Santa Cruz De Tenerife (EFE) that the mandatory prior appointment “is an intolerable abuse” that makes the citizen defenseless.
In this way, Rafael Yanes has expressed himself at a press conference after delivering the report corresponding to 2022 to the president of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, Gustavo Matos, on an “unusual” date that has been brought forward due to the call for regional elections in May and the consequent cessation of parliamentary activity on April 4.
Rafael Yanes has stressed that he cannot delve into the content of the report out of institutional respect until his appearance in the corresponding commission and, later, before the plenary session of the Chamber, but he has detailed that last year 2,925 complaints were registered, 20 percent less than in 2021.
The area that received the most claims is once again the Dependency, but with a decrease of 36% compared to the previous year, Rafael Yanes pointed out.
Of the 29 management areas with which the Diputación del Común works, the greatest growth in the number of claims is registered in housing, with 64%, which shows “great concern” on the part of citizens that has motivated the institution to collect data to prepare an extraordinary report on this matter.
In this regard, Rafael Yanes has pointed out that in order for the public administration to guarantee the constitutional right to housing, it must have a sufficient public park, but in the 1990s in the Canary Islands some 20,000 houses were sold to their tenants as social measure “and they forgot to build another 20,000.”
The current public park is 16,200 (12,000 from Icavi and 4,200 from Visocan), a figure with which access to housing cannot be guaranteed for a sector of the population, since in the case of the Canary Islands it should be at least 33,000 , and the deputy of the Common has claimed that there is a sufficient number and also that by law it is prohibited to sell public housing.
In this regard, he has added that he does not enter into the debate on whether a limit to the rental price should be set by law, since this corresponds to Parliament, while he has considered that it is difficult to legally reserve the prohibition of the purchase of houses by part of community foreigners, since “we are all members of the EU” and in its territory access to property is guaranteed.
But in addition, the Common deputy has called for reflection on a matter that worries him “in an important way”, for which many citizen complaints have been received and on what he wanted to be “very clear: the intolerable abuse of public administration with a prior appointment, which cannot be obligatory”.
This is because the two ways to access the appointment “are not guaranteed”, since the telephone is deficient and the telematics is not available to everyone.
“The phone often does not answer and when it does, many other times, it is a machine that instead of helping the citizen, what it does is confuse him in the administrative tangle,” the Common deputy has reproached.
Regarding the telematic appointment, he recalled that 64% of the Canary Islands municipalities have centers without internet access and that some 66,000 older people live alone and lack the skills to request an appointment with the administration in this way.
In addition, what cannot happen is that when a person goes to an administration, a security guard prevents them from passing because they do not have an appointment, which Yanes has described as “inadmissible.”
Regarding the latter, he commented that an administration that is characterized by preventing access even though there are unemployed officials inside is Social Security, a treatment that lacks legal coverage, which the deputy of the Common has brought to the attention of the Ombudsman.
Another negative fact in relation to 2022 is the number of public administrations that repeatedly fail to comply with the deadlines established by the Diputación del Común, in such a way that they have had to sign 75 reminders and 149 warnings declaring obstruction of their work.
For the head of the institution, on the contrary, the fact that 67 percent of the files processed have been closed with a resolution favorable to the citizens is positive.
Rafael Yanes has also pointed out that in 2021 a special area was created in relation to the coronavirus in the institution, which was eliminated last year to create another with respect to those affected by the La Palma volcano, and which registered a total of 86 complaints. . EFE