The 2018 Special Law for State Housing Construction and its Implementation

The government’s decision in 2017 to embark upon a programme to build housing for members of the security forces was followed by the adoption of a “special law” that governs the implementation of this programme somewhat differently to existing regulations.
The government’s decision was not properly justified: either in terms of considering the various financial approaches to solving the same problem, or from the point of view of legal proceedings.

A special law was passed in Serbia to legislate construction of government-subsidised flats across Serbia, which employees in the security forces would buy under standard market prices. The government has justified this legislative approach by calling upon national security. However, the Government’s decision to address the housing needs of security sector employees in this way and not through some other measures, was not properly justified. The special law has foreseen numerous deviations from the public procurement legislation for the sake of urgency, but in practice, there have been significant delays in the project implementation. Also, by comparing initial announcements and actual contract values, it could be estimated that the project costs would be up to 20% higher than was envisaged at the beginning. Procurement of construction services was marred by insufficient transparency and dubious phenomena such as discriminatory capacity requirements from bidders and low competition.

Preparation of this publication was supported by Transparency International Defence and Security (TI-DS) through the project “Why are they leaving? – Casting light on the link between corruption and staff retention in Serbian defence sector”. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of TI-DS.