A social security legislation long time waiting: The new refunded text of the General Law on Social Security

Abstract

In the Official Gazette of the day October 31, 2015 Royal Decree 8/2015 was published, on 30 October, by which, based on legislative delegation contained in the single article of Law 20/2014, of October 29, the new refunded text of the General Law on Social Security is approved.

With the entry into force of the new refunded text that generally occurs on January 2, 2016, the Social Security system has a legal instrument, long awaited by the doctrine, practitioners and the judiciary, enabling greater legal certainty in the application and interpretation of the rules in an area of such occurrence, as is the area of Social Security, with undoubted benefits for citizens in general.

In this paper an analysis of the new refunded text of the General Law on Social Security is carried out, indicating the background of it, under the legislative delegation contained in Law 20/2014 (delegation was not limited to mere consolidation of a set of laws, but also extended to a work of harmonization and clarification of those provisions, with the aim of having, in the words of the Council of State with a text understandable, systematic and coherent policy), and its structure is made, highlighting new and most significant characteristics of the new refunded text, compared to the previous. The work closes with an appendix which contains a comparative table between the two consolidated texts, indicating the correspondence between the provisions of the new and approved in 1994.