VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Prime Minister Putin's introductory remarks:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,
Today's meeting is devoted to housing construction. We can now analyse the statistics from 2009. On the whole, the numbers are not bad.
The work to provide housing to demographics to which the government has special commitments is being carried out entirely on schedule. This includes service members employed at the Ministry of Defence. As we promised, we will settle the issue of providing service members with permanent housing in the near future.
The work on providing housing to veterans of the Great Patriotic War has gathered pace as well. We have made serious progress in the programme to relocate people out of housing that is beyond repair. A total of 130,000 families, 130,000 people, will receive new housing; legal formalities are underway.
I would like to emphasise that we must meet all our commitments to provide people with housing.
Now, a few words about the situation in the construction industry in general. During the past year of recession our task was to avoid a significant decline in the amount of new housing being completed so that construction projects already under way would not be halted.
We set a goal for ourselves of commissioning 52 million square metres of housing. In fact we did even better, commissioning almost 60 million square metres of housing. To be exact, 59.8 million square metres.
The main thing is to keep up and gradually increase construction. Most importantly, construction projects under way must be finished and new projects launched.
At the end of the day, increasing construction is the only sure way to meet people's housing demands. It is important to provide construction companies with the widest range of sites connected to all necessary infrastructure, including roads. We are relying on the Housing Construction Fund to address this issue.
We must also focus on the construction of low-cost, comfortable, energy-efficient and eco-friendly housing, including low-rise housing.
We have talked a lot about the fact that one of the serious obstacles to the introduction of new construction technologies, which would make housing cost-effective, is obsolete building codes, many of which were set in the 1970s or even in the 1960s.
To get things going, a new technical regulation for building safety was adopted in December 2009 and will take effect in July. This is why we need to create all the necessary conditions for its comprehensive implementation as soon as possible.
In addition, the Ministry of Regional Development and the Federal Agency for Technical Regulation must immediately begin working to update building codes and regulations, without waiting for the official deadline. It must be done now. We must actively start this work.
There is another important issue we must discuss today. We have said many times this year that we will allocate another 250 billion roubles to revitalise the mortgage market. These additional funds will be allotted to reduce the mortgage interest rate.
I would like to stress that this is our objective. Our objective is not just to allot funds, but actually reduce mortgage interest rates. We haven't yet allocated all the necessary funds. Only 40 billion roubles of the planned 250 billion roubles have been allotted.
So today we will discuss the sources and amounts of funding as well as other instruments (and not just financial instruments) that will allow us to lower interest rates.
We must create favourable conditions to make the work in this area beneficial for commercial banks. They must realise this and not delay this work. Even more so because the Central Bank of Russia has done everything in its power by cutting refinancing rates considerably. If we allocate 250 billion roubles to the mortgage market, I do not see any reasons for keeping the mortgage interest rate at 14% in commercial financial agencies.
This is what we will discuss in detail today.
