The ALEP – Associação do Alojamento Local in Portugal submitted, last Wednesday, a petition with 21,325 signatures, ensuring that the topic will be discussed again in plenary. According to the regulations in force, all petitions that are signed by more than 7,500 citizens are mandatorily discussed in plenary and the scheduling of the discussion has a maximum period of 30 days.

In the petition which “results from the concern of people who work in local accommodation, as well as the related activities that depend on it”, there are six proposals that ALEP hopes will be accepted by the parties.

From the outset, the petitioners have as their “main proposal” the “immediate elimination” of the new extraordinary contribution to local accommodation, saying that this fee will jeopardise the activity of around 70,000 operators and “will lead families to ruin”. ALEP defends that this is “a double taxation, considered abusive and that will make it unfeasible to maintain the business in all areas, leading to the closure, or even bankruptcy, of many operators”.

The petition also argues that “instead of revoking the current opposition system of condominiums, created in 2018 by the Assembly of the Republic”, this should be “improved through the introduction of a mediation or arbitration system, or through the creation of the figure of the AL municipal provider”, so that “AL registrations can only be canceled in situations where there are, in a repeated and proven way, non-compliance with the rules for use of the building, always having the final decision on the closure to be taken by the city council”.

The petitioners are still against the suspension of new registrations of local accommodation and call for the maintenance of “the legal mechanisms that currently exist and that were created for this purpose” defending that “councils are, par excellence, the entities with competences to manage their councils and to articulate housing policies with the development of different economic activities that share the same territory”.

Regarding the creation of a five-year validity period for AL registrations and dates for reassessing the validity of registrations, the petitioners want, “as in what already happens in tourist developments”, the creation “of a system of periodic inspections, which can even be every five years, to existing AL establishments”, to verify “whether or not they continue to comply with the legal and regulatory requirements to which they are obliged”.

ALEP has also been contesting, through protests, the Government's proposals contained in Mais Habitação.