New Building Regulations Act comes into force

Shortly before the turn of the year 2017/2018, the new Balearic Islands Planning and Land Use Law (Ley Urbanistica de las Islas Baleares, “LUIB”) was published in the Official Gazette (“BOIB”). The most important innovations are presented here.

The regulations, which came into force on January 1, 2018, replace a body of legislation from the previous government. With the new law, the amnesty for illegal construction in the countryside, which the current government in the Balearic Islands had already put on ice two years ago with a provisional regulation, will be definitively put on hold. The owner of a building project is threatened with sometimes draconian fines in the event of building offences under the new building code. In extreme cases, fines of up to 300 percent of the value of an illegal construction project can be imposed on unauthorized construction projects in rural areas. Fines can also amount to up to 100 percent of the value of an illegal construction project on building land.

Since in the past many owners have sat out demolition orders for years, from 2018 there will be fines for the delay of demolition orders. The law stipulates monthly penalties of ten percent of the value of the building project as a fine if demolition is demonstrably delayed. For example, if the construction project has a fixed value of €50,000, the authorities can impose monthly fines of €5,000. In addition, the new regulations grant the responsible building authorities of the municipalities and the Island Council a period of 15 years for future cases in order to allow illegal development to be demolished.
Civil servants and public persons can also be held accountable for the case, if they allow proceedings to become statute-barred or fines not to be enforced. Here, too, there are corresponding fines according to the value of the building project.

Probably the most important innovation of the Building Code, however, concerns the statute of limitations for building offences in agricultural land (does not apply to building land). According to the new legal situation, building offences in rural areas are no longer statute-barred after 8 years as was previously the case, and the authorities can order the demolition of the illegal property at any time, even after 8 years have elapsed. This means that a sword of Damocles hangs over every type of illegal construction in agricultural land that was started on or after 1 January 2018. The authorities here use the corresponding chronologically ordered aerial photographs as evidence.
Up to now, as mentioned above, building infringements in agricultural land have been time-barred within 8 years of the end of the building project, unless the responsible building authorities took action, i.e. did not send the owner either a fine notice or a demolition order.  A statute of limitations for construction offences in agricultural land was only excluded in nature reserves (in landscape protection areas such as the “ANEI zone”), now construction offences are no longer statute-barred even in “normal” Argraland (“suelo rustico comun”).

Although the owner can still have his property, which was built without a municipal building permit, entered in the land registry with a so-called age certificate (“certificado de antigüedad”) from an architect, which confirms that the property has been in existence for more than 8 years. However, in such a case the land registrar will note that the property was built without a building permit and that the development does not comply with the applicable building laws (“fuera de ordenacion”). In summary, any building in agricultural land constructed without a building permit since the beginning of the year can no longer be time-barred under the new law and the authorities have the possibility to initiate proceedings for building offences at any time. Should it become apparent in the course of this official procedure that the building project cannot be legalised, the construction work carried out without a municipal building licence can de facto never be legalised and must be demolished.