Questions about Catastro – and more
NO property related questions, even the really difficult ones, will be ducked in this column. It seems that many of you are aware that Catastro, the inland revenue’s database is used to calculate your council tax.
That has led to some really consequential questions arising in relation to rural properties, the answers to which I think are going to help a great many of you, certainly in the hundreds of thousands, from the estimated one million or so UK property owners in the whole of Spain.
Reader question: “Is it true, or right, that owners of rural properties get charged VAT when they purchase their property and get charged council tax by Catastro and then local councils refuse to register the owners as living in those same properties so they are denied access to municipal and social services?”
Great question! The short answer is, I know for a fact that this used to happen but, I thought it had been consigned to the history books. Back in 2004-2007 I witnessed that first hand, I’ve also seen the consequences first hand and they’re not pretty or fair. If this is still true, I want to know about it so it can be stamped out definitively. If this has happened to you or someone you know please take the time to complete a two-minute survey so we can address the problem ASAP.
Back to the reader’s question, we’ll take a closer look at what the consequences of that are for those people affected in a second. I don’t mean to minimise them by not tackling them first, I know they literally can mean life and death, unfortunately I’ve been witness to that on several occasions, especially the lack of access to social services. Before we get there, and beyond there to solutions in the pipeline we need to look at how things got to be the way they are, we need context:
Fact: with very few exceptions, you can’t build where they tell you can’t build. You can’t build on green belt land, Suelo no Urbanizable, the clue is in the name. Suelo no urbanizable, land designated NOT for development. Couldn’t be clearer, right?
Except that a lot of those buildings, I’m guessing just from personal experience that most of them, were constructed before that definition (suelo no urbanizable) even existed (Ley del suelo 2007) and certainly before most of the towns had town planning (PGOU) which is where it states what the land classification (urban, rural, brown field...) of all the territory within that area is.
Hundreds of towns still don’t have a Town Plan (PGOU) and are working either from plans from 1994 or from state approved plans, as opposed to locally approved plans.
Here’s a famous case, Torrechiva, tiny village of 90 inhabitants, 20 years to get a town plan approved. It’s like herding cats through syrup. Between 20082018, in Andalucía, there were 547 towns with town planning yet to be approved but had started the process and in that 10-year period only 86 managed it and it took those 86 an average of 10 years to get through the process. What’s worse is the day after they were published they were out of date, still leaving 80% plus that didn’t even make it that far.
Fact: As a result, literally millions of houses have been built on land that you now can’t build on. 350,000 of them just in Valencia, 327,000 in Andalucía... life and definitely the urban sprawl bit of life, finds a way.
Fact: those crimes/ infractions had, and in most cases still have, a statute of limitations. That means the public administration had a time limit to prosecute you, after which it can only deny you certain rights that other ‘legal’ houses have.
Fact: most of those statute of limitations has expired. Not recently, ages ago, decades ago in most cases. The new planning law (LOTUP) came into existence in 2014 so, all the construction built under the previous laws (LUV, LRAU...) has already exceeded the corresponding statute of limitations.
So with very few exceptions, the public administration can do little to nothing to remedy the situation by using the stick, its hands are tied, they must abide by the law too. If the statute of limitations has expired, it’s expired. There’s no reset button for a new government that just arrives on the scene and with the best of intentions wants to fix the situation. New laws are not retroactive by law, art. 14 Spanish Constitution.
Fact: those houses were not built to building specifications they were just built. No plans, no project, just know-how (or not), experience (or not) and a lot of time and money. So they are not up to code, in many cases that’s because they were built before the building code came in existence.
The building code/ Código Técnico de la Edificación was introduced in 2006, although the first year they were obligatory was 2007 as you could still use the previous code NBE when the CTE was introduced. Just as an aside, the NBE were much closer to the British system than the CTE, more results based. So those houses are not
in the planning and they’re not up to code but, there, they, undoubtedly are. You can see them. The administration and the law can’t but, you and me, we can see them.
They are by any definition also illegal: no licence, not up to code, no habitability certificate, and not allowed to be where they are as the planning says they can’t be. However, there they are, millions of them.
