Pedro Sánchez announces guarantees for young people's access to housing

The President of the Government and Secretary General of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, has placed housing as "a national cause" for Spain and has announced the approval in the next Council of Ministers of a line of guarantees of up to 20% of mortgages to facilitate access to a house.

These guarantees will be managed through the Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO) and will be used to purchase the first home for young people under 35 years of age and families with children in their care, according to Sánchez.

The president, who participated in Tenerife in an electoral event of the PSOE of the Canary Islands, said that housing policy involves increasing the supply through the construction of protected housing, with the aim of making it at least 20% of the total housing stock.

"When the right talks about housing, it talks about land to speculate and a luxury good, we want to turn it into a constitutional right and a basic necessity," said the leader of the PSOE.

According to government sources, the guarantees of 20% of mortgages for those under 35 years of age are limited to individual incomes of up to 37,800 euros per year or double if the purchasers of the house are two.

In the case of families with dependent children, there will be no age limit, but the same income limits will apply, although there will be improvement factors depending on the number of children and it will be increased in the case of single-parent families.

"We are going to put all the resources at the service of housing, which is a national cause" due to the difficulties in accessing this right due to the increase in the purchase and rental price, said the president in a rally attended by some 800 people, according to PSOE sources, the maximum allowed in the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA) venue.

The socialist leader recalled that the state plan promotes the construction of 100,000 protected homes, which will allow an increase of 50% in the next five years, and argued that the increase in supply through protected housing will help contain real estate market prices and the emancipation of young people.

The president recalled that the Ministry of Defense will transfer land for the construction of 20,000 protected homes, of which 300 will be on the island of Tenerife, he announced.

The land that will be transferred to the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda is located in the Ingenieros, Ofra Vistabella and La Cuesta barracks, in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, the PSOE later reported.

Sánchez said that the Government's policies demonstrate that from social democracy it is compatible to combine social orientation with economic growth and was understanding that the right is "furious" and resorts to insult, because their alternative is "the cuts and precariousness" that they practiced since 2012.

"They said that we were going to have a hot autumn due to social discontent and Spain is the country in Europe with the greatest social peace," said Sánchez.

They also said that the increase in the minimum wage or the equalization of pensions to the CPI was going to reduce employment or endanger public pensions and the opposite has happened, he said.

"We are demonstrating that socialists govern the economy and social policies better, we are knocking down the paradigms of neoliberalism and that is why they are furious," he said.

For Sánchez, "the national and nationalist right" is installed in "insult and disqualification" and in opposing all the measures that benefit the social majority because "they defend the interest of an elite".

"Being a socialist is doing and not "undoing, cutting, making precarious and inflicting social damage", as the right does, he said.

It is also "dignifying" the lives of people with pension policies, minimum wage, minimum vital income and with a labor reform that ensures that one in two contracts are indefinite, he said.

The president was pleased that the World Health Organization (WHO) has decreed the end of the emergency due to covid-19 and stressed that lessons must be learned from what happened, such as the importance of supporting public health, science and Europe.