The Catalan Competition Authority (ACCO) – an organization that depends on the Department of Business and Labor of the Generalitat – considers that the decree that regulates housing for tourist use, “does not overcome the analysis of necessity and proportionality inherent in good regulation.” From the market”. The report recognizes that the general interest may justify “certain” restrictions but adds that those contemplated in this regulation are not justified.
Approved by decree law, the new regulation obliges the owners of tourist apartments to request an urban planning license and renew it every five years. In parallel, it also obliges City Councils to regulate and limit the number of housing for tourist use with a maximum of five apartments of this type per one hundred inhabitants and, in very justified cases, a limit of ten per one hundred inhabitants. Thus, 28,299 tourist homes are left off the market to begin with. The Government has already approved the regulation – which has the endorsement of the Consell de Guaranties Statutàries – although it must be ratified next week in the Parliament.
The report that ACCO has prepared ex officio states that “the path chosen by the Government has meant that this new regulation, very restrictive of an economic activity, has been incorporated into the legal system without a prior debate, articulated through a formal phase of public information and the corresponding request for technical reports, among which the corresponding ACCO regulation report.” This organization maintains that “a very negative scenario may emerge in terms of competition policy with its consequent economic damages.”
The president of the Catalan Federation of Tourist Apartments (Federatur), David Riba, insisted yesterday that “the regulation proposed by the Government is an abuse that endangers thousands of small and medium-sized companies in the country”. For this group, the figures presented by the studio are “demolishing”.
Competència shares the concern about the problems derived from the difficulties in accessing housing and assures that no one can discuss either the escalation of prices or the lack of supply in this market. Furthermore, he supports that the Government can establish measures that contribute to reversing the situation, but affirms that the decree on housing for tourist use would not fall into this classification “because it is a highly restrictive norm of market mechanisms” and that it does not guarantee ” that the objectives” of improving access to housing are achieved.
Other elements of the decree that Competition questions is that it conditions the obtaining of housing licenses for tourist use on the fact that the town councils modify their urban planning or that the impact that it may have on other sectors linked to tourism such as restaurants has not been assessed. or commerce.
