The Ministry of Natural Resources reformed planning permission and land use approval to reduce the institutional transaction costs of enterprises

The phenomenon of "the date of approval is the time of expiration" of some plans is about to become a thing of the past.

On September 20, the Information Office of the State Council held a press conference, and Zhao Long, vice minister of natural resources, introduced the reform of planning permits, land use approvals, and land spatial planning review and approval systems. Zhao Long said that the Ministry of Natural Resources has recently concentrated on promoting two reforms in the field of land spatial planning: one is to reform planning permission and land use approval, and promote "multi-trial integration, multi-certificate integration", which is mainly for enterprises and the masses; the second is to reform the land spatial planning review and approval system, which is mainly for local people's governments.

Wang Wei, associate professor of the Central University of Finance and Economics and director of the Department of Urban Management, told the 21st Century Business Herald that the two reforms launched by the Ministry of Natural Resources this time serve the reform of "decentralization and management services" proposed by the central government, the reform of government functional departments and the reform of the land spatial planning system, which is conducive to shortening the approval cycle, improving operational efficiency, and realizing the simplification of administration and decentralization, the combination of decentralization and management, and the optimization of services.

Significantly shorten the time for approval of territorial spatial planning

The construction of the land spatial planning system is moving towards new fields.

Lin Ji, chief planner of the China Urban Development Research Institute, told 21st Century Business Herald that according to the "Several Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Establishing a Land Spatial Planning System and Supervising its Implementation" issued in May this year, the overall framework of land spatial planning is divided into "five levels and three categories and four systems", that is, five levels of national, provincial, municipal, county and town; overall planning, detailed planning and related special planning; and four major systems of preparation and approval system, implementation supervision system, regulation and policy system and technical standard system. The relevant content of this conference belongs to the reform of the preparation and approval system.

At the press conference, Zhao Long said that in the past planning review, the main problems included: first, the power of the matter was not clear, second, there were too many indicators, and third, it was often caught in technical controversy, which finally led to an extension of the review time. To this end, in accordance with the concept of "the central government should control the things that the central government should control well, and at the same time give the local government greater autonomy, and further optimize the spatial layout in combination with local realities", the Ministry of Natural Resources is reforming the land spatial planning review and approval system, and issued the "Notice on Comprehensively Carrying out the Land Spatial Planning Work". According to the principle of approving what is in charge, reform is mainly divided into three aspects.

First, the Ministry of Natural Resources submitted to the State Council for approval to reduce the number of cities submitted to the State Council for approval. The 21st Century Business Herald reporter learned that in the past, there were 108 and 106 cities approved by the State Council for urban master planning and land use overall planning, respectively. After this reform, except for municipalities directly under the Central Government, cities with separate planning status, provincial capitals, and a small number of important node cities in the overall development strategy of the country, and the planning of cities that need special protection of important resources is approved by the State Council, other cities are examined and approved by the provincial government.

Second, the content of the reduction of approval, in accordance with the principle of consistency of rights and responsibilities, the national level is mainly responsible for reviewing the content that the state needs to control, and the content responsible for approval will be mainly retained in four aspects: the target positioning of the plan; the delineation and implementation of the control line such as the red line of ecological protection, permanent basic farmland, and the boundary of urban development, and the natural, historical, and cultural protection system that reflects local characteristics; the scale of construction land, the intensity of development, the total amount of water used, and the intensity, infrastructure, Decomposition and implementation of major control indicators such as public service facilities and public spaces; spatial patterns and adjacent relationships between cities and regions.

Third, the approval time has been greatly shortened, and the review time has been compressed from the past 3 years or even longer to about half a year. In order to effectively improve the scientificity, operability and authority of planning, promote the modernization of the national land spatial governance system and governance capabilities.

Wang Wei said that while retaining the core examination and approval content and strengthening the management and monitoring of planning implementation, the central government will delegate greater autonomy to local governments in planning preparation and approval, and local governments may have more flexible arrangements and layouts in the introduction of major projects, industrial layout and investment attraction.

Lin Ji also suggested that according to the current thinking, in the future, in the application of specific indicators, local governments should be given greater planning autonomy. For example, in industrial and mining cities, after ecological restoration or reclamation of relevant industries and industrial and mining land, whether they can independently replace and increase the construction land indicators in the planning with the consent of the provincial level, and similar powers should be delegated.

A planning official from a western province told the 21st Century Business Herald that at present, the Ministry of Natural Resources is promoting all localities to accelerate the "double evaluation" of the carrying capacity of resources and the environment and the adaptability of land space development, so as to lay a good foundation for the delineation of the "three districts and three lines", which is actually the basic work of land spatial planning. The impact of the reform of the preparation and approval system cannot be seen until the land spatial planning system is officially operated.

Streamline the land use approval process

Another part of the two major reforms of the Ministry of Natural Resources is the issuance of the "Notice on Promoting the Reform of "Multi-trial integration and multi-certificate integration" of planned land on the basis of "multi-planning" to promote relevant reforms.

Yan Qin, head of the Department of Land and Space Use Control of the Ministry of Natural Resources, said that the core of the "multi-trial integration and multi-certificate integration" of planning land is to merge the procedures and documents related to planning permission and land use approval, and simplify and simplify them to improve administrative efficiency and reduce the cost of administrative counterparts, which can be summarized as "3 mergers" and "1 simplification".

The first merger is at the stage of project establishment, which is originally issued by the two departments, has similar functional content, and is for the project approval, filing pre-condition pre-examination opinions, site selection opinions into the construction project land pre-examination and site selection opinions. At the same time, it also stipulates that projects that use construction land that have been approved in accordance with the law for construction will no longer be pre-examined for land use.

The second merger is that after the land use is submitted for approval, the construction land planning permit and the construction land approval letter that were originally issued by the two departments and are highly consistent in content, both reflecting the government's supervision relationship with the administrative counterpart, form a new construction land planning permit. At the same time, the needs of administrative counterparts are also considered, and from the perspective of facilitating administrative counterparts, for the allocation of land, the planning permit for construction land and the allocation decision are handled and issued simultaneously. For the transfer of land, when signing the transfer contract, the planning permit for construction land is issued at the same time.

The third merger is multi-test integration and multi-test integration. Before the institutional reform, the approval of construction land, urban and rural planning permits, planning verification, completion acceptance and real estate registration, these links need to carry out surveying and mapping, and the requirements and standards of different links of surveying and mapping results are inconsistent, the surveying and mapping results cannot be generalized, and the counterpart also needs to submit different surveying and mapping reports to multiple departments many times, which not only increases the cost of administrative counterpart expenditure, but also greatly reduces administrative efficiency. Therefore, this reform requires "multi-measurement and merger, joint surveying and mapping, and sharing of results", with special emphasis on the principle of not repeating the review and requiring construction units or individuals to submit the surveying and mapping results of the same subject matter multiple times.

In fact, this "multi-trial integration and multi-evidence integration" is considered to be the proper meaning of institutional reform. An official of a provincial-level planning department in the north told reporters that after the reform of the party and state institutions, the spatial planning of the main functional areas, land use planning, urban and rural planning and other spatial planning has been integrated into a unified national land spatial planning, realizing "multi-planning and integration", creating conditions for the reform of planning permits and land use approval. However, the actual effect of this reform remains to be seen, and there are some provinces that have planned to merge with the land department first, and the relevant integration process is still in progress.

Zhao Long also said that the reform is expected to achieve two effects: one is to facilitate the people, optimize the business environment, and reduce the institutional transaction costs of enterprises; the other is to reduce the waste of administrative resources, so that relevant departments have more energy to formulate policies and implement supervision.

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