Becoming a de facto couple or giving health consent: the Government speeds up 170 procedures

BarcelonaIf a couple wants to sign the papers to become a de facto couple, they will now only need to fill out one form instead of two as before. And to give sanitary consent before a surgical intervention, it can now be done by signing the corresponding document through the La Meva Salut app. "The patient reads it calmly and accepts or rejects it. [...] It is an improvement for patients and professionals," defends the anesthesiologist from Vall d'Hebron Sandra Galve. These are just two examples of the procedures that the Government has simplified or is in the process of simplifying. So far, it has streamlined up to 170 and plans to add 40 more that should be ready by 2028. The objective is to save citizens time in their daily dealings with the Generalitat, which the Government estimates to be around 2,000.

"We want to make people's lives simpler. It's a kind of fight against bureaucracy," defends the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, in statements to the media. The executive is focusing on the procedures most used by citizens in the areas of health, education, agriculture, or justice. "There is an excess of bureaucracy and complicated language that generates errors from citizens and the administration," he admits. All this is part of the Catgirem program, which the executive launched a year ago, when it started by shortening the time for eight procedures that had a long waiting time, such as aid to buy an electric carshortening the time for eight procedures that had a long waiting time, such as aid to buy an electric car.

For example, in the agricultural sector, one of the procedures that the Government has simplified is the application for authorization to transform forest land into agricultural uses, for which a map has been incorporated to facilitate the location of the areas. It has also changed the registry for buying or selling agricultural machinery: PDF forms have been eliminated and replaced with HTML forms. In fact, this is a change that the Government has made in several procedures.

An app for teachers

In the management of the educational world, changes have also been incorporated. Since April, teachers can manage substitutions through an application where they can accept or reject positions from their mobile phone. Once they receive an alert of a vacancy to fill in the form of a substitution, they have half an hour to accept it from the same application. In this way, the executive ensures that the duration of vacant positions has been reduced, as well as the bureaucracy that the centers had to manage.

In the linguistic field, the Government has changed the forms to register to obtain the A1 Catalan certificate. They are now multilingual to facilitate the registration of newcomers. In addition, the way of obtaining and keeping Catalan certificates has been changed: they are now published in the Citizen's Private Area and can be downloaded at any time. So far, more than 8,000 have been downloaded.

Permits for maritime zones

This simplification is also aimed at companies. For example, the form for requesting the installation of a beach bar on the beach or any activity in a maritime area, such as filming, local festivals, or sports and cultural activities, has been simplified. More than 1,000 authorizations are processed each year, and, according to the executive, 1,200 have already been processed since the beginning of the year. With the changes implemented, consultations with the Generalitat have been reduced by 55%.

Furthermore, the request for permits to open a restaurant or a gas station on a road has also been facilitated. According to the Government, up to 3,500 permits are processed each year for activities on roads. To make this request, the company in question will now be told in detail the documents it needs to send depending on the permit it wishes to request, and the number of response templates from the Generalitat has also been reduced. These changes are not yet in effect, but they should be ready by the end of this year.