesterday, the global energy industry has encountered unprecedented challenges and problems due to the short-sighted, erroneous actions by a number of Western countries.
At the same time, the Russian energy system is, without any exaggeration, one of the most resilient in the world, and capable of providing guaranteed supplies to all consumers. We have the most diversified power generation market. It relies on a variety of energy sources such as coal, gas, nuclear energy and various types of renewable energy sources, and Russia maintains a reasonable balance between them. At the same time, our distribution grids have been showing an extremely high level of uninterrupted operation.
To reduce businesses’ costs, the Government has prepared important amendments to the law regulating this industry. The plan is to introduce, on a legislative basis, a new service for managing consumption for wholesale electricity market participants. The idea is to achieve the optimal balance between supply and demand.
As a pilot experiment, this mechanism showed good results. It evens out the load on the power system by smoothing its spikes during peak hours. This benefits all the parties because the cost of power generation is much higher when the system is working at maximum capacity. It is important that this innovation will help the key industries and major industrial facilities save significant amounts.
In order to improve the national energy system’s efficiency, fulfilling the President’s instruction, we will give additional powers and responsibilities to the Market Council non-profit partnership uniting all industry participants.
The new toolkit will primarily strengthen self-regulation within the system and introduce transparent monitoring of designated companies’ financial status.
In general, such initiatives systematise oversight and management in the industry and help improve its sustainability.
Crimea is certainly the region that receives our closest attention. At the end of August, the Presidium of the Government Commission to Increase the Sustainability of the Russian Economy decided to provide additional support to the energy infrastructure of the peninsula. We will allocate another 1 billion roubles to that region of Russia this year. The funds will be directed to maintain and repair critical equipment, install modern metering devices and provide all the necessary technical equipment to the employees. We will also allocate funding to enhance the security of the grid and other facilities.
These measures can be expected to ensure the reliable operation of the Crimean energy system, which is critical for the sustainable growth of the region’s economy and the local residents’ well-being.
