- It is a roadmap and not a guarantee: it sets priorities, but the actual timetable may vary.
- Almost four in ten planned laws develop commitments under the EU recovery funds.
- Housing, work-life balance and 5G network security are among the areas with the greatest potential impact.
On Tuesday 11 January 2022 the Council of Ministers approved the government’s Annual Regulatory Plan for the year. It brings together 368 proposals: 92 laws, of which 11 are organic and 81 ordinary, and 276 royal decrees. It comes only four months after the previous year’s plan, which had been approved on 31 August 2021.
Among the examples highlighted by the government itself are the housing law, the transposition of the EU directive on work-life balance, a social services law, reforms of the science and industry laws and a rule on the security of 5G networks. For anyone running a business or managing assets, the plan is a map of the topics worth watching during the year. It is a way of reading, months in advance, where the country’s economic and social regulation is heading.
What the plan is for
The Government Act requires a plan to be approved every year listing the laws and royal decrees the executive expects to put forward for approval in the following period. Its purpose is to provide transparency and predictability: it lets citizens and companies know which areas are going to be regulated and in roughly what order, and it makes it easier to take part in the public consultations that accompany each project.
It should be read realistically. A plan is a forecast and not a closed commitment: some rules are delayed, others change content during the legislative process and some are added urgently, as happens with decree-laws. What is useful is not memorising the list but identifying which initiatives may affect your activity and following their progress from draft bill to Official Gazette.
The weight of EU funds
Around 38% of the plan’s laws develop commitments under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the programme through which Spain manages the Next Generation EU funds. Those funds are released in instalments in exchange for specific reforms, which creates a timetable with dates the government can hardly postpone without consequences.
For businesses, this means that some reforms will arrive faster than usual and that others will be tied to calls for aid, digitalisation requirements or sustainability criteria. Anyone planning investments or expecting to apply for public funding would do well to check whether their area of activity is linked to any of those commitments. A good practice is to assign someone inside the company, or its external adviser, to follow these rules periodically and summarise them for management.
How to follow it in practice
A simple way to work with the plan is to select three or four rules relevant to your case. Property owners and real estate investors will follow the housing law closely, which, according to the government, will give the authorities tools to contain prices and make access easier for young people. Companies with employees will look at the transposition of the work-life balance directive, with new parental and carer leave rights.
For each rule chosen, it is worth noting what stage of the process it has reached, which public consultation deadlines open and which of your own decisions could depend on its content, such as a lease, an internal leave policy or an investment plan. Your adviser can help you prioritise and review your position once the text is final. That way, when a rule is published, it will already have been thought through what changes it requires and on what timetable.
Knowing the regulatory timetable makes it possible to plan ahead, but only the final text of each rule sets the obligations.
This article is general information. It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and it does not take anyone’s particular circumstances into account.
