The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the new España Crece Fund will mobilize 23,000 million euros per year, between public and private funds, to “invigorate the housing supply” and “make definitive progress in closing the housing deficit”, which will allow the construction of 15,000 additional homes per year.
“The fund will extend the red carpet to the private investor, not to speculate with a constitutional right, but to build a home for the majority of those citizens who today have a difficulty, if not an impossibility, of being able to access housing,” stated the head of the Executive.
He did so during the presentation of the sovereign fund, which will be managed by the Official Credit Institute (ICO), and which is expected to be operational in the second quarter of this year. It will be endowed with 13.3 billion euros, coming from loans from the EU Recovery Plan. Unlike the Next Generation funds, which expire this year, España Crece will be permanent and will not be subject to a specific execution period, as is the case with its predecessor, which ends in August of this year.
Sánchez has highlighted that the name of the fund will force the opposition “to pronounce, even if only under their breath, what they have been trying to deny for years. And that Spain is growing, it is evidence,” he insisted.
The objective is for 2,000 million of the capital injection to be allocated to housing, which would allow ICO to leverage 14,000 million for this policy, while the rest (9,000 million) will come from private investment that the public bank is able to attract, sources from the Ministry of Economy have detailed.
The fund, says Sánchez, meets three fundamental economic policy objectives in the midst of global and European uncertainty: strengthening productivity, contributing to the development of the capital market and preserving Social Europe. “Spain needs a fund that is committed to the future of the European Union as we are doing in many other areas. We know that Europe is a winning bet for our country. Therefore, also from this part of Europe we have to contribute to its growth and improvement,” he said.
It will mobilize up to 120,000 euros
The Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, has highlighted that the new fund is a “powerful tool” with which the Executive seeks to provide companies with support in innovative investment projects, which eliminates obstacles and guarantees their growth capacity throughout the life cycle. Its objective is to “strengthen the virtuous circle” unleashed with European funds and to “generate the conditions for our companies to grow, innovate, and create employment accompanied by higher salaries and an attraction of talent that results in greater well-being for citizens.”
“It is a transformative project with a vocation for the future that only tries to continue strengthening the path that we have been building in recent years of modernizing our economy,” said Body, who highlighted the good economic moment of the country, despite the fact that there are important challenges ahead, such as reducing inequality or productivity gaps with our partners.
The objective is to mobilize up to 120 billion euros of investment in collaboration with the private sector and in nine key sectors: housing, energy, digitalization, AI, reindustrialization, circular economy, infrastructure, water and sanitation or security. This will be done with long-term financing projects, credits from the ICO or direct financing, filling those “gaps” where the market does not reach.
The Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, has celebrated that the fund highlights the “incontestable reality” that Spain is going through a good economic moment and that “economic growth” has to be mobilized to respond to the crisis in access to housing. España Crece is, he said, about seeking to redistribute that wealth to guarantee the right to housing through a public housing stock, an area in which our country is lagging behind compared to the rest of its European partners. “We have laid the foundations for good work, which has to do with more investment and also public-private collaboration that focuses this debate on housing policies,” he assured.
Source: www.eldiario.es
