We are closing 2021 with a good condition of the Polish economy, and our country is in the forefront of the European Union countries that are going through the crisis caused by the global coronavirus pandemic in the smoothest way. This is a result of the unprecedented aid of over PLN 230 billion for business continuity and job protection that the state has provided since the beginning of the pandemic to companies affected by Covid-19. It is also a credit to Polish entrepreneurs and employees who, despite unfavourable circumstances, have managed to adapt to the new realities.

- says Minister of Economic Development and Technology Piotr Nowak. And he stresses:

We will continue at the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology to promote high economic growth and give the economy a strong development impulse. Support for Polish SMEs on the Polish and foreign markets, pro-entrepreneurial legal regulations, increased foreign investment, innovation and digitalization of the business environment will be the main directions of the ministry's activities in 2022.

The following is a list of the Ministry's key initiatives in 2021.

Construction and housing

Flat without own contribution - Act of 1 October 2021 on guaranteed housing credit (Journal of Laws item 2133). This is one of the key solutions included in the government's Polish Order programme.

Under the legislation, the state, through the Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, will guarantee an own contribution of 10 to 20 per cent of the financed property, with a maximum of PLN 100,000 for those who take out a loan for a period of no less than 15 years.

For creditworthy persons, the guaranteed housing loan means above all the removal of the barrier of the lack of funds for own contribution, which is required to obtain a mortgage loan for the purchase or construction of a flat.

In addition, repayers of such a loan will be financially supported each time their family grows. The amount of funding received will depend on the number of children in the family (PLN 20,000 in the case of the birth of a second child, PLN 60,000 - for the third and each subsequent child).

The regulations will enter into force on 27 May 2022 (with the exception of part of the provisions allowing for the start of the process of preparing BGK and lending banks for the implementation of the instrument, which entered into force on 10 December 2021).

Construction of houses up to 70 sqm - the Act of 17 September 2021 amending the Act - Construction Law and the Act on planning and spatial development, which implements one of the key assumptions of the government's Polish Order, i.e. construction of a house up to 70 sqm of the built-up area without formalities.

It introduces simple legal solutions enabling faster construction of single-family residential buildings. The facilitations are envisaged for detached single-family residential buildings of no more than two storeys with a built-up area of up to 70 sqm. The impact area must fit entirely within the plot or plots on which they are designed, and the construction is carried out in order to satisfy the investor's own housing needs.

Such houses will be able to be built in a simplified procedure, i.e. on the basis of a simplified notification, without the obligation to appoint a construction manager and keep a construction log.

The regulations will take effect from 3 January 2022.

Additionally, in the second half of 2022, after the completion of an architectural competition for the development of a concept of a single-family house with a construction area of up to 70 sqm, a website will be launched for all those interested in building a house for their own housing needs. The website will feature building designs selected as part of the competition, which will only require adaptation to the conditions of a specific building plot. 

The so-called social housing package, i.e. support for rental housing, including social and municipal housing - the Act of 10 December 2020 on amending certain acts supporting the development of housing and the Act of 16 December 2020 on accounting for the price of premises or buildings in the price of real estate sold from the communal real estate stock. Both laws entered into force at the beginning of 2021.

The data from January to October (as at 26.11. 2021) confirm the very positive response of social rental housing investors to the new solutions introduced under the so-called social housing package. They show record interest of beneficiaries in financial support from the Surcharge Fund and the Government Housing Development Fund.

In 2021, 332 applications for support from the Surcharge Fund were received and qualified or are still being processed by BGK.  This is the highest implementation of the social and municipal housing support programme in all years. The number of flats resulting from the submitted applications is also record high - over 8 600 units. 

To date, 289 applications from municipalities for support for the creation of a new Social Housing Initiative from the Government Housing Development Fund have been completed, i.e. support has been paid out or applications have been positively examined and are awaiting payment. A further 128 qualified applications from municipalities concerned the subscription of shares in an existing Social Housing Initiative.

Digitisation of the investment and construction process - the Ministry of the Interior worked intensively with the General Office of Construction Supervision to digitise the construction process. Thus, as of 1 July this year, 23 online forms can already be submitted to the e-budownictwo service (e-budownictwo.gunb.gov.pl), including

• an application for a construction permit with an attached plot or land development plan and an architectural and construction design
• application for a demolition permit;
• notification of construction works;
• notification of the intended date of commencement of construction works.

The Main Office of Construction Supervision also implements in parallel a number of other IT systems affecting the efficiency of the construction process and social welfare, among which are:

• Central Record of Emissions of Buildings - CEEB;
• Electronic Daily Building Log - EDB;
• Central Register of Building Permit Holders - eCRUB;
• Construction Product Market Surveillance System - SNRWB;
• Electronic Register of Building Objects - ECOB.

According to the assumed timetable, the process of building the System for Administrative Proceedings in Construction, which will be made available by GUNB to officials in aab and nb authorities across the country, should begin as early as the beginning of 2022.