Being a Municipal Technical Architect in a village greatly affected by this problem is a direct route to developing a personality disorder. An owner comes in and wants to enlarge a window in a ‘legal’ house and I spend an hour looking at the project.
While not 200 metres from that spot there are hundreds and hundreds of ‘illegal’ houses, not itzy bitzy windows but, whole houses with pools which I did nothing about because, we can, until recently, do nothing about it.
Fact: The law does not prohibit their sale. Can you imagine the impact that would have? A million homes x 2 owners, two million really, really miffed owners and their mates and family basically a third of the total population in huff, it would make the introduction of the poll tax look like a day at the races. Never happened, not going to happen and for good reasons. So they’re on sale and we, amongst others, buy them. Hundreds of thousands of us.
Those are the impossible facts that any government is faced with. Hundreds of thousands locally and millions nationally of ‘illegal’ properties, in fact ‘doubly illegal’, not up to any corresponding code and not in the planning and hands very legally tied.
The problem has only been infinitely exacerbated by the transfer of those properties to foreigners who understand they love Valencia so much they want to live here and not so much of the Ley del Suelo 2007,
LRAU, LUV, LOTUP texto refundido, even less of the ‘not’ texto refundido, PGOU or Catastro. They/ we buy a property ‘in good faith’, with a nice lawyer, a nice notary tells them they can buy it and then the poor but, also nice person at the council has to run through what I just ran through with 10 words of English and a dictionary.
Having worked in one here, I’m happy to report that local authorities are just trying to organise development in the best interests of everyone. They didn’t build those properties, in fact they told them not to. The original property owners in many cases see decades pass and as we have seen no town planning forthcoming and they improvised a plan.
Take a look at the centre of London and tell me that’s not an improvised plan. The proverbial ‘it’ happens everywhere, all the time. In the UK, we haven’t resolved the problem we’ve side-stepped it.
We have a thing called ‘permitted development’ basically that’s just saying ‘we know you’re going to do it anyway, so within these limits just get on and build it’. No harm no foul as they say. No-one broke any laws, the municipal technician isn’t having a nervous breakdown, well not for that reason anyway, as there was no permission to be avoided, so no fines to be issued etcetera.
Spain has a legal code, an accounting code (I used to teach accounting here at ESTEMA/ Antonio de Nebrija University) and a building code. They like to codify, which is great if you can do it and if you can do it constantly, if not you ossify (you make it inflexible). I genuinely believe, with the best of intentions from all parties, that’s what’s happened here. The answer to that problem is localism in planning but, that’s for another day.
Legally, there’s a brilliant report written by Pedro Joaquín Maldonado Canito. It’s so well written and so clear. The conclusion of that report is if someone can prove to a council they are living, in any form: legally, illegally, a-legally (yes, that’s a thing), B-legally (OK, that’s not a thing), even in a ruin, then they must be registered there. Here’s the important bit, you don’t need a ‘licencia de ocupación’ to prove it, that’s a document to say the building (or hut or cave) meet the building criteria for habitation.
There’s also art. 6 (LA LEYLEG.. 7636/1985) de la Ley 7/1985, de 2 de abril (BOE del 3), Reguladora de las Bases del Régimen Local ( LRBRL (LA LEY-LEG.. 7636/1985)) y en los art. 53 (LA LEY-LEG.. 8155/1986) y siguientes del Real Decreto 1690/1986, de 11 de julio (BOE de 14 de agosto). That law has been interpreted for example by the Presidential Government (Resolución de la Presidencia del Gobierno de 21 de julio de 1997 cuyo art. 4) to mean that wherever you are actually living you are legally/officially living, not living legally but, legally living.
It actually goes into detail about even if your living in a hut, a cave or a caravan or even a place with no roof. If that’s where you’re living, that’s where you’re living and you should be registered as living there, full stop.
Part 2 next week.
To access the expat town hall registration survey, scan the QR code, or go https:// docs.google.com/forms/d/e/ 1FAIpQLScbhU87lc10jR5fh1Yn6G4EAuvFHhmpMK0WReHorJ_dHwFsRA/viewform