Validity blue parking card
22-10-2005
Life-long validity of parking card for people with a permanent disability
In the future people with an incurable disability will receive a parking card having a life-long validity. As of today people with a disability have to renew their parking card every ten years. With this new measure the annual flow of some 40.000 applications could be contained. Belgium totals a circulation of approximately 250.000 parking cards.
You will certainly know them: parking spots reserved for people with a disability. When a person with a disability wants to use such a spot his or her parking card must be clearly visible on the car's dashboard. This parking card is valid for ten years. These cards must be renewed every ten years, which is continually causing all kinds of problems. But some disabilities don't evolve and that way any renewal is in fact absurd. That's why all recent parking cards, e.g. those issued from October 1st, 2005 on, apply indefinitely. It was Vincent Van Quickenborne (VLD), secretary of state for Administrative Simplification, and Gisèle Mandaila Malamba (MR), secretary of state for People with a Disability who took the initiative in this matter.
For people with a permanent disability, this obligatory renewal every ten years is quite absurd -of course it is! Having to prove every ten years that your upper limbs are paralysed or have remained amputated, admit it or not, but the point of it just beats common sense. Furthermore they have to make the transfer twice at least to apply for the renewal of the parking card: first they have to go to the city hall to get the application form and afterwards they have to get to a mailbox or post office for dispatch.
The obligation to renew parking cards every ten years was necessary in order to avoid abuses. Sometimes it happens, when people die, that their parking card is not sent back to the administration, although it is required by law. In such a case the deceased's son or daughter often continues to use the parking card for years and in that respect he or she actually takes the parking space normally reserved to a person with a disability. Recently it became possible for the administration, through the National Registry and the Central Database on Social Security (Kruispuntbank voor Sociale Zekerheid), to find out whether the true holder of a given parking card is not a deceased person. The administration will then summon the next of kin to return the parking card.
All parking cards issued from October 1st, 2005 on, are essentially of unlimited duration. The parking cards issued up until September 30th, 2005, are still valid for their ten years' period. To get a renewal for these existing cards one last application will be necessary. The new parking card will be of unlimited duration just as well. One exception: when the medical file or certificate shows that the approval of the disability or invalidity concerned is limited in time. In that case the parking card has the same period of validity as the period of approval. For instance, someone had a serious traffic accident and as a result he or she finds it particularly difficult to make transfers.
Translation: André De Laet
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