The deadline on paper, and the months on my invoice

RC/RT/2026/T.21 · Letter from the table · 16 September 2026

To the Red Tape Council,

I support RT-001. I am writing from Stockholm, where the rules already give an applicant something important: a deadline. My experience also shows what a deadline does not do when the process stretches, the information is split across steps, and a small firm has to keep paying while it waits.

On 2 March, I signed for premises for my small business. The change I needed was modest: an alteration to the street-facing entrance. The municipality confirmed that I needed a building permit. I filed the application through the city’s digital service on 6 April and uploaded the drawings and other requested material. On 17 April, the application was treated as complete. I planned to begin using the premises on 1 July.

Under Sweden’s Planning and Building Act, the municipality is generally required to decide a building-permit application within ten weeks of receiving a complete application. If further investigation makes it necessary, the deadline may be extended once, by up to a further ten weeks; the applicant must be told about the extension before the original deadline. The Act also provides for a reduction in the permit fee when the decision deadline is missed. These are useful protections. They are clearer than being left with no stated endpoint.

On 29 May, I received notice that the decision period was being extended. The new date given was 4 September. The permit was decided on 11 September. I am not asking the Council to assume that every delay is avoidable, or that a public authority should approve a proposal that has not been properly assessed. But from the applicant’s side, the deadline moved and then passed, while the practical answer was still simply to wait.

Waiting had a price. My rent is 18,400 kronor a month. Because the premises could not be used as planned, I paid two months of rent before the decision date: 36,800 kronor. A contractor’s rescheduling charge was 6,200 kronor, and temporary storage cost 3,750 kronor. Those amounts—46,750 kronor in all—are not the cost of a complicated project. They are the kind of cash outflow that can unsettle a very small business. I can manage it only by postponing other spending and keeping less in reserve.

I used the digital application service, but a submitted application is not the same thing as a single process that lets an owner see what is happening. I needed to understand what counted as a complete file, what the extension meant for my calendar, and what I could do about the fee after the later decision. Each question became another task to fit around running the business. A one-stop process should show the file’s status, the responsible office, the next required step, the applicable deadline and the route for asking about a delay or fee reduction. It should not merely provide a place to upload documents.

That is why I support all four parts of the proposed standard.

• A small-business impact test: before changing a permit rule or its administration, ask what the change means for an owner who pays rent, wages or supplier bills while waiting. The test should consider both the form-filling burden and the cost of time.

• One digital process: make the application, document requests, status updates and decision visible in one place, even when more than one office has a role.

• Published service times: publish the ordinary time, the point from which it is counted, and how often cases are extended. A statutory maximum and a useful public service measure are not always the same thing.

• A deadline with a consequence: I support a silence-is-consent rule for permits where the risks are suitable and the application is complete. It should have clear safeguards and exclusions where public safety or other people’s rights require a decision. Where consent cannot safely be presumed, there should still be a real deadline, a reasoned notice of delay and an effective remedy.

Sweden’s ten-week rule is a sound starting point, not a complete answer. A fee reduction after a late decision may recognize that the deadline was missed; it does not reimburse rent, restore a lost opening date or give an owner back the time spent chasing the file. A published service standard and an intelligible digital status would help me plan. A carefully designed consent deadline would change the incentive to leave a complete, low-risk application unresolved. And an impact test would make the authority consider the person on the other end of the process before a rule is adopted.