Councils may be at risk of acting illegally if they cancel Local Accommodation (AL) Permanent Home Ownership (HPP) registrations that did not provide evidence of activity yesterday. The warning is issued by the Portuguese Accommodation Association (ALEP), which explains that municipal councils have no way of confirming the nature of the documents not submitted.
AL owners in the country had to provide proof of their activity by Wednesday the 13th. According to Law No. 56/2023 of October 6, holders of the AL registration, within the scope of the Mais Habitação program, “are obliged to provide, by submitting a declaration of contribution, proof of the maintenance of the exploration activity and communicating the effectiveness of the exercise on the RNAL platform – National Register of Local Accommodation, through the Balcão Único Eletrônico”. If they have not done so, the respective registrations will be canceled, by decision of the mayor of the relevant region. However, the measure does not apply to the operation of local accommodation units in HPP, as long as this operation does not exceed 120 days per year.
The problem, ALEP states, is that without the relevant proof of activity, the rooms cannot determine whether the property is an HPP or, for example, a ghost registration. “The chambers we have contacted say they may be committing illegal situations with the issue of cancellations. If they don’t cancel the registrations [que não entregaram prova] they are not complying with the law, but also if they cancel an HPP registration. It is complex and the municipalities do not know how to act,” explains the vice-president of ALEP to Dinheiro Vivo. Nuno Trigo adds that ALEP itself made owners aware of sending supporting documents, but that “the law there is no obligation to “But there are many who may have chosen not to do so and the municipal authorities cannot cancel under penalty of committing illegality and engaging these holders. This situation will result in complicated situations for municipalities and even for some in court,” he complains.
The official added that some municipalities have also proactively asked owners for clarification about the type of AL to avoid embarrassment. Nuno Trigo accuses the government of “making laws on its knees” and testifies that there is a gap in how the validation of evidence should be carried out. For this reason, he guarantees, municipalities do not want to end up in a wave of ‘blind cancellations’.
‘According to the law, the owners must cancel everything. But there is common sense and local councils are the first to worry about the local economy, with small owners having an influence on small traders. Out of common sense, the municipalities say that they will not do that. act blindly when it comes to cancellations, especially because they do not have the ability to understand what permanent home ownership is, but by law they should be,” he states.
After the government extended the deadline for submitting operating certificates by six days at the request of ALEP and restrictions were registered on the platform, the next phase for the association is still uncertain. “One thing is the provision of proof of activity and another thing is the validation of this proof. At the moment we are only talking about delivery and then there will be a process that will take months for the cameras to validate this evidence. It is not clear in the law which ones are mandatory and which are not, I don’t know how they are going to control this level,” says the ALEP spokesperson.
Half of the AL in Lisbon could be cancelled
The deadline for submitting proof of activity only ended at 11:59 PM yesterday. Neither the Ministry of Economic Affairs nor the Agency for Administrative Modernization (AMA) provided figures to Dinheiro Vivo. An official source from the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Administrative Modernization said only that the system was “fully operational and recording a normal number of entries.” The Porto City Council confirmed that it had received 9,203 contributing statements, out of the 10,500 AL registered with RNAL.
In Lisbon, ALEP says, “about 50% of AL did not take the test.” In other words, only half of the 20,000 AL registrations in the capital provided evidence. Sometimes these are inactive registrations, the association admits, so-called ghost licenses. “But there are a number of other situations, namely foreigners who, because it was electronic and needed a digital mobile key, could not produce the key. There are also elderly people who had a lot of difficulty with it because this is a digital process. And we have a group, which can be quite large, and it concerns the AL registrations carried out at HPP,” says Nuno Trigo.
According to the ALEP spokesperson, the situation is “extremely worrying at all levels.” “If this is exhaustive, it means that 50% of the AL in Lisbon would have to be cancelled. More than 40% of overnight stays in Lisbon take place in AL, even if you were to eliminate those that were already inactive, there would be a very large percentage of accommodations that were closed or illegal. Our fear is that non-proactive illegality will be promoted by the holders, due to incapacity,” he adds.
ALEP fears that the measure “will become something negative for the entire sector and a problem for municipal authorities”.
Source: DN
