exempting vulnerable beneficiaries from paying for building permits and recommends for timely implementation of this planned measure. National Housing Care Programme The continuing backlog in implementation of Croatia’s Housing Care Programme (HCP) remains of concern. By end of November 2017, there were 1,167 pending requests for housing care from former occupancy/tenancy rights holders. In comparison to 2,443 pending requests in December 2016, this is a significant decrease. However, the trend of stark difference between issuing negative decisions (3,298) in comparison to positively decided (570) signals that majority of cases will end up in the second instance procedures and thus cannot be considered as final. In terms of accelerating the issuance of administrative decisions, UNHCR Representation in Croatia confirmed a steady progress has been demonstrated at the time of writing this Report. UNHCR recommends conducting an analysis on the negatively decided requests on housing care. The Central State Office for Reconstruction and Housing Care reported that 193 former tenancy/occupancy rights holders have received housing units in 2017 through national housing care program. This is an improvement in comparison to 2016 when 147 former tenancy/occupancy rights holders received housing under national housing care program. Eight local Serb National Council’s coordinators were engaged in facilitating contacts between housing care applicants and local county offices of state administration until the completion of the project on 30 June 2017, assisting in total 508 beneficiary families. The budget of the CSORHC for the national housing care has been increased for HRK 23,824,441 (some EUR 3, 1 million) in comparison to 2016 and for 2017 was HRK 87,324,441 (some EUR 11, 6 million). The budget for former occupancy tenancy rights holders remained the same (HRK 3 million or EUR 400,000). The budget for reconstruction was decreased from HRK 5 million in 2016 to HRK 2 million (EUR 266,000) in 2017. CSORHC reported that 689 beneficiary families received housing units under national housing care programme of which 193 were former tenancy occupancy holders. 1,361 beneficiary families received building material under national housing care. The implementation of the State-run reconstruction program also needs to be accelerated as at least 841 families still await assistance. In 2017, 340 beneficiary families received reconstruction assistance. In 2017, 250 families purchased housing units, which is a slight increase, compared to 2016 when 223 purchase contracts were signed. CSORHC needs to address and resolve 3,683 pending purchasing requests. Further improvements are required to accelerate the purchase procedure and to introduce favorable conditions for urban areas. 9