The European Commission launched this Wednesday a public consultation to gather input on how to simplify EU regulations affecting housing construction, with the goal of cutting bureaucratic procedures, streamlining projects, and helping to increase the supply of affordable housing in the European Union.
The process is aimed at national, regional, and local administrations, as well as representatives from the construction, housing, and finance sectors, and civil society organizations, and will serve as a basis for designing a legislative simplification package planned for 2027 within the future European Affordable Housing Plan.
According to Brussels, the EU faces a crisis of access to reasonably priced housing, and the overlap of rules and procedures in the different Member States increases regulatory complexity, generates unnecessary bureaucracy, and makes construction and renovation projects more expensive and delayed.
In this scenario, the Commission aims to determine which elements of European legislation are affecting housing supply and to what extent the problems derive from the community rules themselves or from the way they have been transposed or developed by the Member States.
Interested parties can submit their contributions until September 30. In addition to identifying the obstacles they perceive in European regulations, Brussels requests concrete proposals to simplify procedures and examples of good practices that can be replicated across the Union.
The Commission places this consultation within its general strategy to cut bureaucratic burden and emphasizes that it has already presented more than a dozen simplification packages that, according to its estimates, will save around 18 billion euros per year in administrative costs.
The European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jorgensen, has argued that the sector needs "simpler rules" to build and renovate homes more quickly and has assured that the future proposal will seek to eliminate procedures, costs, and delays "without lowering environmental and social protection standards."
As part of this process, the Community Executive also plans to hold meetings and workshops with Member States and local authorities through the "European Housing Alliance," recently created to strengthen cooperation in this area.