Housing Min. wants to make it difficult to delay construction projects with complaints

Housing Minister Hugo de Jonge wants to make it more difficult for locals to delay housing construction projects with endless complaints. He thinks he can gain months by shortening the appeal procedure against building plans, the Public Housing and Spacial Planning Minister said in his action plan to speed up housing construction, which he sent to parliament, RTL Nieuws reports.

According to the Minister’s plan, if the municipality rejects an objection, the complainant can appeal once to the Council of State, the highest administrative court in the country. Currently, complaint appeals work their way up from a lower court to end up at the Council of State after months of appeals and multiple courts handling the matter.

“You currently see a not-in-my-backyard attitude in many projects. We need to break through that together. The voice of the people who don’t want things is now heard so much louder than the voice of the home seeker,” De Jonge said.

De Jonge’s action plan also includes other ways to speed up the construction process. A study into what causes delays in housing projects showed that a lot of time is lost during the planning process, which takes an average of six years. By taking multiple steps at the same time, rather than one after the other, you can save a lot of time, De Jonge said.

He wants calculations, the drawing of plans, research, involving stakeholders, and the recording of agreements to happen more simultaneously and in conjunction. He’ll test this method in five housing projects.

Another part of the acceleration plan is the standardization of building- and sustainability requirements. “Every project has different requirements and obligations. That costs time and money,” De Jonge said. He plans to lay down the standardization in national regulations and make sustainability requirements more general with less room for exceptions. According to the Minister, that will also make it easier to make prefab homes in the factory.

Speeding up the construction process is vital for achieving the government’s goal of building 900,000 homes by the end of 2030. Currently, the development of a housing project takes an average of ten years - that is way too long for people anxiously waiting for a home, De Jonge said. “It must and can be shorter.