The Executive of Iñigo Urkullu has announced an appeal before the Constitutional Court against the Housing Law, with the opposition of the three councilors of the PSE-EE, considering that it invades regional competences because it regulates aspects that, despite not being included in the legislation of Euskadi are the responsibility of the autonomous community.
The Basque Government Council has approved this Wednesday the filing of the appeal. Based on the report prepared by the Executive's legal services, he wants to appeal seven articles of state law, a transitory provision, an additional provision and two final provisions.
The members of the autonomous Executive, PNV and PSE-EE have maintained their discrepancies regarding this law, which was rejected in the Cortes Generales by Andoni Ortuzar's party, differences that have been transferred today to the Governing Council, where the three councilors of the PSE-EE have shown their disagreement.
Sources from the Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport, led by the socialist Iñaki Arriola, have explained to Efe that the three PSE-EE councilors have shown their disagreement with the legal report, considering that Spanish law "is an opportunity for the Basque Country because it does not impose, but expands rights".
In this sense, they insist that the regulation authorizes the autonomies to adopt measures for which they do not have powers and allows them to have all the possible and useful tools to face access to affordable housing, a path that reminds them that the Basque Country undertook "long time".
The spokesperson for the Basque Government, Bingen Zupiria, explained that the appeal was decided on the basis of the report from the institution's legal services, a report that, as he recalled, has its origin in the approval by the Basque Parliament at the beginning of May of an initiative signed by PNV and PSE-EE.
The spokesman has made an appeal to the central government to try to channel this issue in the bilateral cooperation commission to try to bring positions closer and reach an agreement that avoids the appeal.
Zupiria explained that the arguments contained in the legal report that the regulation "occupies" the space available to the Basque administration "to be able to develop its own housing policies", which generates "legal uncertainty about the regulations to apply".
"It is about the imposition on the Basque Country of certain measures and means to carry them out in aspects of housing matters that are the exclusive competence of this autonomous community", considers the Basque Government, which insists that "the State claims to be the only power that defines the social function of housing", as well as "regulating in depth the public actions promoting housing and the public policy of access to it".
These circumstances relegate the Basque Autonomous Community to "be a mere executor" because its regulatory competence in this matter "is completely emptied".
Likewise, the legal report indicates that "to a large extent" the content of the law is previously collected and "well regulated" in Euskadi through the Basque law of 2015, which, as he recalls, was validated by the Court Constitutional.
Specifically, the report indicates that the state law establishes a high percentage of land reserved for subsidized housing, which "violates constitutional jurisprudence in this regard", while introducing "contradictions" as to the necessary destination of the public assets of the land, which "limits the decision-making capacity of the Basque Country in policies of its exclusive competence".
Regarding the declaration of stressed residential market areas, the State regulation "occupies the space that the development of the Basque regulations has to fill", which "closes the possibility of such development".
For all these reasons, the Department of Public Governance and Self-Government of the Basque Executive understands that "the State is denying the possibility for Basque society to be, through its democratically elected representatives, the owner of its own model in housing policy".
"Deliberately and with a recentralization strategy, it is ignoring that in the State there are different realities and very differentiated efforts in this specific area, since the Basque Country is the autonomous community that has built the most VPO, only behind Andalusia, a community that quadruples our population," denounces this department.
In short, the Government of Iñigo Urkullu defends the ability of Basque citizens to "establish their own path in what is recognized by law and without interference" and stresses the need to "protect the space recognized by the Basque Department of Territorial Planning, Housing and Transport", to define and materialize housing policies based on the needs of the Basque Country.