In the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology we are working on developing a new regulation specifying the technical and construction conditions for buildings. This is a key piece of legislation for the entire construction industry. It will contain regulations that will define the applicable technical conditions in the construction industry.

We continued in 2021 to work on the reform of planning and spatial development, which is intended to make the entire system more coherent and simpler. 

We have divided the reform into deliverable phases of amendments to the current Act. We envisage an extended consultation on the first tranche, which includes:

• introduction of a general plan, passed obligatorily for the whole municipality (instead of a study), with the rank of a local law act, which will contain, among others, standards of accessibility to social infrastructure;
• speeding up the procedures for creating planning acts while strengthening public participation;
• changes to the provisions on decisions on development conditions, including the introduction of a time limit for their validity and linking them with the general plan;
• complementing the system with an integrated investment plan as a form of local plan, allowing transparent agreements between investors and municipal authorities
• intensification of subsequent stages of digitisation, inter alia, by introducing the Urban Register.

Hotline for the Polish Order programme

On 15 December we launched a helpline for citizens and entrepreneurs at the Ministry of Transport and Tourism, through which they can obtain reliable information on the Polish Order solutions. From Monday to Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 22 765 64 64 you can get comprehensive information on the current legislation, administrative procedures and services available electronically and on the possibilities of using the solutions introduced by the Polish Order. It will also be possible to receive support in filling in forms and applications necessary to use the solutions provided by the Polish Government.

The hotline is one of the elements of the so-called Multi-Channel Information Centre "Polish Order", which is supervised by the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, with substantive support and in cooperation with other offices, including the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Family and Social Policy, the Ministry of Health and the Social Insurance Institution. It offers several forms of support, including: a telephone conversation with a consultant, a livechat, a helpdesk and a virtual assistant available round the clock. 

Support for entrepreneurs

Anti-crisis shield - the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology played an important legislative and coordination role in the efforts of the entire government administration to support entrepreneurs in times of pandemic. As a result, we implemented further aid instruments, such as micro-grants and subsidies to employees' salaries.

The Ministry participated in the preparation, in cooperation with remaining/other ministries, of regulations for the industry shield providing for assistance to entrepreneurs most affected by the pandemic wave in autumn 2020 and spring 2021. Assistance was provided to more than 60 industries, and the condition for obtaining it was to have in the REGON register the relevant PKD code of the prevailing activity as at 31 March 2021.

The support consisted in:

• exemption from social security contributions,
• subsidies to employees' salaries,
• standstill benefit,
• subsidies up to PLN 5 thousand for micro and small entrepreneurs.

We estimate that as many as 270 000 companies could have benefited from the instruments of the shield.

So far, under all anti-crisis shields, support for the Polish economy has amounted to over PLN 243 billion, and 99% of beneficiaries of aid programmes have maintained their current form of business. We have protected 8.3 million jobs. It is thanks to such significant, broad and well-thought-out shielding measures that Poland has turned out to be one of the European Union countries most resistant to the economic crisis.

Financial Shield - we were responsible, among other things, for preparing the legal framework for the operation of the PFR Financial Shield Programme in its successive editions, the implementation of which was entrusted to the Polish Development Fund, which was its exclusive operator.

Over 347 thousand enterprises from all over Poland, employing over 3.2 million people, benefited from the PFR Financial Shield 1.0 programme for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. The entrepreneurs received over PLN 60 billion. In turn, the PFR 2.0 Financial Shield is a support of almost PLN 7 billion for nearly 47 thousand entrepreneurs, employing over 357 thousand employees.

Family foundation - advanced works on the draft act on family foundation are being conducted in the Ministry of Regional Development. The purpose of the existence of this new institution is to improve the legal environment for company succession, particularly due to generational changes. This will make it possible to build strong domestic brands, as well as to accumulate and protect capital against fragmentation.

The solution is modelled on foundations of this type operating in many European countries, including Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. The draft law is currently subject to arrangements, consultations and opinions, it is on the list of legislative and programme works of the Council of Ministers.

Counteracting payment blockages - under the legislation, from 1 January 2021, the largest corporate income taxpayers are required to submit reports to the minister responsible for the economy on their payment practices in the previous year. This is due to an amendment to the Act on Counteracting Excessive Delays in Commercial Transactions, which imposes such an obligation on the largest CIT taxpayers. By 1 February 2021, 3,000 reports had been submitted to the Ministry of Taxation and we published a summary of them in the Ministry's Public Information Bulletin.

The objectives of the solution were:

• to create an analytical tool to study general trends on the Polish market;
• to increase the transparency of the activities of larger entrepreneurs, which is of particular importance in the context of decisions made by companies from the SME sector to cooperate with large enterprises.

In the Anti-Pollution Act we committed ourselves to an annual evaluation of its functioning for the next three years. We are implementing this and analysing the situation. The postulates of entrepreneurs, as well as information coming from the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, are particularly helpful here. Currently, work on the amendment of the Act is in progress. We hope that it will streamline the anti-competition proceedings conducted by the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection.

