“As long as there is no large stock of public housing for rent, not to buy, but to rent, affordability will continue to be a problem in Spain,” concludes Amparo Pla Carretero, a lawyer specialising in debt and evictions and the former director of the Sociedad Pública de Alquiler. And she concludes her conversation with this newspaper as she began it, because she believes that this is the key, and the problem is, “the lack of political will to tackle it,” she says.
This 60-year-old lawyer was the director general of the Sociedad Pública de Alquiler (SPA), the first successful attempt by a government in Spain to influence the rental market with an agency created for this purpose. José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero presided over the Executive, and during the short seven-year lifespan of this state agency, ministers MarÃa Antonia Trujillo, Carme Chacón and Beatriz Corredor, as well as the minister José Blanco successively held the housing portfolio.
The short lifespan of the Sociedad Pública de Alquiler began in 2005 and ended in 2012, shortly after the formation of Mariano Rajoy’s first government. “At a board meeting of SEPES (the Sociedad Estatal del Suelo), I was informed that the SPA was being wound up. We were about to balance books with an agreement with financial institutions, but they didn’t let us continue. It was sad,” says Pla today, always attentive to Spain’s political debate on housing.
A report by the Court of Auditors put the cost of the initiative at 54.17 million euros in 2019. This is more than double the 20 million with which the agency was set up to try to mediate between owners and tenants, providing collection insurance for the former and maintenance guarantees for the latter, under an intense barrage of criticism from the right.
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