Lisbon City Council says it has no power to revoke local accommodation licenses

The Lisbon City Council does not have the right to revoke the licenses of local accommodation businesses (ALs) that have not provided evidence of ongoing activity, the mayor’s president said on Wednesday, repeating his criticism of the Mais Habitação program.

“At the moment, the city council cannot and does not have the opportunity […] cancel all these licenses,” said Carlos Moedas (PSD) at an open meeting of the municipal executive in response to questions from Bloc de Esquerda (BE) Councilor Beatriz Gómez Díaz about the abolition of AL, which did not undergo an audit of activities and monitoring to ensure that the affected facilities were transferred for residential use.

As part of the government’s national Mais Habitação program (PS), new legislation that came into force in September gave AL registrants two months to prove they were continuing to operate.

According to official data, there are 19,917 AL registrations in Lisbon, of which 11,447 provide proof of activity registration, meaning that more than 8,200 will have to be canceled as the deadline for doing so has passed.

According to the mayor of Lisbon, the result of AL owners’ obligation to provide evidence of continued operations “shows how in Portugal governments often take public policy measures without examining the data.”

“Essentially we had the More Housing package, which set the rules according to data, which in the end is not true. In Lisbon, there were supposedly 20 thousand local housing units in operation, and now we know that half of them, so public policy should have been made based on reality, but this is not the case,” the mayor criticized.

Carlos Moedas believed that implementing measures without supporting data “shows a lack of detail and analysis”, resulting in “poorly designed” public policies.

Urbanism councilor Joana Almeida (independent elected by the Novos Tempos coalition PSD/CDS-PP/MPT/PPM/Aliança) highlighted the “chaos caused by the government’s decision” to set a deadline for those with active local placements to submit evidence.

Joana Almeida confirmed that “11 thousand owners” in AL have provided proof of continuation of activity, documents that “the Lisbon City Council with its team of three people in this entire local area will have to confirm.”

“In a hurry to resolve this issue, the Government decided that those AL owners who have been in operation for up to 120 days do not need to provide this proof, in other words, at the moment we have nine thousand AL owners. What we don’t know is fictitious these are licenses or phantom ones,” he explained.

The person in charge of urbanism recalled that a report on the characteristics and monitoring of local housing in Lisbon, dated December 2022 and published in February, indicated that two out of every three ALs in the city correspond to “ghost licenses”.

“We don’t have any information at this time about who the local homeowners are who are maintaining homes for up to 120 days,” he said, saying the council was “determining how to resolve the chaos.”

Joana Almeida stressed that “it was chaos, although it could have been an opportunity” to clarify how many ALs had already converted to residential use, noting that the council was left “without the possibility of knowing the reality that is actually happening on the territory, because many of these AL licenses are already leased.”

A councilor said that following the approval of the Community Housing Bylaw, the council is preparing to discuss a proposed amendment to the Community Housing Bylaw (RMAL).

Among the changes made in the new AL law are a tax exemption for owners who rent their homes from local housing until the end of 2024, an extraordinary activity contribution and a suspension of registration of new apartments outside the low tier. -density of territories.