Rossiiskaya Gazeta: "Putin calls on government to eliminate bureucratic barriers"
The prime minister calls on the regions to remove bureaucratic barriers for the construction industry.
Vladimir Putin continues revising the system of state supervision, this time in the construction industry.
During a meeting on improving supervision and streamlining the delivery of government services in the construction industry yesterday, the prime minister noted that the largest number of complaints about supervision come from the construction sector. The main grievance is an excessive number of administrative procedures. Approvals take years in Russia, whereas elsewhere - for example, in the OECD countries - it takes just a few months, Mr Putin said.
"One gets the impression that what builders need today above all is the ability to ‘come to terms' with the authorities, while the construction itself is a secondary matter," he said.
Although housing construction is up 60 million square metres a year, "when all is said and done, this is the result of daily manual control", the prime minister said, adding that so far "a model that would regulate the situation automatically does not exist."
As it turns out, "amending the law is not everything," Vladimir Putin said: as before, all manner of pretexts are found to interfere in construction, for example, the issuance or withholding of permits that are not stipulated under the law and even violate the law. "The most common type of violation happens in the process of construction supervision, government inspection by experts and the issue of permits," the prime minister said, before enumerating the problems. Granting land for construction and plugging into infrastructure is one such problem area.
In some regions, the oversight system operates efficiently. But they are few and far between. They include the Rostov Region, the Perm Territory, and the Republic of Tatarstan. But there are far more regions that have done nothing or next to nothing to eliminate unlawful administrative barriers. These include Moscow, the Primorye Territory, the Saratov Region and Mordovia. "Such a situation cannot be tolerated," Mr Putin said. He promised to take up the issues with the Prosecutor's Office shortly (seeking a review of regional authorities' compliance with the law) while the governors would have to report back on the state of affairs in the construction industry.
Moving to the federal level, Mr Putin said that the system for reviewing project documentation was in need of reform. "Experts must be truly responsible for the quality of their work," the prime minister said, adding that "it is necessary to reduce the number of instances where projects are assessed by experts and the cost is estimated at the federal level."
Vladimir Putin also stressed the need to simplify the form of urban development documentation and accelerate the transition to web-based government services: if all the documents are submitted through the Internet and the customers can track the progress of the approval process, that would limit the opportunities for abuses and red tape.
"Housing is our key priority," Mr Putin said. "But the same problems, sometimes even more serious problems, exist in the construction of new industrial projects... Endless delays, the tendency of dishonest officials to ‘squeeze out' the investor nullify in many ways our efforts to modernise the country's economy."
"The heads of the regions of the Russian Federation must keep key investment projects in their regions under personal review, and the government will help them," the prime minister promised.
For example, the government will give them greater powers to redistribute land for investment projects. In Mr Putin's opinion, it is necessary to provide territory for comprehensive industrial development with simplified permit-issue procedure and access to infrastructure. For example, such zones already exist in St Petersburg, the Kaluga Region and the Republic of Tatarstan.
Kira Latukhina
