The clash between the Government and the Generalitat over the rental price index in stressed areas continues. The Minister of Territory, Ester Capella, held a meeting this afternoon in Madrid with the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, to show her the Government's disagreement with the decision that the Central Executive wants to make to impose a homogeneous price register for the entire country. “The rental market is not homogeneous,” Capella has warned, so if the state index is applied “rental prices will not go down.”
The councilor has proposed to the minister a formula to superimpose both rental pricing indices in the 140 localities that are considered stressed. Capella's proposal is the following: when the Catalan index is within the state range (between the lower and upper state range), the rent limit will always be the Catalan Index. Likewise, when the Catalan index is outside the state range, the upper or lower state range will be applied depending on which of these two values are closer to the Catalan one.
Sources from the Ministry of Housing assure that Isabel Rodríguez has raised with Capella the willingness of the central government to establish a state index whose criteria "had been worked on between the technicians of the State and the Generalitat and how they had been shared politically on several occasions."
The Ministry of Housing, in fact, proposes a state index that leaves Catalan practically ineffective. The department led by Isabel Rodríguez is about to publish a homogeneous price table for the entire country that draws from the Tax Agency, the General Directorate of the Cadastre, the National Institute of Statistics, the Bank of Spain, the College of Registrars and the Department of Economic Affairs of the Ministry of the Presidency. The Executive considers that its data has a greater degree of specificity to know the situation of the rental market in these stressed areas.
The determination of the Ministry of Housing is firm: "The Government of Spain, in compliance with the established mandate of the Housing Law, will apply a homogeneous index to the whole of Spain," defends Isabel Rodríguez's team. "This index is just one more instrument to control the increase in rental prices," they add. "We trust that the public policies implemented by the different administrations will improve access to housing," these sources conclude.
The Catalan index, in contrast, is based on the bonds of the contracts that are deposited in the Catalan Soil Institute (Incasòl), a public body dependent on the Department of Territory. The Generalitat considers that its index is robust and reliable and that is why Capella has insisted that it will continue to fight for the state index to incorporate the Catalan register.
“We will defend our index, I do not consider the battle lost,” stressed the councilor who has defined the market situation in Catalonia as a “housing emergency.”
