Planning Law comes under scrutiny

He made the request at a teleconference with localities on July 15 to review the implementation of the law which took effect in January.

Dung underlined the significance of the law as its covers many economic sectors and many new concepts are introduced for the first time, including the 10-year overall national planning scheme.

The law is also considered an important tool to help the Government, ministries, sectors and localities set development targets and strategies, ensuring comprehensive and sustainable socio-economic development and effective and economical exploitation of resources.

To implement the law effectively, the Government issued a resolution earlier this year guiding tasks that ministries, sectors and localities need to undertake, including increasing information dissemination to raise awareness of the law, organizing training, issuing documents guiding the implementation and reviewing existing planning work to ensure it’s in line with the law, according to Dung.

However, the law has been slowly deployed due to obstacles and different understandings of new concepts, said the Deputy PM.

Major obstacles include the adjustment of planning work for 2021-30 as the law fails to cover all planning that needs to be adjusted locally, according to representatives from localities.

Another difficulty relates to the planning steps. The law regulates that the central-level planning serves as a foundation for planning activities at lower levels, meaning the planning work of ministries, sectors and localities can only be done when overall national planning is made. This would mean planning at lower levels would take years to complete, they said.

The regulation aims to ensure comprehensive planning but it is difficult to implement, they added.

Deputy PM Dung asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment to work with ministries and agencies to guild the implementation of the law.

Regarding local adjustments of planning from now to 2020, he proposed the National Assembly Standing Committee allow authorized agencies to decide the implementation of urgent investment projects for socio-economic development which will later be updated by new planning.

Concerning planning works that were done and examined before the law took effect but were not approved, he proposed the National Assembly Standing Committee to allow these planning works to be approved.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment was also asked to set up interdisciplinary teams to help localities and sectors remove difficulties.

Source: VNA