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Government to bring in bill reducing administrative barriers in housing construction

MOSCOW, December 06. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has issued instructions to submit to the State Duma lower house of parliament a bill on reducing administrative barriers in city building, the Russian government’s website reports.

The government says that the “bill is aimed at creating the conditions to boost entrepreneurial activity in the construction sphere, acceleration of the work and increasing the housing and other construction volumes.”

The document was drafted by the Regional Development Ministry pursuant to the ‘May decree’ of the Russian president “On measures on the provision of affordable and comfortable housing and improving the quality of housing and public utilities services” and a roadmap for the improvement of the investment climate in the construction sphere.

The president’s decree set the tasks to work out a comprehensive list of the federally set administrative procedures in the housing construction sphere, as well as the order of coordination of additional procedures, set by the subjects, organizations of the housing and public utilities sector, power grid and natural gas supply organisations; to prepare proposals on amending the law for setting a uniform procedure for the interaction of the housing construction organisations.

Thus, it is proposed to add to Article 2 of the Town-Planning Code the principle of uniform standards to the order of interaction of town-planning relations’ parties.

According to the bill, Article 6 of the Town-Planning Code should be supplemented by the provisions on vesting in the Russian government the powers to approve a comprehensive list of decisions, taken by the federal and regional bodies of authority, organisations that exploit utility networks and the organisations, authorized to conduct expert examination of construction documentation.

It is proposed to vest the government with the powers to approve the list of actions taken by the specified bodies and persons for the purpose of architectural and building design work, construction and reconstruction of capital facilities.

The document also provides for banning the above bodies from taking additional decisions and actions that are not specified in the lists.

“The adoption of the bill and approval of the list will promote both the creation of comfortable conditions for construction in Russia's subjects and the improvement of efficiency of the local self-government bodies of municipalities in the settlement of the local questions by them,” according to the government website. “The regulation proposed in the bill will make it possible to considerably reduce the number of taken decisions, as well as the time and costs of all the procedures.