November 18, 2023.- The Ministry of Territorial Policy, in collaboration with the National Institute of Statistics (INE), announces grants amounting to 64.12 million euros for the modernization of the municipal register through local entities.
In this call for proposals, subsidies will be granted to provincial councils of common and foral regime, to island councils and consells, as well as to the autonomous uniprovincial communities. The final beneficiaries of this modernization of the register will in any case be the municipalities with a population of less than 20,000 inhabitants, as well as the cities of Ceuta and Melilla.
Municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants that wish to do so will also be able to join the digital tools developed on the basis of this call.
The actions that the recipients of the grants will be able to carry out through this call are two:
- Development of a new updated system of information management on the territory of municipal scope. Each municipality must have a database of homes identified with a unique code at national level, as well as tools that allow the automatic updating of the information existing in that database.
- The implementation of a new system of real-time exchange of information between municipalities and the INE. The eligible action will include the elaboration of adaptation projects from the current information systems of the municipalities, on a monthly basis.
Local authorities will be able to submit their application until 31 March 2024, and similar projects that were already started will be accepted.
The INE will detail in a technical guide the eligible activities to be developed and their timetable; this guide will be published before December 31 on the web pages of the INE and the Ministry of Territorial Policy.
Collaboration Territorial Policy-INE
The acting Minister of Territorial Policy and Spokeswoman of the Government, Isabel Rodríguez, has been working since 2022 with the National Institute of Statistics (INE) in the design of the modernization of municipal registers managed by local entities to update the existing ones to date with an age of more than 30 years.
The collaboration between the Ministry of Territorial Policy and the INE is permanent to contribute to the achievement of a project of high value for citizenship and the modernization and digital transformation of public administrations with the objective of updating the municipal register in real time.
The initial diagnosis was shared by both parties: Spain has an old population register that does not allow us to know the update of the number of inhabitants of a population at the time it occurs, but each month. There is a lack of an accurate and unified census of streets, buildings and other types of buildings and the old model that has existed until today does not fit into the current technological context.
The potential impact of the transformation that is now being undertaken will be considerable in many areas, including taxation, the environment, the provision of services, etc., as well as in public policy planning.
On July 17, 2023, Territorial Policy and the INE formalized the corresponding agreement to promote the modernization of the management systems of the register of local entities. Thanks to the support of the INE, committed to the necessary regulatory reforms for the modernization of the system of exchange of data of the register between the public administrations, it has been possible to design this call that will contribute to financing, within the framework of the Plan of Recovery, Transformation and Resilience, projects to improve the management of an essential tool in the planning of municipal policies such as the municipal register.