The Government relaunches a Land Law that is losing support: Podemos is opposed and Sumar is suspicious

Maria Hernandez Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday, March 26, 2024-13:47

The Government tries again with the Land and Urban Rehabilitation Law. The Council of Ministers gave the green light this Tuesday to the preliminary draft to modify the rule and begin the parliamentary process after last year's electoral advance frustrated the course of the previous proposal.

It will not be easy. The text has been losing support along the way and has become a new point of divergence between the Executive partners as a result of the doubts expressed by

Sumar

, which join the explicit rejection of the

Podemos

deputies . "Our vocation is to have a broad consensus" in Congress, said Pilar Alegría, spokesperson and Minister of Education and Sports, in the press conference after the Council. "It is a law highly demanded by city councils and by the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP)," she added.

The proposal aims to "provide legal certainty" and "prevent formal errors that can be corrected" from leading to the total nullity of territorial and urban planning instruments, as explained by the Ministry of Housing in a statement. The minister of the sector, Isabel Rodríguez, already stressed last month on the need to achieve consensus to move forward with the norm. "I hope to have the support of the parliamentary groups to activate this draft law, which declined in the previous legislature, and which will provide urban planning with stability and legal security, avoiding the paralysis of urban plans when errors can be corrected" Rodríguez explained during his appearance at the Senate Housing and Urban Agenda Commission on February 18.

Through the text approved this Tuesday, a legislative reform is proposed that provides territorial and urban planning instruments with the stability, certainty and legal security that they demand, because urban planning plans are an essential tool for the development of towns and cities with criteria of sustainability, housing policy, job creation and, in general, the national economy. "The legal text is essentially proposed to provide the field of territorial and urban planning with a set of measures that reinforce the stability of these instruments and legal certainty," says the Ministry.

Faced with political discrepancies, in the real estate sector there is expectation and desire for the reform to go ahead because they see in it a way to speed up possible solutions to the problem of access to housing in Spain and to the lack of supply that occurs in the market. "If we want to address the lack of housing supply in our country and the accessibility difficulties, we need to develop and manage land more effectively and with greater legal certainty," explains

Juan Antonio Gómez-Pintado

, president of the Association of Developers and Builders of Spain (

APCEspaña

). The organization considers that the approval of the text this Tuesday is progress in this regard.

According to data managed by the association, there are currently almost a hundred municipalities affected by court rulings that have declared the nullity of their respective urban planning. This is a very revealing fact, especially if one takes into account that, in terms of population, a population of almost four million people is concentrated in these affected municipalities.