Barcelona City Council has proposed saving the ‘Amazon tax’, which was a pioneer in Spain, and has appealed the ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) that annulled the regulations last July. This is what municipal sources have advanced to elDiario.es.
In February 2023, Barcelona became a pioneer in taxing the use of public space by large home delivery companies, but the Court overturned the measure following an appeal by the UNO transport employer’s association. The council already assured at the time that, although it respected the judicial decisions, it was dissatisfied and would study how to defend it.
In their ruling, the magistrates recognized the “current obsolescence of the current regulations” in relation to commerce systems such as Amazon’s, but they also annulled the Barcelona rate by considering it “unfair” that it taxes only the loading and unloading on the street of the operators. of electronic commerce and not of the group of carriers.
For its part, the council justified that the rate should not fall on self-employed distributors and small businesses, but on operators who work with “a certain intensity.”
“The economy and society are moving towards new economic models and public administrations need to have legal tools to regulate these new models and manage the private uses they make of public space,” they say from the City Council.
For this reason, the council presented an appeal last October to defend “the need to manage this type of activities.” In their challenge to the ruling, the municipal legal services want to take advantage of the fact that the TSJC ruling was not unanimous and that a magistrate did endorse the rate, although she was in the minority in the court.
In her argument, the judge considered that the fee should be authorized when remembering that the use of public space by e-commerce vans “is unsustainable for the environment and collapses traffic in the city.” The delivery activity of companies like Amazon, the dissenting opinion added, is carried out “to the detriment of other users, merchants or not, who do pay taxes to finance services and infrastructure.”
In parallel, the council is already working on the “necessary” legislative changes to ensure “municipal tax power in this matter”, as explained by City Council sources who, on the other hand, did not want to advance how the regulation could change. rate.
2.6 million annually to public coffers
The initial rule taxed the use of public space made by the vans of transport companies that invoice more than one million euros per year. In Barcelona there are 26 operators that fall into this consideration; Between them they obtain 200 million euros annually, 62% of which correspond to the first five, led by companies such as Amazon, DHL, SEUR or UPS.
But Amazon, paradoxically, was saved from paying the fee that bears its name because a ruling by the National Court, which ruled last October that the company is not a postal operator, but rather a e-commerce.
The City Council initially calculated that the fee would add 2.6 million euros to the public treasury. The weight of this amount was distributed among the companies based on their bulk of business and, approximately, each of them had to end up contributing 1.25% of their annual income.
The regulations were designed as a compensatory measure for small businesses and physical stores, which are subject to taxes such as the IBI that the e-commerce they don’t pay “It was a way to protect local commerce from the threat posed by large platforms,” they say from the City Council.
In addition, the rate equated delivery vans with other businesses that also use public space such as bicycle and motorcycle sharing services. According to municipal data, the areas classified as loading and unloading have a daily occupancy of 47%, a fact that congests a city that “was not designed” for this high number of vans, as noted by Mayor Jaume Collboni during the session in which the standard was approved.
This had the support of the PSC, ERC – a party that had been promoting the tribute for years -, Comuns and Junts. The PP and Vox voted against.
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