Salva casa, Milan Regional Administrative Court against the Ministry of Economic Development: no binding value of the guidelines
The Ministry's indications do not serve to guide the judges' decisions. After the comments on the legitimate state new uncertainties on Decree 69
Key points
A new crack in the MIT guidelines on the Save Home. After the rulings that challenged the Ministry of Infrastructure's indications on legitimate status, comes an even more radical pronouncement: for the Lombardy Regional Administrative Tribunal (judgement no. 3433/2025) the document is totally lacking in binding force.
Beyond the single expression, however, the judges' decision goes further, because it challenges even a simple reference to the Ministry's answers within an appeal. In the case dealt with by the ruling, concerning a change of use blocked by the municipality of Porlezza, in the province of Como, the plaintiffs had invoked precisely the MIT guidelines in support of their arguments.
And the judges reject this reference, explaining that "not even the clarifications made" in the guidelines of 30 January can be cited in support of the deed's thesis, since "these are first and foremost indications and interpretative guidelines without binding force". A thesis, moreover, already affirmed by the Council of State (nos. 10223/2024 and 1361/2024), more generally on the subject of interpretative circulars. Thus, the ruling also challenges the possibility of referring to these indications in support of one's arguments, when the interpretation of the Salva casa is at issue.
The decision goes in the line of the objections already made to the possibility, ventilated precisely by the MIT, of implicitly certifying thelegitimate status of a property, without a precise verification (Lombardy Regional Administrative Court, no. 227/2025).
Forms
If the conclusions on the binding nature of the ministerial guidelines are substantially consistent with the established case law on the issue of the nature of circulars and, in general, of interpretative acts of a non-regulatory or legislative nature, the problem that now arises is that several indications of the MIT guidelines have been incorporated into the forms approved by the Unified Conference.
