The procedure of land plot allocation is completely legislated in Ukraine. However, it is a long-term, complicated, and non-transparent process and it contains significant corruption risks. If you sum up the time provided in the law to obtain an ownership or a use of land, you will get a period of 8.5 months. In some cases, this term is even longer and could last for a couple of years.
For example, in Kyiv, applicants need to apply to the officials or interested persons about 17 times during this period.
More than 50 documents are made up at the end of the whole procedure.
As for other transactions with land, such as changing the purpose or establishing land plot boundaries, the situation is a little better, but the mentioned negative issues happen there as well.
Therefore, there is a need to create tools for regulation of registration procedures for land ownership that could be more convenient for society and business. Some initiatives on this issue are currently implemented. For example, in 2015, the access to personal data of land plot owners and users was opened.
This information can be viewed with the help of a public cadastral map. Notaries received the authority to register real property titles and provide the extracts from the State Land Cadastre.
The list of essential terms and conditions for land lease agreements was reduced – there is no longer need to attach paper applications to them.
However, many registration procedures for land ownership still require to be simplified. Therefore, state government bodies worked out a new list of draft laws on deregulation of land legislation during the second half of 2015. The BRDO was also involved in this work.
BRDO experts believe that it makes sense to carry out further simplification of the land registration procedure in two stages.
The first one implies making selective amendments to the legislation that could be done quickly, within one or two months and without serious consequences for government and business.
The second one is devoted to working out and implementing comprehensive changes that involve using the e-governance technology, improving land planning activities and reducing the government employees, who make decisions in the land sector. The implementation of this stage requires at least a year.
The Better Regulation Delivery Office worked out the proposals for legislation, the adoption of which will allow to shorten the procedure of obtaining a land plot from the state-owned lands by at least two months, for the first stage.
In particular, it is proposed to abolish the mandatory permits for preparing the land-planning documentation, abolish the mandatory payment of advance fees when buying a land plot, provide citizens with the opportunity to receive public cadastral map copies and implement other deregulation measures.
The main ideas on simplification of the land registration procedures offered by different entities in the last six months are summarized in a table.