State poised to take an axe to licencing steps

Scores of projects have been caught up in red tape

“If a survey were conducted it would estimate the cost of sluggish licencing procedures for property development projects at billions of US dollars,” Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh, general director of Refrigeration Electrical Engineering Company.

Enterprises must go through up to 33 procedural steps before starting construction of a project, which could take up to five years, according to a MoC survey of nine major projects in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Tay province.

The MoC wants to cut the steps down from 33 to eight including no longer certifying there is no dispute over land to be used, an agreement with the local authorities about the project site, approval for a 1/500 construction scale, approval for mapping a construction scale to 1/500, an approval for the border and area of the lot involved to be mapped to a scale of 1/500 and the approval for the border to be marked off to 1/500 scale.

Many enterprises agree with the MoC’s move, however, they said there needed a top-to-bottom review of current procedures. Dang Hoang Vu, general director of Thanh Binh Real Estate Company, said property companies were facing administrative, compensation and financial difficulties. He said many projects could not be carried out due to procedural difficulties.

Meanwhile, there are no measures to deal with officials who act contrary to regulations. “I have never seen any officials being dealt with when they contravene regulations. If there are no clear-cut measures to deal with bad local officials, no policies will never be satisfactorily effective,” said Vu.

Nguyen Van Duc, deputy director of Dat Lanh Real Estate Company, said it was lucky for a project to go through 33 procedures in three years as it took some projects more than three years to go through just one step.

He cited the Thanh Thuy Company’s project in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 8 as evidence of prolonged procedures. The process of verifying a 1/500 scale map took three years and five months. Meanwhile, Dat Lanh Company’s project in District 12 took a year and four months to go through the approval process before submitting the project for examination by authorities.

Duc said: “There used to be some strange administrative requirements. When you want to have a residence certificate you have to own a house in the city and if you want to own a house you had to have a residence certificate.

This results in a situation in which no applicants have a house and no one have a residence certificate. It is necessary now to simplify procedures and conditions should be created for enterprises to go through several procedures at the same time. It will not affect the city’s zoning plan, but on the contrary, it will help accelerate the pace of projects.”

Thanh said: “If an enterprise submits a regular dossier to a certain office and if this office prolongs the approval for the project beyond the prescribed time-limit, can the enterprise bypass that approval step?”