The reform of the Land and Urban Rehabilitation law promoted by the Ministry of Housing hangs by a thread. The regulation, claimed by the real estate sector, some autonomous communities and town councils in an attempt to provide solutions to the problems faced by developers and builders, does not have the necessary votes to pass the first parliamentary procedure, that of amendments to the entirety, which must pass Thursday in the Congress of Deputies. The Ministry of Housing offers changes in the regulations and, faced with the refusal of Sumar and the regular partners, it has addressed the PP.
One of the main novelties that the ministry has included in the bill is the speeding up of building permits for developments built on public land through positive administrative silence. In other words, if a developer who decides to build a block of flats on public land applies for a license and does not get a response within six months, the authorization would be considered granted. The aim of the measure, according to ministry sources, is to speed up the development of the social housing stock.
The Spanish Government also included in the text that is being put to the first vote today that partial annulments and formal appeals to general urban planning plans do not paralyze the projects completely. 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 and Cartagena, to which must be added those blocked due to minor or fixable defects. The law aims to give way to this situation.
Sources from the Ministry of Housing pointed out that, “if we want to have land to design urban planning, this law is essential”. A rule, they defend, that wants to “offer more legal certainty to the sector”.
The reform of the Land Law has been met with a frontal rejection by the partner of the Spanish Government, with Sumar, who assured yesterday that he will vote against the rule and that he even has an agreement on this discrepancy with the PSOE, according to affirm Yolanda Díaz, and with three amendments in their entirety raised by ERC, Junts and Podemos.
The urban planning initiative, therefore, can only move forward with the involvement of the PP, which until the close of this edition reserved the meaning of the vote. Until yesterday, the Spanish Government maintained contacts with the main opposition party to obtain their abstention and the real estate sector also conveyed to the public the importance of the law not decaying, as they admit in Genoa. The popular parliamentary group is debating, therefore, whether it chooses to save the rule and introduce “weighing amendments” in the next phase of parliamentary processing or to promote another parliamentary defeat of the Spanish Government in a central issue of the legislature, housing .
