Housing Plan: first blow to amendments – tax breaks scrapped
Initial screening of proposed amendments: it will be difficult to include support measures in the plan to tackle the housing crisis
by Flavia Landolfi and Giuseppe Latour
Key points
There is very little scope for including tax relief measures in the Housing Plan. This was the outcome of the initial screening of amendments carried out yesterday by the Chamber of Deputies’ Environment Committee. The eligibility review of the proposals submitted last week has, in fact, scuppered several amendments intended to introduce tax relief and incentives of various kinds, which had been requested by various parties during the hearings.
In total, there were around fifty amendments to Decree 66 (rapporteurs: Dario Iaia (Fdi), Erica Mazzetti (Fi) and Elisa Montemagni (Lega)) that were declared inadmissible. After removing the duplicates, this brought the total number of proposed amendments still in the running to 438, but the Environment Committee – explained Chairman Mauro Rotelli (FdI) – intends to proceed with the selected ones, which should number around 250–270, to further narrow the scope of the work.
Incompatibilities
On closer inspection, a number of amendments that were clearly incompatible in terms of subject matter have been withdrawn, such as a proposal to allocate funds for urban regeneration projects in the Municipality of Forni di Sopra, in the province of Udine, or another proposal aimed at regulating a special plan for the protection, environmental restoration and regeneration of the historic centre of Cosenza. On the subject of amnesties, the amendment that sought to clarify, by law, that properties regularised from 1985 onwards are fully equivalent to those built with a valid planning permission: currently, in fact, case law imposes a series of restrictions on them, for example regarding volume bonuses. This clarification, too, will not be included in the Housing Plan.
Tax matters
Above all, however, it is the tax chapter that has been most adversely affected by the ineligibility criteria. Thus, the proposal to extend the concessions for PIRs to long-term savings plans ‘aimed at financing integrated housing programmes’, organised in accordance with the provisions of the Housing Plan, has been blocked. The potential exemption from registration tax for deeds ‘involving the transfer for consideration of ownership of residential property units, purchased by parties who, within six months of purchase, to enter into a contract of usufruct with a view to the subsequent sale of those units’. In practice, this would have been, a form of incentive for rent-to-buy.
For the time being, there is no scope for new tax relief schemes. A proposal to introduce specific tax breaks for the renovation of public and social housing has been rejected: a basic discount of 40 per cent, which could be increased to as much as 100 per cent in certain situations, such as for charging points or the removal of architectural barriers. Similarly, a sort of safeguard for work linked to the superbonus is inadmissible. Finally, an end to the tweaks for the flat-rate tax on short-term rentals. And no to the establishment of a Guarantee Fund for savers’ investments in the Housing Plan.