Investments

On 25 March 2021, we introduced changes to the Programme for Support of Investments of Significant Importance for the Polish Economy for 2011-2030 (the programme with the budget of PLN 2.6 billion is an important tool for investment support). As a result, the criteria for participation in the programme have become easier for Polish entrepreneurs from the SME sector.

These include:

• lowering the thresholds for manufacturing investments;
• introduction of lower thresholds for SMEs (lowering the requirements of the costs that must be incurred within a given investment);
• harmonisation of quality criteria with those applicable within the Polish Investment Zone;
• lowering the requirement for new jobs by 50% (mitigation of the requirement concerning the creation of new workplaces by the investor).

The preferential conditions are valid until the end of 2021.

Innovations

The Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, together with the Ministry of Finance, has developed tax reliefs to support innovation and digitisation processes in enterprises (relief for robotisation, relief for "prototypes", relief for private investors in venture capital funds).

The Ministry actively participates in Important Projects of Common European Interest - IPCEI. In 2021, using the IPCEI mechanism, we implemented at the national level 2 competitions for projects in the following areas: hydrogen technologies and systems and microelectronics.

In this way, we join the European initiatives for the development of areas with the greatest potential resulting from the current technological conditions and decisions made so far in terms of locating the industrial base. Currently, 10 Polish projects are at the preparatory stage, at the international level, to be evaluated by the European Commission.

We aim to increase the adoption of state-of-the-art digital solutions in manufacturing activities, in order to boost the competitiveness of European and Polish SMEs and prevent them from losing their market position. We have actively joined the initiative to create a network of professional intermediaries - Digital Innovation Hubs and European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs). Their mission is to support digital transformation. Winners selected in the national competition will be able to apply for funds from the European Digital Europe Programme.

We are implementing the "Originator Zone" Programme (years 2021-2023), which is a nationwide pilot programme of the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology carried out in cooperation with the Puławy Science and Technology Park, the Poznań University of Life Sciences and the Krakow Centre for Innovative Technologies INNOAGH Sp. z o.o. The "Originator Zone" is:

• a place for disseminating innovations, creating new ideas and concepts, bringing together people ready to experiment and expand their horizons;
• assistance, consulting and technical support for creative people interested in innovations;
• a platform for exchanging ideas and checking the business, technological and commercialisation potential of new ideas.

Zones for innovators, students, inventors, researchers, technology enthusiasts, families and children will be located in three cities: Puławy, Poznań and Cracow.

We have launched a pilot concerning developing and testing solutions for shaping competences in artificial intelligence among secondary school students and promoting AI-based entrepreneurship in secondary schools. The pilot study will serve to develop recommendations for further systemic actions in this area.

Green energy

We are working on a draft amendment to the Law of 20 May 2016 on investments in wind power plants - the so-called Distance Act. This will allow for the development of onshore wind energy and the "unblocking" of residential construction in the vicinity of these power plants. The project has been positively assessed by the Joint Commission of the Government and the Local Self-Government and is at the final stage of consultation within the Council of Ministers. It will then be sent to the Sejm.

Tourism

In connection with the pandemic, we have prepared a number of instruments to support the tourism sector, including entrepreneurs operating in the tourism industry, and regulations to help tourists (until October this year, there was also a tourism department under the aegis of the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology).

Tourist Shield, in which we provided for the possibility of using benefits in the form of stopovers and exemptions from Social Security.

Polish Tourist Voucher - with this you can pay for hotel services or tourist events in Poland until the end of March 2022. Almost 7 million children are eligible, payments of PLN 1.98 billion have been made so far using the voucher.

Support programme for municipalities located in mountain areas. Developed on the basis of the Government's Local Investment Fund, it was intended to counteract the negative effects of reduced travel during the Christmas and winter holidays (January 2021).

Tourist Reimbursement Fund (TFZ), which refunded customer payments due to non-performance of tourism events due to the pandemic. We extended the availability of a travel voucher for a travel event cancelled due to a coronavirus pandemic to two years from the date the travel event was due to take place. We have also postponed by eight months the deadline for tour operators to start repaying payments to TFZ. The first instalment will have to be repaid by 31 December 2021 at the latest, not from April 2021 as originally.

Tourist Assistance Fund (TFP) - an instrument to support the tourism industry for unforeseen circumstances in the future, e.g. in the form of warfare, natural disasters or force majeure affecting the possibility of carrying out a trip. We have introduced the possibility of setting off contributions paid by tour operators to the TFP against future payments in the event that contracts with travellers are terminated or modified in a way that affects the amount of contributions due to the TFP.

We launched a new turystyka.gov.pl platform with a mobile application, where one can check all categorised hotel facilities legally operating in Poland.

We established the Expert Council for Tourism, which actively participated, inter alia, in consultation works on developing assumptions for the transformation and development of tourism.