The VCCI document offers suggestions to the draft law on urban and rural area planning. Noting that large businesses are willing to influence the process of law compilation to obtain results beneficial to them, VCCI said the ban on direct sponsorship of planning cannot solve the problem, or could even worsen problems as it becomes more difficult to discover. 

Regarding sponsors for planning, Article 12 of the draft law stipulates that businesses have the right to support development plans, but they must not make direct payments to organizations which give advice in planning. The funding must be paid to the state budget before money is disbursed according to current regulations.

VCCI said there are both advantages and disadvantages in businesses’ sponsorship of development planning.

Recently, local authorities restricted direct sponsorship of planning. The funding has to take a roundabout tour – to the state budget and then to planners in accordance with rates set by the state.

However, businesses believe that the scheme doesn’t bring desired effects and large corporations can influence the planning process through unofficial ways. 

VCCI has suggested that the law compilation agency should follow another approach which allows enterprises to sponsor planning, but information about the sponsorship needs to be made public. This will be associated with a strict examination, inspection and opinion collection, to be implemented with the witness and under the supervision of many different parties.

According to VCCI, the solution will mitigate the risks of businesses infiltrating their wanted policies into laws, while strict supervision will allow sponsorship of the planning.

In other words, instead of imposing a ban which is not effective in reality because businesses still do it through unofficial ways, it would be better to allow the sponsor but only under strict supervision.

VCCI also pointed out that it is difficult to access information about planning.

Some localities post information about decisions and general planning, but they don’t show maps. In other cases, they only show maps, but there is no explanation, or they show new planning, but don’t show adjustments.

In general, localities post information about planning in PDF files or JPG files and the quality of images is low because of low resolution, which makes it impossible to find the information businesses want.

Hong Khanh