One stop suffices for a start-up company to clear away red tape. Give the Post Office your new address, and your tax form follows automatically. But let a handicapped person try to find out about his or her legal rights it means consulting a whole string of public services. Where's the logic?

There are agencies responsible for family benefits, social security, social assistance, and so on, all providing services for handicapped persons. Each one has its own queues, its own complex forms and regulations, its own more or less helpful personnel, its own waiting period. It wouldn't by chance be a national pastime to take pleasure in making life complicated for people in difficulty, would it?

At the same time, there is still no solution to one of our main problems: the habitat. No nation- wide agency guarantees housing adapted to the needs of handicapped persons. Social housing authorities balk at the prospect of offering apartments to the non-salaried, and communal authorities seem to ignore the issue. Installation of an apartment is expensive, and the cost often falls on the beneficiary. Specially adapted transport services depend primarily on private initiative (associations, taxis) and are costly in relation to people's income. Handicapped access to public buildings is scoffed at day-in-day-out. Latest example in Marseilles: four brand- new experimental art cinemas full of steps and stairs!

There is clearly no organisation in our country that has the means to inform people, to monitor the application of regulations, to propose complementary measures, to coordinate initiatives, to reduce the amount of time and money being wasted. How about creating a single window for information and services, endowed with the necessary power of enforcement, for the benefit of citizens and social workers.

Such organisations do exist in this world: the Office of Handicapped Persons in Quebec, for instance. Is such an example transposable? Maybe, if and when there is a coherent policy, expressed as a willingness to act in the interest of citizens, by listening to them and providing the kind of service that would improve the quality of life.

Sounds like a democratic dream....

English translation thanks to Sylvia Thullen