Budget 2010

Working with municipalities to tackle antisocial behaviour and halt urban decay

Additional efforts to further reduce antisocial behaviour and urban decay and accelerate the improvement of public services are two of the core elements of the 2010 budget of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. In both areas, central government will work closely with municipal authorities. In uncertain times like these, it is even more crucial to have a public sector that works as a team and offers visible solutions to social problems, as Minister Guusje ter Horst and State Secretary Ank Bijleveld have argued.

Antisocial behaviour

Even though the Netherlands is becoming a safer place to live generally, additional measures must be taken to combat antisocial behaviour and urban decay in residential neighbourhoods. In 2010 and 2011 Dutch municipalities will receive an extra €150 million to tackle these social ills, especially antisocial behaviour connected to drug and alcohol abuse and juvenile delinquency. These municipalities will take additional measures in these areas, and in 2010 and 2011 they will participate in National Clean-Up Day. By the end of 2011 the various police forces will be augmented by 500 community officers, 375 of whom will be on the job by the end of 2010.

A bill to combat football hooliganism and serious antisocial behaviour is expected to become law sometime next year, empowering municipalities to issue group banning orders and restraining orders to football hooligans and antisocial juveniles, and to require them to report to the police at set times.

To fight antisocial behaviour connected to alcohol abuse, municipalities will be given new powers under the amended version of the Licensing and Catering Act. They will now be directly responsible for ensuring that retailers respect the minimum age limit for the sale of alcohol, and mayors will be able to ban the sale of alcohol outright in certain supermarkets if they are caught selling alcohol to minors on more than three occasions. The government is also experimenting with raising the age limit for the purchase of alcohol from 16 to 18 in certain municipalities. After evaluating the results of this experiment, a decision will be made on whether to raise the age limit nationwide.

The police can perform better if regional police forces work together more. With that in mind, many operational management tasks will be clustered together at national level. The goal is to have more officers on the beat and fewer behind a desk. The overall number of police officers will rise in the years ahead.

Service delivery

In 2010 members of the public will be able to take advantage of an increasing number of government services online. It will no longer be necessary for individuals to repeatedly supply the authorities with their personal details. More public authorities will be given access to the commercial register, allowing them to consult and reuse information from businesses. Besides being quicker, this new process will reduce some of the workload of the Chambers of Commerce and relieve businesses of the responsibility to respond to requests for information they have already supplied.

The ten biggest problems in the category of ‘administrative burdens’ will be tackled with renewed vigour. Under the new plan the deadline for resolving them is no longer 2011, but 2010. Plans to reduce the administrative burden for members of the public are on schedule, but in these times of economic adversity, extra investments are being made in efforts to eliminate red tape and associated expenses. Some examples of this are a simplified application process for social assistance benefit and the automatic remission of local charges.

In 2010, additional measures will be taken to reduce the administrative burden on professionals and government authorities, including municipalities.