The Environment Act will affect your life. What kind of law is this?

The construction of a dormer window on a house in The Hague. Roof construction always requires a permit from the municipality.Image ANP / Robin Utrecht

1. What is the Environment Act?

The Environment and Planning Act will determine how the scarce space in the Netherlands is distributed among citizens. For almost every piece of land that is being built on, a permit must already be requested from the government. There are now dozens of different counters and rules for this. The Environment and Planning Act makes this one digital counter.

Whether someone wants to install a dormer window, renovate a shed or house, cut down a tree or plant an entire forest: from now on, all permit applications will go through that one digital counter of the Environment Act.

The aim of this operation is to simplify the licensing procedures. This could save the government money and allow citizens and businesses to build faster.

2. What will change if I want to apply for a dormer window, for example?

Anyone who wants to put a simple dormer on their house now runs the risk of getting caught up in the many permits and regulations that come with it. With a bit of bad luck, the dormer window already has to go through about five approval processes.

First, a permit is required for the construction activity itself: installing the dormer window. If something also needs to be demolished, such as part of the old roof, there is a good chance that a second permit will be required for ‘demolition and/or asbestos removal’. If the dormer window is placed on a house that has been declared a monument, a permit is also required for ‘maintaining, restoring, changing or demolishing a monument’.

If the dormer window is placed at the front of the house, there is a chance that the renovation plan deviates from the zoning plan. Then permission must also be requested to ‘act in violation of the spatial planning rules’. And finally, most municipalities will also want the dormer window, for example, not to be purple, but for the building to meet the current aesthetic requirements of the neighbourhood. The blessing of the aesthetics committee must be arranged before the dormer window can be legally built.

The Environment Act was once conceived to abolish this ‘torture’ through all those different counters. If the law is introduced, the building permit can now be applied for at a single digital counter, where you can see at a glance which rules must be complied with. That should save a lot of time and frustration, if only because the names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of five different departments no longer have to be traced.

3. Are there any other benefits?

The intention is to increase the waiting time for a permit from 26 to 8 weeks, so that citizens and companies can start building more quickly. In this time of the great housing shortage, this is more necessary than ever, says Minister Hugo de Jonge for Housing.

Municipalities have the advantage that they can offer more customization. At the moment, one citizen wants to build, the other plant trees, and a third wants to build a solar park. ‘Everyone fights for his or her own interests, but now only one can get his way,’ said Geert Teisman, professor of public administration at Erasmus University. de Volkskrant

According to the professor, the Environment and Planning Act offers the opportunity to do justice to several wishes at the same time. ‘The Environment and Planning Act encourages smart combinations of ambitions, so that we can do more with less space,’ says Teisman. ‘Can you live in windmills, for example? I’m just saying something’, says the professor.

4. Sounds beautiful. Who can be against this?

It will not be the first time that there is a gap between theory and practice. In theory, the new Environment and Planning Act will soon ensure excellently regulated permit procedures. But the practice may be more unruly, critics fear.

Senators in the Senate mainly fear major ICT problems around the digital permit counter. Officials working with test versions are already reporting various implementation issues. The Association of Dutch Municipalities, among others, fears a ‘temporary setback in services’ if the counter opens in January.

That is precisely the reason for continuing to test and adapt the system, explains responsible minister Hugo de Jonge. “That’s no different from how Apple works: they can already bring a 1.0 version to the market, knowing that they can still fix bugs afterwards,” said Professor Teisman.

Critics are not convinced. They currently call the implementation of the law ‘very risky’ (GroenLinks) and foresee ‘major problems’ (PvdA). Left-wing opposition parties also fear that nature will more often lose out on building plans.

There is also fierce resistance on the right side of the Senate. Henk Otten consistently compares the Environment and Planning Act with the Titanic. ‘Captain De Jonge has been warned of looming icebergs, but instead of changing course, he sails full speed ahead.’

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