1. An allowance for living conditions shall be fixed, according to the official's place of employment, as a percentage of a reference amount. This reference amount shall comprise the total basic salary, plus the expatriation allowance, household allowance and dependent child allowance, less the compulsory deductions referred to in the Staff Regulations or in the regulations adopted to implement them.
Where an official is employed in a country in which living conditions can be deemed equivalent to those normally obtaining in the Community, no such allowance shall be payable.
In the case of other places of employment, the allowance for living conditions shall be fixed as follows.
The parameters taken into account for fixing the allowance for living conditions shall be the following:
- health and hospital environment,
- security,
- climate,
to which three parameters shall be applied a weighting of 1:
- degree of isolation,
- other local conditions,
to which two parameters shall be applied a weighting of 0,5.
Each parameter shall have the following value:
0: where conditions are normal but not equivalent to those normally obtaining in the Community,
2: where conditions are difficult compared with those normally obtaining in the Community,
4: where conditions are very difficult compared with those normally obtaining in the Community. The allowance shall be fixed as a percentage of the reference amount referred to in the first subparagraph, in accordance with the following scale:
- 10 % where the value equals 0,
- 15 % where the value is greater than 0 but not greater than 2,
- 20 % where the value is greater than 2 but not greater than 5,
- 25 % where the value is greater than 5 but not greater than 8,
- 35 % where the value is greater than 8.
The allowance for living conditions fixed for each place of employment shall be reviewed and, where appropriate, adjusted each year by the appointing authority after the opinion of the Staff Committee has been obtained.
2. If living conditions at the place of employment are such as to put the official at personal risk, a temporary additional allowance shall be paid to him by special reasoned decision of the appointing authority. This allowance shall be fixed as a percentage of the reference amount referred to in the first subparagraph of paragraph 1:
- at 5 % where the authority advises its staff not to settle their families in the place of employment,
- at 10 % where the authority decides to reduce temporarily the number of staff serving in the place of employment.