Fabien Piersanti: 'It is urgent to invest in new infrastructure'
For the BTP du Var, the challenges of 2025 are numerous and may seem daunting.
However, Fabien Piersanti, president of the Fédération du BTP du Var, is convinced that the BTP will meet them with success. As he recalled during the New Year's wishes ceremony in La Valette-du-Var: 'The year drawing to a close has had its share of surprises, opportunities but also and above all difficulties, and I fear we have seen nothing yet.
That being said, it is with ambition and determination that I wish to share with you the priority areas of our action for next year. These priorities will be structured around four major objectives: the development of our markets, the improvement of the performance and competitiveness of our companies, the reinforcement of services to members, and finally the influence of the BTP and the Fédération.'
DIVERSIFICATION OF MARKETS For the federal president, the first challenge is the broadening and diversification of markets: 'The continuous decline in new work, whether in housing or non-residential, must lead us all to diversify our activities. It is not an option, it is a question of survival because this Concretely for the Bâtiment, the restoration of the PTZ for first-time buyers, the temporary exemption of donations up to €100,000 for the construction or acquisition of a primary residence in new builds, and maintaining the budget dedicated to MaPrimRénov' were favorable decisions that the BTP wished to see taken up by the new government. crisis will spread sooner or later to all markets.
I had the opportunity to say, during my inauguration speech, that we had a serious problem with the housing policy carried out by the country's executive power and more generally with its view of the construction sector. The fleeting Barnier government had shown more attentiveness, and the discussions on France's 2025 budget had finally made it possible to secure a certain number of advances obtained by our national bodies before the deployment of 49.3.'
But, for Fabien Piersanti, we must go further with deeper reflections on a real status for private landlords and a redefinition of the Zéro Artificialisation Nette (ZAN) to meet the housing needs of the population.
INVESTING IN INFRASTRUCTURE According to the Var representative: 'In the field of public works, it is urgent to invest in new infrastructure and for their maintenance. The ecological transition requires massive investments, estimated at between 20 and 30 billion € per year, comparable to the post-war reconstruction effort. These measures will take a long time to produce their results, as we know, and the disrupted political and economic context is not to our advantage.
But we must draw from this constraint an increased motivation for our entrepreneurial spirits. Let us keep in mind that crises are also opportunities.'
However, market opportunities exist and should make professionals rather optimistic. Starting with public procurement, which remains well-oriented so far. Local authorities have healthy finances for the vast majority, and debt is low there.
PUBLIC PROCUREMENT 'Our department is still among the most attractive, if not the most attractive, and the needs for new infrastructure as well as heritage maintenance are significant. To regulate this market, a charter promoting access for TPEs and PMEs to public procurement was signed under the aegis of the préfet du Var just under 3 months ago. This charter, drafted within the Office du BTP, is a compendium of best practices for public buyers aiming to make public procurement accessible to small businesses and thus encourage the trickle-down logic of Var construction contracts into the fabric of local businesses.
In the face of the turpitudes of the private market, public procurement must be that source of activity that will allow our companies to preserve local employment.'
This is why Fabien Piersanti thanked the Conseil départemental, the Région Sud, the Métropole TPM, and the Association des Maires du Var for having already signed and ratified it. The Fédération du BTP is promoting it to each municipality and EPCI, alongside president Jean-Pierre Véran, so that the signing process continues and expands throughout the Var.
'On public procurement, the FFB and the FNTP fight daily with the country's executive to preserve the resources of local authorities and their investment capacity. This is part of our advocacy missions, which mobilize a portion of our action with ministers and parliamentarians. In this sense, we are the allies of local authorities.
This is a point that seems important to me to emphasize,' the federal president pointed out.
Finally, in the context of building maintenance, the energy renovation market, which is just waiting to restart after the refocusing of the MaPrimRénov scheme last May, still runs up against the capacity of households and businesses to afford the financing of the work. There lies a colossal reservoir of activity for the sector, which is at the crossroads of the economy's ecological transition and from which it should derive a substantial activity that is still struggling to take off (...)
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Photo BTP du Var.