Holiday lets - Bad laws with dubious justifications

At present, it isn’t actually known how many of these places will in fact be on offer. A point to bear in mind is that these aren’t new places but ones that were effectively frozen by the previous government’s moratorium. It wasn’t therefore possible to acquire places via the pool and to request a new licence as a holiday rental property. Habtur doesn’t reckon there will be that many, as owners won’t wish to sell them. The association may be right, but a concern has been expressed about the possibility of illicit trading. Owners can designate someone who wants to make a purchase. Might this give rise to, shall we say, inducements to sell to an interested party?

Whether it does or it doesn’t, the Council has until June 15 to publish requirements and what have you. The Council also has to establish precisely how many accommodation places there are to be in total, namely the combination of licensed holiday rental beds and hotel beds. From what has thus far been intimated, this is likely to be 412,000, which the current administration has maintained will represent a reduction of 18,000, when in reality it will be nothing of the sort. This was a figure that the previous administration had arrived at.

Were there to be 412,000, these would comprise 308,000 hotel beds and 104,000 holiday rental beds. And again this would be a legacy from the past and the tourism management of the PSOE-led coalitions - Council of Mallorca and Balearic Government. To explain how this number came about, one has to take account of provisions that predated those coalitions. Scope existed for the creation of more places.

It is the places created when Biel Barceló of Més was tourism minister that have been at the heart of months of political bickering. While Més and their fellow coalition members had foreseen that places would in fact be eliminated over time, they have been accused by the Partido Popular of having given rise to overtourism precisely because they made them available.

A certain hypocrisy in the political arguments is encapsulated by the fact that the PP have chosen to permit the continuation of the 90,000 places about which there has been so much argument. By blocking their exchange, so thinking on the left went, they would eventually disappear. To the extent that they do or will contribute to the housing problems is open to debate (one can’t ignore that they can amount to a fair old number of properties), but here was an opportunity to have at least conveyed a message to a public being increasingly concerned by these problems that a measure was being adopted. It hasn’t been taken, the government insisting it is not about decrease but about no growth.

A government justification is that Balearic citizens should have a right to benefit from the ongoing tourism boom. This is a variation on a theme, as the Més justification was one of “democraticising” tourism, predicated on a naive view - or this was the impression anyway - that there would be some families with the odd spare apartment knocking around who could supplement their incomes through legit holiday lets. Més and allies such as the environmentalists GOB also saw this as a way of upsetting the hoteliers. Notwithstanding a desire that is unlikely to have been diminished, they all admit it was a colossal mistake. And the mistake is now being repeated.

I have said previously that I was once in favour of a liberalisation and that I challenged the tourism ministry in a public forum over the faffing around by ex-tourism ministers (PP), Carlos Delgado and Jaime Martínez, that failed to result in a satisfactory regulatory framework under the 2012 tourism law (which was otherwise and in general, a pretty decent piece of legislation). But this changed, and we all know why, as did Barceló by 2017. Airbnb unleashed the illegal in far greater number than had once been the case, while at the same time being a channel for the legal.

When there were only the licensed villas and chalets, there was no issue. One was caused by poor legislation and an inability to deal effectively with illegal supply. I am well aware that hoteliers are also blamed for overtourism and shouldn’t escape any decrease in places (were there to be any) , but the separate issue is housing. A hotel is not for living in, so why should apartments (and certain categories of house) be for non-residential purposes? The Supreme Court in Madrid, only by way of observation as opposed to ruling, is among those to have made this point. And it shouldn’t be overlooked that a holiday let bonanza has fundamentally undermined planning principles established years ago for the discrete existence of residential and tourist accommodation. Bad laws with dubious justifications, and both the right and the left have to share the blame.