The reform of the Land and Urban Rehabilitation law promoted by the Ministry of Housing hangs by a thread. The regulations, demanded by the real estate sector, some autonomous communities and city councils to try to provide a solution to the problems faced by developers and builders, do not have the necessary votes to overcome the first parliamentary procedure, that of amendments to the entirety, which must happen this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies. The Ministry of Housing is offering changes to the regulations and, given the refusal of Sumar and the usual partners, it has turned to the PP.
One of the main novelties that Housing has included in the bill is the streamlining of construction permits in developments built on public land through positive administrative silence. That is, if a developer who decides to build a housing block on public land requests a license and does not receive a response within six months, the authorization would be considered granted. The objective of the measure, ministry sources explain, is to accelerate the development of the social housing stock.
The Government also included in the text that is being put to the first vote today that partial annulments and formal appeals to the general urban planning plans do not paralyze the projects in their entirety. At this moment, more than a hundred general urban planning plans have been cancelled. They are those of Madrid, Vigo, Ourense, Gijón, Ibiza, Las Palmas, Santander, Toledo, Zamora, Orense, Vigo and Cartagena, to which must be added those blocked due to minor or correctable defects. The law seeks to resolve this situation.
Sources from the Ministry of Housing indicated that “if we want to have land to design urban planning, this law is essential.” A rule, they defend, that seeks to “offer more legal security to the sector.”
The reform of the Land Law has been met with frontal rejection by the Government partner, with Sumar who assured yesterday that he will vote against the norm and that he has even agreed on this discrepancy with the PSOE, according to Yolanda Díaz; and with three amendments to the entirety proposed by ERC, Junts and Podemos.
The urban planning initiative, therefore, can only move forward with the involvement of the PP, which until the closing of this edition reserved the direction of its vote. Until yesterday, the Government maintained contacts with the main opposition party to obtain their abstention and the real estate sector also conveyed to the popular people the importance of this law not declining, they admit in Genoa. The popular parliamentary group is debating, therefore, whether it chooses to save the rule and introduce “significant amendments” in the next phase of processing or promote a new parliamentary defeat of the Government on a central issue of the legislature, housing.