SPAIN is moving to more than double taxes on tourist flats as it seeks to bring a deepening housing crisis under control.
The government is set to vote in the coming weeks on legislation to increase VAT on holiday rentals from 10% to 21%, the Council of Ministers announced on Monday.
The measure, which forms part of a broader housing package, aims to help lower prices in Spain’s property market as residents across the country warn that soaring rents and purchase costs are forcing them out of their own neighbourhoods.
Campaigners have partly blamed the crisis on the unchecked spread of holiday rentals, with thousands of protesters taking to the streets across Spain last weekend as they chanted against ‘guiris’ – the Spanish slang term for Northern Europeans.
READ MORE: Thousands protest across Spain over soaring rents amid housing crisis
Elma Saiz, Spain’s Minister for Social Security, Inclusion and Migration, described the proposed legislation as ‘very ambitious.’
The minister, from the ruling Socialist party (PSOE), added the government was still negotiating its final content with MPs.
The package is also expected to include incentives for landlords who reduce rents, alongside measures to extend tenancy agreements and speed up housing construction.
The move comes as calls grow across Spain to clamp down on overtourism and bring spiralling property prices under control.
Thousands of fed-up residents last weekend marched through the streets of Malaga, Cadiz, Tenerife, La Palma and Caceres as they claimed that even full-time workers could no longer afford to rent homes in the cities where they were born.
In Malaga, protest organisers said 25,000 participants attended, though government officials put the figure at around 4,500.
In Caceres, demonstrators claimed many tenants were spending up to 60% of their salaries on rent, blaming estate agencies and investors for pushing prices beyond local incomes.
Campaigners said housing had become ‘a business instead of a right’ and demanded tighter regulation of rents, limits on tourist accommodation and greater protection for tenants.
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Until Spain addresses the problem of squatters and people who rent the refuse to pay, making landlords under the law liable to keep and pay for utilities, they will never resolve the housing crisis. May the renters responsible for the utilities and the minute they go in arrears on rent, removing them should be made easier. The law is at fault here..