II —

With regard to the family holiday allowance the consolidated laws have, since the enactment of Article 5 of a Law of 25 June 1962, contained an Article 73 quater which provides (in the wording of Article 1 of the Law of 15 April 1965): ‘The compensation funds for family allowances and the public authorities and institutions referred to in Article 18 shall grant a family holiday allowance. This allowance shall be paid each year during May in respect of children for whom family allowances were payable for the month of April in the year for which the allowance is granted. The conditions of payment of the family holiday allowance shall be the same as those laid down for the payment of family allowances …’. Article 1 of the Royal Decree of 1 February 1968 on family holiday allowances as amended by Article 6 of the Royal Decree of 5 October 1973 provides: ‘The amount of the family holiday allowance shall be equal to the amount of the family allowances provided for in Articles 40, 42, 47, 50 bis or 50 ter increased if appropriate by the age supplement provided for by Article 44 which was actually paid for the month of April of the relevant year’. Article 2 of that provision reads: ‘The family holiday allowance and the family allowances for the month of April shall be made in a single payment by the paying agencies. The paying agencies shall maintain separate accounts for transactions relating to the payment of the family holiday allowance’. Article 4 reads: ‘The Royal Decree of 25 April 1958 fixing the method of calculating the subsidy which the compensation funds for family allowances are entitled to use to cover their administrative expenses … shall not apply to the transactions referred to in this decree’. In terms of Article 3 the administrative expenses incurred in payment of the family holiday allowance shall be paid as a lump sum by the ONAFTS to the compensation funds affiliated to it. The procedures for paying the family holiday allowance are thus substantially the same as those for paying the special family allowance under Article 50 quinquies of the consolidated laws. Nevertheless, like the special allowance, the holiday allowance ‘does not in any way constitute a supplement to salary or remuneration’ (Article 74). In this respect also, although those characteristics caused the family holiday allowance to be termed the, ‘thirteenth month of family allowances’ and although the fact that the amounts of these allowances were identical caused the ‘meeting of heads of administration’ to regard the holiday allowance as a mere ‘increase’ in family allowances, it cannot mean that they are actually identical. The family benefit in question, although paid periodically, unlike the special family allowance, is an allowance for a specific purpose, that is, a benefit differing from the ‘ordinary family allowances’, which are the counterpart of the dependent child allowance referred to in Article 67 (1) (b) of the Staff Regulations. This is clear from the comparative tables of the social security systems in the Member States of the European Communities. Article 1 (u) (i) of Regulation No 1408/71 states that ‘family benefits’ means all benefits in kind or in cash intended to meet family expenses under the legislation provided for in Article 4 (1) (h) excluding the special child-birth allowances for which provision is made under Belgian and Luxembourg legislation respectively as also the prenatal and maternity allowances provided in France under the Social Security Code. According to the provisions of Regulations No 1408/71 and No 574/72 at present in force workers subject to French legislation are entitled, in respect of children residing on Community territory outside France, to the family allowances provided for by the legislation of the place of residence, whilst workers subject to the legislation of other Member States are entitled to the family benefits provided for in the country where they work regardless of the place of residence of the members of the family. As regards the former, the advantages referred to are solely the family allowances strictly so called whilst the advantages of the latter include, in addition to the family allowances properly so called, benefits for a specific purpose. There thus exist under the national legal systems classical family allowances and benefits for a specific purpose which are peculiar to one or more States and which do not recur in all Member States. In this connexion there exist child-minding allowances, housing and removal allowances and this does not constitute an exhaustive list. It thus follows for example that an Italian worker employed in France whose family remains in Italy receives Italian family allowances which are less than those received by French workers and furthermore French workers are entitled to supplementary family benefits which are not payable to foreign workers. These differing outcomes raise difficult problems and result in divergencies which still exist at the present moment. The applicants' husbands in respect of whom the Commission is effecting the deduction come under the Belgian system of social security. In that system neither the identity of the paying agency nor the identity of the amount paid necessarily means that the nature of the benefits is identical. Inasmuch as the holiday allowance and the special allowance were not integrated into the ‘statutory’ family allowance the first two allowances must be considered as distinct from the latter. I thus consider it impossible to establish unilaterally that, from the point of view of the Staff Regulations, a specialized national benefit, which is expressly distinguished from the family allowance for dependent children, is ‘of like nature’ to the dependent child allowance provided for by the Staff Regulations. I also consider it extremely risky to maintain that the advantages granted to a person in employment, albeit of a ‘specific’ nature in the legislation pursuant to which they are paid, are deprived of this nature if such person has a spouse working in the institutions of the European Communities and must be considered as having already been paid ‘in another form’ under the Staff Regulations. A considerable number of the officials concerned are women who for a long time have not enjoyed the household allowance and who lost through marriage, or have only recently recovered, the expatriation allowance and to make them repay a slight advantage to which their children are undoubtedly entitled by reason of the spouses' employment or activity treated as such seems to me profoundly unjust. This, I think, is a matter of principle. Furthermore the argument that, having regard to its amount, the dependent child allowance under the Staff Regulations paid to a spouse who is an official has a comprehensive function is contradicted by the fact that provision is actually made in Article 67 (1), in addition to that allowance, for a specialized allowance, the education allowance, which is even granted in respect of children who attend the European schools where instruction is free and where there are no registration charges or examination fees. Nevertheless it cannot be considered that this education allowance was granted to cover all the costs of children's education: since more and more children are following courses in winter sports, and taking holidays by the sea and in the open air, even outside their holiday periods, the institutions, whilst not actually creating a special allowance for those purposes, have at least increased the amount of the existing education allowance. Furthermore, as well as the education allowance granted to European officials and featuring in the budget of the Communities the European institutions make a financial contribution to the holiday costs of the children of such officials in holiday camps organized by the European institutions: there seems no reason why officials who do not send their children to such camps should not be able to claim national family holiday allowances to which they are incontestably entitled under their national legislation and which are plainly intended to cover, in part at least, the costs involved in sending children to ‘national’ camps, if they so prefer. I should like to add a final point: in the Communities there is no specific allowance for a dependent person other than children. It is merely provided in Article 2 (4) of Annex VII that ‘Any person whom the official has a legal responsibility to maintain and whose maintenance involves heavy expenditure may, exceptionally, be treated as if he were a dependent child …’. The amount of the dependent person allowance is strictly identical to that of the dependent child allowance and naturally is paid by the same department Maintaining such persons, who in the majority of cases are retired relatives in the ascending line, certainly does not entail holiday expenses. If the dependent person allowance takes the form of a flat-rate payment and does not include the item holidays', likewise the dependent child allowance, which is strictly identical to it, cannot contain this item although it takes the form of a flat-rate payment.