Recently, the Ministry of Justice organized a council to appraise the draft resolution on piloting some specific mechanisms and policies for social housing development.

Reporting to the council, Tong Thi Hanh, Director of the Legal Department under the Ministry of Construction, said the government always pays much attention to housing for people and defines this as a key task in the country’s socioeconomic development. Vietnam needs to promote social housing development to provide products for low-income people and workers in industrial parks.

Implementing policies and laws on social housing development has produced remarkable results, helping meet the housing needs of low-income individuals and beneficiaries of social housing policies.

Despite important results as mentioned above, social housing development faces some shortcomings and limitations, including insufficient financial funds for localities and companies to carry out social housing projects and complicated and time-consuming procedures for selecting investors for construction investment projects. Social housing investment projects must carry out procedures for planning, design, investment preparation and investment implementation.

To tackle these issues, a resolution of the National Assembly needs to be studied and built to allow piloting some specific mechanisms and policies for social housing development to accelerate the investment and construction progress of social housing projects.

Hanh said, the draft resolution includes 12 articles, featuring the establishment of the National Social Housing Development Fund, procedures for assigning investors of social housing projects that do not use public investment capital and trade union financial resources, and procedures to assign investors of housing investment projects for the people's armed forces.

Speaking to the council, Mr. Bui Tien Thanh from the Urban Development Department of the Hanoi Department of Construction, said that this special resolution can be enforced immediately, with clear regulations.

Commenting on each specific provision, he said that in Article 3, a local housing development fund should be established; without these funds, it will be difficult to support investors in developing social housing. In Article 4 on assigning social housing project investors, one agency should be unified and the Department of Construction should be the lead body rather than assign two agencies at the same time because this will help reduce the implementation time.

Concluding the council meeting, Le Thi Hoang Thanh, Deputy Director of the Department of Civil and Economic Law under the Ministry of Justice, acknowledged that the draft resolution presents many outstanding, feasible and implementable solutions. At the same time, she requested the drafting agency to absorb comments from delegates, study, supplement and edit the draft resolution accordingly.

According to the draft, in case a social housing construction investment project has carried out the bidding process, but it has not yet completed investor selection before the effective date of this resolution, it will continue to be implemented in accordance with the bidding law.

In case the commercial or urban housing construction investment project has been approved in principle of handing over the land fund for social housing construction in the project to the State to assign it to another organization but it has not been handed over yet or handed over to the State but not yet selected an investor, then based on the investor's request, the Provincial People's Committee shall assign an investor of commercial or urban housing project to directly invest in social housing construction in the allocated land fund.

If the social housing construction investment project proposed by the investor has been approved in principle before the effective date of this resolution but has not yet selected an investor, the Provincial People's Committee shall approve the investor if it has a written request for project implementation and meets all the conditions as prescribed.

In case the social housing construction investment project proposed by the State agency has been approved in principle before the effective date of this resolution but not yet organized an investor selection event or not yet selected an investor, the project shall be made public and the investor shall be assigned according to this resolution.