Urgent Vagueness: The tourism decree

The regional government has decreed. Urgent measures have been required. A decree has, therefore, been necessary. It is tourism which demands the urgency. There is no time for the normal parliamentary process that accompanies the passing of a law. The decree will be rubber-stamped by parliament without amendment.

Thirty months after the 2012 tourism law was approved, the government has issued its decree. So urgent have been the measures that it has taken them over two and a half years to get round to them, and now that it has, what are we all supposed to make of these measures because, not untypically for tourism minister Jaime Martínez, they come with any amount of lack of clarity?

The urgency, one fancies, has to do with the proximity of the next elections. This is not a decree to grab votes. It is one of goalpost-shifting in order to, for example, allow the government to wallow in the glow of the publicity surrounding the Rafa Nadal tennis centre. Regulations regarding the concession of licences have had to be amended, and so that is what the government - urgently - has done, and in the process has taken away Manacor town hall's rights in the matter.

De-regulation might be thought to be a good thing, and in the case of the Nadal centre it may well be, but it has plainly suited the government to act in this specific instance while it has not in other instances. This tourism de-regulation has also been applied, bizarrely, to the land on which Son Espases hospital has been built. The decree has declared that this land is in "the general interest" (the Supreme Court had itself decreed eighteen months ago that it had to be), but what this has to do with tourism is frankly anyone's guess.

Here are measures introduced to attempt to ensure that if (when) the Partido Popular loses the next election, they cannot be revoked. It is this, I would suggest, which is the true urgency of the decree. But there are other aspects of tourism which demand equal urgency, and which are covered by the decree, that do not get such regulatory clarity. Take holiday lets, for instance. On the one hand we are led to believe that a specific decree related to them has been postponed. On the other we are told that there will be no regulation. To add to the opaqueness, island councils are to "analyse" incidences of holiday lets. What is the point of analysing something if there is to be no regulation?

Because Martínez deals in obfuscation, it is just possible to believe that these analyses may eventually lead to some modification of current legislation to do with private holiday accommodation, but one can only say "may". If a specific decree has indeed been postponed, this may mean postponement until the elections. Is the government, therefore, not wanting to adopt "urgent measures" in respect of holiday lets that might contradict its own stance on the subject and the wishes of the hoteliers? It's impossible to say for sure.

Further analyses - and the decree actually refers to "each tourist area", which implies each resort rather than whole islands - are to be conducted into the "incidence" of all-inclusive. The decree is vague to the point of total silence as to what these are intended to do. But again, as with holiday lets, it is just conceivable that these analyses could lead to further measures to limit the incidence. In the absence of any clarity, however, one cannot be certain.

A headlining aspect of the decree - in "The Bulletin" at any rate - was the provision of incentives for businesses to stay open all year. It might be advantageous for the government to imply that businesses will be open all year, but this is not what is in the decree. The government does consider "seasonality" to be an urgent matter, but it has been urgent pretty much since the dawn of Mallorca's mass tourism. For the government to now try and trumpet some decisiveness it is taking on this urgent matter is eyewash, especially as incentives for businesses which open for a minimum of eight months (not all year, note) were in the original 2012 law. The wording in the decree is unaltered.

What has been added is provision for incentives to tourist businesses in tourist zones declared as being "mature" (as in having stock and infrastructure which is outdated or obsolete). So far only Playa de Palma has been defined as a mature zone (Magalluf, Santa Ponsa and Peguera are due to be). The decree has widened the scope for incentives to include pretty much any business working in the tourism sector, but as for seasonality, it has reduced the minimum opening period - it is "from six months". That is most certainly not all year.