Piano casa, from renovations to new buildings: what's new

Announced in the summer by the Prime Minister at the Rimini Meeting, relaunched in the winter by Giorgia Meloni herself at the conference at the beginning of the year, the government's Home Plan is taking its first step. The programme will be set in motion by a decree-law that will make 950 million euro available. Here are the elements known so far:

The Budget Law has brought the resources already allocated in previous manoeuvres into a unified framework, quantifying the resources immediately available for the plan at EUR 970 million. Other funds will be added to this: at present, the count according to the government would come to 6 billion, which could even rise further and exceed 8 billion. In the reshaping of the NRP, in fact, a further 1.2 billion euro could be recovered, which was initially earmarked in part for the purchase of new trains.

The numbers on the social housing front give a precise idea of the resources needed for this chapter, which is the most advanced. There are approximately 63,000 dwellings in need of renovation, because they are currently uninhabitable. At the moment, however, there are various funding lines pointing in the same direction, especially at the regional level, anticipating what the government intends to do: the real need, then, could be around 50-55 thousand dwellings to be upgraded. The average cost of a renovation is currently around 18,500 euro. Rounding up to 20,000 euro, it is estimated that the measure will have to cost around 1.1 billion euro to complete the work and assign these properties to as many families on the waiting list.

The timing of the operation, to be started with the new decree, may not be very long. The works, although they concern thousands of buildings, are in most cases small extraordinary maintenance works (above all, upgrading of the plant engineering part) for which a few months are needed. Many former Iacp may be able to move within the framework of the maintenance framework agreements that they have already contracted out, cutting the time it takes to contract out the work. In other cases it will be necessary to entrust companies with new maintenance lots: some public housing companies are already moving in this direction. Upgrading, however, will be concentrated mainly in the North, where there are more unfit buildings.

The resources for social housing would have to be distributed through an emergency financial instrument that would allow them to be allocated on a non-reimbursable basis, based on expenditure reporting. For social housing, given the budgets of the former Iacp and the tenants' fees, a model based on soft loans, similar to the one currently used by the European Investment Bank, would not work. The direction should be given to an entity capable of managing this new instrument, distributing the resources to the former Iacp: the chosen company would be Invitalia.