The month January brought significant changes to the Polish Spatial Planning and Development Act. These changes are intended to increase the transparency of the Integrated Investment Plan (IIP) procedure and shorten its implementation time. During the preparation of such a plan, the municipality negotiates the content of an urban planning agreement with the investor, in which the parties commit to carrying out activities, including those related to the implementation of a complementary investment. Therefore, provisions were added enabling the municipal council to establish, through a resolution constituting an act of local law, guidelines for urban planning agreements concluded during the IIP preparation procedure.
In addition, further amendments were introduced to the Act on Land and Mortgage Registers and the Act on the National Court Register. These amendments primarily apply in the event of submitting an application for documents (i.e., extracts from land and mortgage registers, excerpts from land and mortgage registers, and certificates of closure of land and mortgage registers) via the IT system, and to download these documents as electronic documents, allowing for the preparation of printouts via the IT system. Downloaded electronic documents and their printouts have the force of documents issued by the court if they have features that enable their verification with the data contained in the central land and mortgage register database.
January saw also changes to the Act regulating the improvement of support mechanisms for electricity and heat consumers, which extend the deadline for providing electricity suppliers with information from entrepreneurs from the micro, small and medium-sized enterprise sector on the value of the aid granted to them in connection with the application in the second half of 2024 of the maximum price of electricity in settlements with eligible consumers connected to the distribution or transmission network, which are micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), based on the provisions of the Act on extraordinary measures aimed at limiting the level of electricity prices and supporting certain consumers in the years 2023–2025.
This month, the Polish Parliament passed a law granting the President of the Republic of Poland the ratification of the Investment Protection Agreement between the European Union and its Member States, on the one hand, and the Republic of Singapore, on the other, signed in Brussels on October 19, 2018. The aim of this agreement is to provide greater protection to investors from European Union member states than is currently provided under bilateral investment protection treaties (BITs) concluded by individual EU countries with Singapore. It will replace the currently applicable Polish-Singapore BIT (Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Poland and the Government of the Republic of Singapore on the Protection and Promotion of Investments, signed in Warsaw on June 3, 1993). The agreement contains fundamental principles of investor protection, including a clarified fair and equitable treatment clause (FET clause). The key solution contained in the Agreement is the establishment of a permanent, independent, two-instance arbitration tribunal that will be able to resolve disputes concerning the provisions of the Agreement.
Furthermore, significant changes were implemented into the Social Insurance System Act and certain other acts. These changes are intended to streamline and standardize the way doctors at the Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) issue medical certificates, as well as the rules for monitoring sick leave. Furthermore, they are also intended to shorten the waiting time for medical certificates and ensure better working conditions for medical examiners, which is intended to help reduce medical examiner staffing shortages.
Finally, new amendment to the Act on the Protection of the Rights of Purchasers of Residential Premises or Single-Family Homes and the Developer Guarantee Fund established two significant regulations from the perspective of real estate purchasers:
- new law requires the use of the appropriate Polish Standard to calculate the usable area of a residential property or single-family home.
- It ties the method of calculating the purchase price of rights arising from a contract concluded under the provisions of the amended Act to the usable area of the property, prohibiting the use of methods of measuring area other than the usable area calculated in accordance with the Polish Standard.
