It’s beginning to look as if the current Czech government is taking the difficulties connected with getting anything built in the country seriously. Hospodářské noviny reports that the Minister for Local Development Klára Dostálová is under intense pressure from the prime minister to cut the time it takes to get planning and construction permits. The goal is to slash the average delay of 1,103 days down to just a single year. The first change is likely to be felt in the construction permit process where rulings by construction offices are attacked by various people and groups. At the moment, the various offices that are required to react to such attacks often fail to answer in the required time period, slowing down the entire process.
Dostálová’s proposal to is to give the offices a set period of time (likely to be 60 days) in which they must answer. Failure to respond in that period will mean that the office doesn’t dispute the validity of the construction permit. HN reports that the only way to make more substantial improvements will be to re-write the entire construction law, something that’s expected to take up to four years to complete.
Remarkably, a study by the Prague office of Deloitte, due to come out soon, will demonstrate that the time it takes a developer from the moment it submits documents for an EIA to securing a planning permit is actually shorter than the average time needed to secure a project’s construction permit.
