The “social” turning point that the PP is preparing is linked to Feijóo’s speech on squatting, one of the main obsessions of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party, to which a new concept has been added, “inquiokupación”, to define these people stopping. pay their owners. However, the popular have included in their package of measures on housing one to limit the protection against evictions provided by the law: that the threshold for considering a family in a vulnerable situation increases from 1,800 euros per month to 1,050.
The PP presented this Wednesday some of the main measures it plans to introduce in a future housing bill. This is the second rule announced by the party after its change of strategy to present Feijóo as a more moderate political leader, concerned with social issues. Among the policies planned by this initiative are the end of the cap on rental prices or tax reductions for owners to encourage them to put their apartments on the rental market.
But as rent prices soar in cities across Spain, many of the measures announced under the plan are aimed at the so-called problem of squatting. “In Spain there are 80,000 occupied homes and that is not a small number, no matter how much the government wants to minimize it,” said the PP’s deputy secretary for Sustainable Development, Paloma Martín, on Wednesday during the presentation press conference. the content of the initiative.
This calculation comes from a study by the private foundation Institut Cerdá which also speaks of a reduction in these squats of 10%. Data from the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) shows 16,765 known acts of burglary and theft of real estate, out of a total stock of 20.9 million housing units, or 0.06% of the total. The PP MP also gave other information for which she did not give her sources: “But what is more serious is that every year, 25,000 ‘restoculations’ take place in Spain. This is a problem that experts say is becoming chronic.”
To avoid this last phenomenon, the PP will include in its bill, which it will present to Congress in the coming weeks, a limitation of the protection of vulnerable families against evictions, which Martín defended during the press conference as a measure to improve young people’s “access” to rental housing.
The measure aims to dismantle one of the points of the Housing Law approved by Congress in the last legislature, the departure of the PSOE and the Unidas Podemos government. This rule provided mediation and arbitration mechanisms to protect vulnerable families who cannot pay rent, to prevent them from being evicted. Concretely, the law seeks, through a modification of the Code of Civil Procedure, to give administrations sufficient time to find a housing solution for vulnerable people, without limiting or removing the rights of owners. This would thus respond to the demands of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has repeatedly reprimanded Spain for violating the right to housing.
The law considers that a family can benefit from this right of mediation when the amount of rent and supplies exceeds 30% of the total income and provided that the income level does not exceed the limit of three times the Public Indicator of Monthly Income with Multiple Effects. (IPREM), currently at 600 euros. In other words, provided that the combined income of all members of the family does not exceed 1,800 euros per month.
This limit increases depending on the number of dependent children, in cases where it is a single-parent family or with dependent or disabled children.
And it is this barometer that the PP wants to touch to prevent many owners from stopping renting their accommodation “for fear of squatting”. The new limit, according to the law that the Conservative Party will soon present, will be 1.5 times the IPREM. In other words, for a family to benefit from this mediation, the total income of the entire unit cannot exceed 1,050 euros. It is enough for a couple to have one member unemployed and another earning minimum wage to escape this protection.
“From the Popular Party we are faced with this problem that the government has put us in. We are a responsible party, totally committed to the most vulnerable, to those who are truly vulnerable, and we are going to protect them with all our strength”, affirmed Martín, this measure which he tried to mix with the so-called demands that the young people are asked to rent, which is not set by law but by the market and which is generally much higher.
This point of the law had already been the subject of criticism for these same reasons during its treatment in Congress, when the right believed that the text left Spain as a squatting paradise. Already at the time, tenant unions criticized this same measure for being insufficient in its protection of tenants.
According to the latest statistics from the CGPJ, measures taken after the pandemic to avoid expulsions of vulnerable people have reduced launches. Yet, in 2023, for example, nearly 20,000 families found themselves homeless due to non-compliance with the urban lease law and another 5,260 because they were unable to pay the rent. mortgage.
Furthermore, the protection of housing law does not even concern all leases, but only those considered to be large owners, that is to say those who own more than ten homes. For these cases, the rule provides a mechanism so that when there are vulnerable people, the administration is aware of this and tries to prevent the expulsion.
The mediating body will be the autonomous community where the property is located, to try to reach an agreement between the parties and, if this is not possible, for the administration to provide a housing solution to the person or vulnerable family before taking legal action. The autonomous communities have funds provided by the State through the National Housing Plan and specifically intended to cover this type of situation.
The Platform of Persons Concerned by Mortgage Loans (PAH) was already very critical at the time of a measure that it considered to be a “make-up”. “The conceptual framework of the law involves postponing them, suspending them while social services look for an alternative. And it’s a trap. We know that social services are not always transferred, but that they collapse. In addition, there is no alternative, because there are no houses,” Laura Barrio explained to elDiario.es last year, while the law was being negotiated between the government and parliamentary groups.
The PP tried to justify this Wednesday that this change in criteria must be accompanied by greater protection of vulnerable families, so that it does not rest on “owners but is the responsibility of social services”. However, in the absence of knowing in more detail those proposed by Martín, this protection implies involving “regional and local administrations in matters of housing and social assistance so that they present an alternative proposal for decent housing for rent”, which is already contemplated by the current wording of the law.
