News item | 01-07-2022 | 9:00 am
An amendment to the Joint Regulations Act (Wgr) will come into effect today. Local authorities are working together more and more intensively. This happens at different levels and in different ways. The Joint Regulations Act enables (public law) cooperation between provinces, municipalities and water boards. With this change, representatives of the people, such as municipal councilors and members of the state, will have more influence on the decision-making process of this type of collaboration and will be better able to control it.
More influence
In joint regulations, the local government transfers powers to (the board of) a regional, inter-administrative partnership. Examples of legally required partnerships are the environmental services and the security regions. In recent years, various studies have shown that representatives of the people (municipal councils and councillors) experience too great a distance from joint regulations. This puts pressure on the democratic legitimacy of joint arrangements. This amendment improves the involvement of representatives of the people (municipal councils, provincial councils and boards of water boards) in the management of a partnership. This gives them more influence on decisions of a joint regulation.
Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations Bruins Slot: “The tasks facing municipalities do not stop at the municipal boundaries and increasingly play a role at regional level. Working together in this way also makes it possible to act more effectively and efficiently. With this amendment to the Wgr, municipal councils, provincial councils and general boards of water boards will have more and better tools to influence decision-making in joint regulations and to carry out their monitoring tasks. This gives local democracy a better grip on regional cooperation and is thus strengthened.”
Reinforcement role and position
With this amendment to the law, the options for representatives of the people to strengthen their own monitoring and framework-setting role in joint regulations are adjusted and expanded. The democratic legitimacy of decision-making within such a partnership is also increased. Examples are the right to submit a view (including when making an arrangement and when making decisions), setting up a joint advisory committee for councilors and agreements on how to deal with citizen participation. Members of parliament also have more influence on the functioning of a scheme, for example through mandatory agreements about the evaluation of the scheme and the obligation to make agreements about the (financial) consequences of withdrawal for the withdrawing participants. In this way, all participants are already clear in advance about the (financial) consequences of a possible withdrawal. In addition, there will be additional control powers, such as the option to conduct a joint inquiry into the functioning of the joint scheme as a whole. All councils involved must, however, agree to this survey by majority.
Implementation period
The part of the law that gives rights to representatives of the people will take effect immediately on 1 July 2022. For the other part (obligations to amend existing joint regulations in order to make stricter agreements about, for example, retirement or evaluation), the law provides for an implementation period of two years.