Escoda: “Announcing a Housing Plan at the end of the term in office is an empty gesture and an admission of Toni Pérez’s failure”

The Socialist Municipal Group on Benidorm City Council has commented on the decision by Toni Pérez’s governing team to apply for a €250,000 grant from the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030 to draw up the Municipal Housing Plan and create a Housing Observatory. Socialist spokesperson Cristina Escoda said that, although any step taken on housing is necessary, the initiative “comes very late” and amounts to an explicit acknowledgement by the Popular Party of a “wasted term of office”.

“The housing situation in Benidorm does not need any more studies to tell us what we experience every day: we are in a desperate situation. You only have to look at the news to see how Benidorm is leading the increase in house prices in Spain. Families, young people and workers in our city cannot find homes to rent or buy, either because of exorbitant prices or the absolute lack of available housing,” Escoda denounced.

The spokesperson recalled the mayor’s recent remarks, in which he described the project as essential, stating that “without this plan, any measure would be an ‘empty gesture’”. “If Mr Pérez now acknowledges that genuine public policies cannot be designed without this plan, what he is doing is openly admitting that everything he has said and the little the PP has done during almost 12 years in government has, precisely, been a monumental ‘empty gesture’ at the expense of the wellbeing and future of Benidorm’s residents,” she criticised.

In-house resources and measures on the table
From the Socialist ranks, questions have been raised about why the local government has had to wait for a grant scheme from the Spanish Government before taking action. “If €250,000 is going to be used to draw up all these strategies and establish the observatory, we have to ask why the City Council did not use its own resources to do this years ago, or at least since the Socialist Group proposed specific alternatives to revive the city’s residential property market,” the councillor stressed.

In this regard, the Socialist leader recalled the measures that the PSOE has been proposing for some time to bring the nearly 24,000 vacant or barely used homes in the municipality back onto the market. Among these measures, Escoda highlighted the urgent need to restore the Municipal Housing Foundation to provide legal certainty for both landlords and tenants, with municipal advisers ensuring that tenants pay a reasonable rent and that landlords receive their rental payments on time. They have also proposed placing limits on tourist accommodation, using municipal taxation to offer tax breaks to property owners who put their homes on the long-term residential rental market, while imposing levies on large property owners with vacant homes and providing public grants for renovations, strictly conditional on the refurbished properties being made available to local residents as rental homes for a set period. This was also one of the measures proposed last year in the Urban Agenda Action Plan.

In addition, the spokesperson stressed that, although the solution to the housing crisis is highly complex, “we believe that applying the State Housing Law would be a great help, as it would allow Benidorm to be declared a Tensioned Residential Market Area, thereby introducing a legal cap on rental prices”.

Finally, Escoda stressed that “what Benidorm has lacked during Toni Pérez’s terms of office is not diagnoses, but work and the political will to use the different tools available to us at municipal level”. “We hope that this grant from the Spanish Government does not end up as just another headline or another file gathering dust in a drawer, and we demand that effective measures be adopted immediately to guarantee Benidorm residents’ right to decent housing,” Escoda concluded.