After the Environment Act comes into effect on January 1, 2024, all local regulations in a municipality will continue to apply. Municipalities have until 2029 to develop a comprehensive integrated spatial plan for the entire municipality, known as the transition phase. During this phase, the municipality is expected to integrate these regulations, or more precisely the provisions relating to the physical living environment, into the spatial plan.

One option could be to include the regulations in an initial (partial) spatial plan of a municipality, but it must also be ensured that the "old-style" regulations continue to apply in the rest of the municipality, and those regulations need to be adapted accordingly. To avoid this unclear and complex situation, we advise municipalities to establish a Physical Living Environment Regulation (PLER). The PLER consolidates all existing regulations with provisions related to the physical living environment and serves as a separate document until the end of the transition period.

Ideally, at the end of the transition period, the PLER is seamlessly incorporated into the finalized spatial plan in one smooth process.

We have developed a standard PLER that includes the regulations that are present in almost all municipalities in the Netherlands, such as the General Municipal Bylaw (APV), the Waste Management Regulation (except for any overlap with the litter article from the Transition Package), the Tree Felling Regulation, the remnants of the Building Regulation, the Heritage Regulation, the Market and Stall Regulation, the Houseboat Regulation, and the Soil Remediation Regulation. We are happy to customize the standard PLER in collaboration with the respective municipality. This often leads to interesting discussions because although most municipalities initially aim for a "policy-neutral" conversion, we have encountered cases where certain topics are regulated redundantly or even contradictorily. In such cases, we naturally find a solution.