The end of the parliamentary course due to the summer break meant in July the suspension of the processing of the laws that are followed in Congress and the Senate. Some of these rules were just a step away, a simple vote or two, from being finally approved. Among others, projects as announced as the one that will put an end to the so-called “benefits from heaven” of energy companies, the law that creates the National Fund for the Sustainability of the Electric System or the one that puts an end to the requested vote are in this situation. .
Laws to reduce the electricity bill have been frozen in Congress for months while prices skyrocket
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The closing of the Cortes Generales in summer is determined by the Constitution, which in its article 71 indicates that during the year there will be “two ordinary periods of sessions”: from September to December, and from February to June. Plenary sessions can be convened in an extraordinary way, as happened in July to hold the debate on the state of the nation and approve some royal decree laws within the term.
That same reason, to validate decrees, will force the deputies to advance the end of their vacations for an extraordinary plenary session that will take place next Wednesday, August 25. The Government has to see the endorsement of the royal decree laws approved in the last Council of Ministers of the course. Among them is, for example, the one that includes energy saving measures, but also the one that addresses the new contribution system for self-employed workers and that of urgent measures in the matter of forest fires.
In that same session, it will be possible to definitively approve the Sexual Freedom Guarantee Law, which was not ratified by the Senate last July, unexpectedly, due to the last-minute approval of a controversial amendment that modified the preamble. The one known as the ‘only yes is yes’ law had been one of those that had been left on the verge of coming into force after a very long process, first within the coalition government and then in the Cortes, where it has been more than a year. The last delay, of just a few weeks, was used by the PP to make fun of the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, but in the end the problem was revealed since the rule expressly includes measures against the so-called “chemical submission”.
The plenary session on Wednesday will also definitively approve the Science Law and the amendment to the Bankruptcy Law.
One step behind is the Law for the Creation of a Compensation Fund for Asbestos Victims, proposed by the Basque Parliament and whose parliamentary process began at the same time as the legislature, at the end of 2019, but which has run into disagreement politician ever since. The negotiation picked up speed in the first half of this 2022 and the proposal passed this July from Congress to the Senate, so it enters the final stretch for final approval.
The modification of the requested vote (the system by which Spaniards residing abroad can vote) is also experiencing its last parliamentary measures. More than a decade after it was introduced into Spanish law and caused continuous complaints from those affected for hindering the exercise of the right, the formula will be changed just in time for the 2023 elections. proposal in Congress invites us to think that its passage through the Senate will be brief and uncomplicated.
In the same situation is the proposal of the PSOE to toughen the judicial treatment of certain traffic accidents, so that in case of serious injuries or death due to serious negligence, it is always settled in the criminal jurisdiction and the judge cannot refer him to the civil. The Senate received the text of the reform in June, and will have to deal with it when it returns in September.
The discounts on the electricity bill, for the fall
Congress also has yet to conclude the processing of two of the most anticipated bills because they will directly affect the price of energy, which will affect the electricity bill. Or so the government hopes. The moment could not be more opportune, with the wholesale price very high despite the relative success of the Iberian exceptionality and with the forecast that the autumn, and especially the winter, could skyrocket costs if Russia cuts the gas supply, as has threatened.
It is about the law that creates the National Fund for the Sustainability of the Electricity System and the Law that Acts on the Remuneration of the CO2 Not Emitted from the Electricity Market, whose objective is to limit the so-called “benefits from heaven” that the companies achieve. companies that generate hydroelectric or nuclear energy.
This last rule, which is among those agreed by the PSOE and United We Can in the coalition government agreement, entered Congress almost a year ago, at the end of August 2021. The deputies voted for its processing by the urgent route, in addition to providing the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge Commission with “full legislative competence”. In other words, it will go directly from the commission to the Senate, skipping the debate and voting in plenary session.
The amendment period closed relatively soon, in October. And, since then, the commission has been working on the so-called presentation report, which includes both the original proposal and the amendments of each group. This was closed on June 21, so there is only one vote left in the commission to be able to send it to the Senate. But, although the commission has met and has put laws to the vote (such as the popular legislative initiative for the protection of the Mar Menor), benefits from heaven have not entered the agenda.
Thus, it will not be until September when two rules of presumed social impact are addressed and whose freezing some parliamentary groups already lamented last spring. Then it will go to the Upper House and, depending on the amendments accepted by the senators, it will have to return to Congress, so it is very likely that the rule will take effect until next fall.
It is a situation similar to that of the law that contemplates gradually removing from the electricity rate (in five years) the cost of the premiums for the oldest renewables (7,000 million euros) and charging it to all energy marketers. It is what is known as the National Fund for the Sustainability of the Electric System.
This government project reached Congress in May 2021. Its processing was also described as “urgent” and was entrusted exclusively to the same Commission for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge. The term of amendments closed in September of that year, but the report of the paper has not been ready until this month of June. As in the previous case, its approval in the Lower House will not arrive until September, so its final implementation will hardly take place before the fall, after the relevant passage through the Senate. If there are no more delays.
But not only these two laws that will affect the energy sector are on the verge of approval. Others, such as the Law of Democratic Memory or the Law of Creation and Growth of Companies, are also undergoing their last steps in the Senate, where they arrived in the weeks prior to the summer break.
Accelerated the banking and energy tax, and the housing law
Work on these standards will be resumed after the holidays. But the parliamentary groups will have to work on two regulatory packages that, according to what the government has said, should be ready as soon as possible: special taxes on excessive profits from banks and energy companies and the Law for the Right to Housing.
The first two have just started their journey. The PSOE and United We Can parliamentary groups registered a bill at the end of July. The chosen modality, an initiative of the deputies, is much faster in terms of the bills that the Government can approve, since these must go through a series of prerequisites, such as the opinions of the advisory bodies or public consultation , from which propositions are exempt.
However, there are a series of steps to follow. But the two parties of the coalition government can step on the accelerator in Congress, where they control the Table, and, with the support of parliamentary allies in the Board of Spokespersons, print the maximum possible speed: urgent processing, in committee and in reading unique, that is, without going through the Senate. In this way, the deadlines would be shortened.
Something that, as far as is known, will not happen with the housing law, a regulation that began its journey within the coalition government in 2020 and that finally reached Congress in February of this year. As an example of the delay that the norm accumulates, when the PSOE and United We Can began to write the norm, Pablo Iglesias was vice president, José Luis Ábalos the minister of the branch and Ione Belarra, secretary of State. The first two are out of politics and Belarra is today Minister and General Secretary of Podemos.
Be that as it may, on April 27 the amendment process was closed after less than ten extensions of the term, which is not much according to what has happened in this legislature in which some regulations accumulate dozens of extensions that suppose, in fact, a parliamentary block to its approval.
The work of the Law for the Right to Housing, which has been classified as urgent (that is, that the terms will have a duration of half of those established on an ordinary basis), fall on the Committee on Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. The Congress bulletin has already published the amendments to the articles and the deputies will have to close the report of the presentation at the return of summer. Then it will be the Plenary that faces the last debate before its referral to the Senate and, where appropriate, the return to the Lower House for final ratification.
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