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The Flemish Government aims to ensure faster and more legally secure permits with its permit revolution. Dryade endorses that objective. Environmental organisations also have an interest in simple and efficient procedures. Good projects should be able to be permitted within a reasonable timeframe, while illegal projects must be adjusted or refused in a timely manner.
But one of the proposed reforms threatens to achieve just the opposite. With a new review procedure, the Flemish Government adds an extra procedural step before a permit can be contested at the Council for Permit Disputes. According to Dryade, that procedure threatens to make the permitting process more complex, slower, and more legalistic.
From hopscotch to hopscotch-step-jump
The Mixed Commission on Permits published its final report in September 2025. By the end of 2025, the Flemish Government translated the recommendations into an Action Programme for legally secure and robust permits. Meanwhile, three draft decrees are on the table. An important point of discussion is the so-called duty of attention. The premise is that anyone who has objections to a permit must formulate them as early as possible in the permitting procedure.
That idea is not new. Previous attempts to make access to the Council for Permit Disputes dependent on what a citizen or organisation had previously raised in the administrative procedure were twice rejected by the Constitutional Court.
The Flemish Government is now opting for a different structure: the review procedure.
Today, a classic permit procedure consists of three steps, like a hopscotch: a decision in first instance, possibly an administrative appeal, and then an appeal to the Council for Permit Disputes. In the new arrangement, there is a fourth step in between, the hopscotch jump. Anyone wishing to appeal to the Council for Permit Disputes must first submit a review request to the authority that recently made the permit decision.
Barely fifteen days to formulate all objections
This review request is moreover much more than a simple request to the authority to reconsider its decision. The applicant must include all illegalities that they wish to raise later before the Council for Permit Disputes. What is not included in the review request cannot, in principle, be presented to the judge later. For this, the citizen or organisation receives barely fifteen days.
That is particularly short. An environmental permit can be based on extensive advice, environmental studies, plans, conditions, and technical documents. Anyone wishing to contest such a decision must analyse the entire file, identify possible illegalities, and formulate these legally sufficiently precisely. By comparison: for the final appeal to the Council for Permit Disputes, there is currently a deadline of 45 days.
The review procedure therefore threatens to become not an accessible opportunity for self-correction, but a kind of preliminary petition to the court.
More legalisation instead of less
This will predictably lead to more legalisation. Citizens and associations wishing to retain their rights will have to open all legal registers from the request for revision. Local authorities and other governments may also be confronted with this obligation.
This creates exactly the opposite of what an efficient permitting procedure needs. Instead of a simple possibility to quickly rectify obvious errors, a new formal procedure arises in which parties will have to position themselves as legally as possible out of precaution. Moreover, the procedure takes time. After the fifteen-day period to submit a request for revision, the government has up to 45 days to make a new decision.
A reform that aims to speed up procedures could extend the path to the court by about two months.
New procedural discussions for the court
For the Council for Permit Disputes, the reform threatens to yield little efficiency gain. Indeed, new discussions may arise regarding the admissibility of arguments. Was a particular objection already raised in the request for revision? Was it formulated sufficiently precisely? Is the means being developed for the court still the same means as that which was in the request for revision?
As a result, the judge may have to spend more time on the question of whether an argument may still be examined, while the essence should just be whether the permit is lawful. This does not necessarily contribute to more robust permits. On the contrary: procedural discussions can push the substantive handling of a file further into the background.
Widely supported criticism
Dryade is not alone in that criticism. Also the SERV, Minaraad, VVSG, Flemish Association of Provinces, MORA and SARO formulated fundamental objections to the proposed revision procedure. This is striking. Local authorities, provinces, employer and employee organisations, and environmental organisations do not always view the permitting policy in the same way. Nevertheless, various advisory bodies and stakeholders point in the same direction: the additional procedural layer threatens to lead to more complexity, more workload and more difficult access to legal protection.
The Flemish Government nevertheless decided to retain the revision procedure. The Flemish Parliament is now up next.
Simplifying also means daring to cut out
Dryade supports the ambition to achieve faster, clearer and legally more robust permits. But for that, the reform must actually make procedures simpler. Introducing an additional procedure, with a deadline of fifteen days and far-reaching consequences for what can later still be brought before the court, does not achieve that according to us.
A classic permitting process today resembles a hopscotch. In English, that discipline is not coincidentally called the triple jump. Those who want to reach the finish line faster do not add a fourth jump. Therefore, Dryade advocates for the removal of the revision procedure from the reform.