Malaga architects slam 'unacceptable' two-year delay for planning permits

The professional association of architects in Malaga has issued a formal demand to the Andalusian regional government (Junta) to address a deepening crisis in planning applications.

Delays for expert review reports in the province have now reached up to two years, a timeline the association describes as "clearly unacceptable".

"While the issue is not new, the situation has worsened significantly in recent years. The bottleneck is primarily affecting renovation and new-build projects located within historic centres or near listed buildings, where reports from the regional ministry of culture are a legal requirement..

The association regrets that the regional government "has not implemented measures to improve the processing times of planning applications and has also ignored the requests for meetings made by this institution to address this problem, which has been causing serious damage to the professional activity of architects for far too long, as they can only express their despair at not being able to work properly".

According to the architects, this is due to "undersized staffing to handle the number of existing cases, coupled with high turnover of technical staff and the absence of a unified and shared set of criteria among all architects", which leads to "an incomprehensible disparity in interpretations of the applicable legislation".

The organisation considers it "especially striking" that this problem does not occur equally in other provinces in Andalucía and is affecting Malaga "in a worrying way, given that it is the economic engine of our region".

The association's dean, Susana Gómez de Lara, explained that, to reach these conclusions, they analysed the processing status of a number of projects from both the provincial capital and other towns in the province, such as Antequera and Nerja. "Each one had its own specific circumstances, but in all of them we have detected the same situation: that cases take two years from the architect's submission with the department of culture to reach the desk of the technician assigned to review them," stated the dean. She also pointed out that these ministry officials "are only now beginning to review the projects that were submitted in March 2024".

For Gómez de Lara, this delay makes the developer "doubt the architect's expertise" and could even lead to "the project being scrapped, because a lot can happen in two years". The dean stressed that this public complaint is "born of desperation because they said that with Andalucía's new urban planning law, the Lista, everything was going to be faster, but it's proving very difficult".

Faced with this situation, representatives from the architecture profession in the province are calling for "the urgent implementation of measures to reverse the current collapse in this administration and to ensure a more agile and efficient processing of planning applications". They also expressed their willingness "to engage in dialogue and institutional collaboration to improve its functioning and respond to the needs of professionals and the public at large".