The PP will table a bill on housing next week, as announced this Tuesday by the Secretary General, Cuca Gamarra. This will be the second “social” law after the new strategic turn which attempts to give Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s team a supposedly moderate image. The “number two” of the PP highlighted the general lines of the norm in an informative event: lower taxes, land liberalization and “elimination of bureaucracy” to build up to 200,000 homes per year during a period that has not been defined.
Gamarra defended during an information event in Madrid that housing is “one of the most urgent problems facing the country”, especially for young people. The general secretary of the PP accused the coalition government of having implemented measures that discouraged the construction of houses and their rental. And this, he says, is what the first opposition party wants to insist on.
“In Spain, around 200,000 homes could be built each year, which is what we need and what the reports tell us we need in our country,” he assured.
“Today our country is not building the number of homes that could be built and that Spanish society needs. And they’re not being built because the law was legislated in the opposite direction to what we need,” Gamarra said. “Today, there is no legal security, no land is made available, there is no dynamic of administrative agility and elimination of bureaucracy that makes it possible,” he said. – he added, before ending with one of the PP’s favorite mantras: “No, there is aid that allows young people to access this housing, what exists is protection for squatters .
For this reason, Gamarra explained, the PP plan involves “ensuring legal certainty, reducing bureaucracy, putting land on the market and facilitating construction.”
According to Funcas, the housing problem in Spain is due to speculation.
The Secretary General presented some measures which essentially boil down to lower taxes and liberalization of housing construction. Gamarra proposed “exemption from gift tax” within families “of all amounts intended for the purchase of housing”. In addition, the PP has recovered an old proposal from Feijóo: a progressive exemption from income tax for young people which would go from 100% in the first year to 25% in the fourth. A measure that the PP launched more than a year ago, without linking it to housing, and which it now recovers as part of the finalized plan.
But the tax cuts don’t stop at young people, the group that has the most difficulty accessing housing. Gamarra assured that the PP bill will propose that “in the income tax, the bonuses, the exemptions, will be recovered from the income that comes from rentals, from those who put or put back housing on the rental market”.
Silence on Lebanon
The cataract of measures on housing announced by Gamarra highlighted the silence of the secretary general in the face of the invasion of Lebanon launched yesterday morning by Israel.
Asked specifically about Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to send his army to an area where there are hundreds of Spanish soldiers, sent by the UN precisely to try to avoid war actions like that carried out by Israel, Gamarra did not even mentioned neither country. it made no mention of peace, security, human rights or respect for international law.
Feijóo’s “number two” limited himself to attacking Pedro Sánchez and regretting that his leader was not receiving information from the government. “In foreign policy there is something important, the need to recover state policy,” he said. Gamarra demanded to have “a position as a country in international affairs, which was abandoned by Pedro Sánchez.” “There is no communication whatsoever,” he concluded.
Gamarra asks the Constitutional Court not to review the sentences
The Secretary General also reacted to the decision of the Supreme Court to ratify the non-application of the amnesty law to the leaders of the process against whom accusations of embezzlement have been brought. Gamarra requested that the Constitutional Court not review this ruling.
“That the Guarantee Court does not try to be a reviewer of sentences, that it accepts the application of the Supreme Court,” said Gamarra, who also assured that “the courts are not there to read into the legislator’s thoughts or what he had, “is there to literally apply what the law says, and this law does not cover crimes of embezzlement.”
