The Government of the Canary Islands published in the BOC on December 23, 2014, in the middle of the Christmas holidays, the draft Decree approving the Regulations for Tourist Use Housing in the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands so that all interested parties could present their allegations.
I want to emphasize in this regard that I agree that rules must be established to guarantee the territorial and economic coexistence of the use of homes for tourist purposes -vacation rentals- with regulated tourist activity and avoid any type of unfair competition with the hotel sector and, not only that, but also provide legal and economic security to the entire tourist activity, which as you know is our main current economic engine.
However, I regret having to point out that this Decree prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands is minimal, it is a patch and I miss a regulation based on an idea about the territory.
It obviates the real problem, which is none other than the readaptation of the tourist development model; at the same time, it is denoted that those who have prepared and endorsed it have not learned from the serious damages already caused by the Law on Renovation and Tourist Modernization, incapable of offering a broad vision of the activity, and in this case the Decree forgets an approach to a tourist city where residential use, the creation of new products, complementary activities and the diversification of the offer can be assumed.
This Decree has a simplistic tone that I cannot share, which far from being the product of dialogue and consensus with the various associations for the defense of vacation rentals, continues to leave tourist apartments, Bed&Breakfast (B&B), P2P or homes where there may be the possibility of shared use and homes that do not have authorization from the Community of owners to establish a tourist use, without possibilities of regularization, raising great doubts about the procedure established for prior communication of the start of activity with a responsible declaration.
Based on these factual arguments and others of a legal type and no less important, I have presented a series of allegations to the draft Decree because I consider that there are important violations of legal rights -such as interference with the right to property-- and it does not regulate activities that are already underway in other autonomous communities and in the rest of Europe that are giving excellent results.
Among the proposals that I have raised, I highlight that tourist homes can be transferred to a single user or rented by rooms under the name of Bed & Breakfast.
This modality, the B&B, represents an opportunity to diversify the tourist offer and with its regulation everyone would win: owners, tourists and the administration. In addition, let us bear in mind that one of the strengths of our tourism is precisely the friendly and open character of the Canarian people, so B&B users would have the opportunity to learn, through living with families from the Islands, more enriching experiences and learn about those corners and basic aspects that do not appear in advertising brochures; valuable information that comes from word of mouth.
Likewise, I am concerned about section 2 of article 4, which refers to the operating regime and requires neighborhood authorization to carry out the vacation accommodation activity, so I propose its deletion.
I must warn that this is an article that violates the constitutional principles of regulatory hierarchy and legal certainty (art.9.3 CE) since it not only imposes an obligation not foreseen in a Law of higher rank, the Horizontal Property Law and Civil Code, but is contrary to the provisions of said standard of greater rank and regulatory hierarchy to this Regulation. It also violates Law 1/83 that regulates the Government and the Canarian Public Administration (art. 39).
In addition, it violates the principle of legal certainty contemplated in the Spanish Constitution and other regulations that do not allow establishing limitations on the exercise of a fundamental right such as that of private property, widely consolidated in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and courts of the European Union.
And it is that a community of owners is not legitimized to restrict the use that an owner can make of his private property as long as it does not contravene the provisions of the community statutes or the Laws. What can be done is to establish sanctioning warnings for tourist services in cases where situations of poor coexistence arise.
With respect to the requirement of the habitability certificate of these homes, a situation that many would not be able to obtain, I have proposed the modification of article 12.2 a in which a responsible declaration of occupation of buildings or facilities would be included, or, where appropriate, the habitability certificate or the habitability certificate signed by a competent technician.
In short, the regulation of vacation rentals or vacation homes is an urgency, it is a reality that affects about 53,000 families in the Canary Islands and we cannot allow more limitations to tourist development.
*Astrid Pérez Batista, regional deputy of the Popular Party
