BGM Radar

Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 requires a draft national nature restoration plan by 1 September 2026. Belgium will not meet it: the federal and Flemish plans are ready, Wallonia and Brussels are not. The timetable published on the official Renature Brussels site announced a first-reading adoption in summer 2026; the State Secretary for Climate now says September or October. The delay therefore concerns two distinct deadlines, one of which the Region set for itself.

The King Baudouin Foundation's water poverty barometer, produced by the ULB and the Universiteit Antwerpen, finds that one Belgian household in eight devotes an excessive share of its disposable income to its water bill. In Brussels the share reaches 23.2% in 2024 against 21.9% in 2021. Wallonia falls from 19.3 to 15.6%, Flanders from 9.1 to 8.5%. Brussels is the only one of the three regions where the share is rising, and the gap with Flanders widens from 12.8 to 14.7 points in three years.

The Regional Security Council of 26 August 2026 decided on forty federal police officers and twenty mobile cameras within twenty days. The nineteen mayors appointed, with immediate effect, a single commander for the six police zones, a role given to the chief of the Brussels-Capital/Ixelles zone. The federal Interior Minister separately announced a federal reserve platoon and fifty officers. These three announcements do not add up and no source consolidates them. The federal police count fifty-seven shootings over the first seven months of 2026, against one hundred and one for all of 2025.

The Council of State's auditor general issued an opinion on 21 August 2026 recommending suspension of the award of the Brussels casino concession, challenged by the outgoing operator for inadequate reasoning. The concession runs fifteen years and is worth roughly seven hundred and fifty million euros, with operation from 1 January 2027. In parallel, the Ecolo group leader on the municipal council filed on 24 August a notice of presumed breach of the City's code of ethics adopted on 29 June, concerning the mayor's seat on the board of Sporting Anderlecht, of which the concession holder is a principal sponsor.

The date of the cuts announced in June and July, until now described as falling before winter, is set at 1 September 2026. The thousand places represent about a quarter of the capital's roughly four thousand shelter places, and half of the Brussels Deal's two thousand, a federal scheme funded at forty-two million euros a year since late 2022. The federal Minister for Asylum and Migration granted no postponement, although BelRefugees, the Samusocial and the AMA and BICO federations had asked for 31 March at the earliest.

The college of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode will propose to the next municipal council that it instruct its lawyers to launch judicial and administrative appeals against the Region, denouncing the organisation of its financial asphyxiation. A supervision procedure was opened at the end of May 2026. On 30 July the municipality was told its 2024 annual accounts had been refused approval for the second time. Without approved accounts there is no 2026 budget; without a budget, no full access to regional funding. The municipality does not appear in the one-hundred-and-fifty-million-euro envelope for municipalities in difficulty.

On the evening of 26 August 2026, Jette announced it is intervening in two proceedings against the RNP 07L flight path: the environmental cessation action brought in 2018 by the Brussels Region and the challenge to Brussels Airport's environmental permit. This executes the motion of 4 March 2026. The municipality joins Schaerbeek, Evere, Berchem-Sainte-Agathe and Lennik, but rejects the most obvious remedy: returning to the VOR07 path would displace the nuisance. It calls for a cap limiting landings over the north-western municipalities.

Of the 97,392 jobseekers registered with Actiris at the end of July 2026, 11% are under twenty-five. That group is up 17% year on year. The rise reaches 30% for young people in their occupational integration period, the six months following graduation. The backdrop is contracting demand: job vacancies advertised in Brussels fell 25% between August 2024 and July 2025.

The subdivision permit for the Josaphat wasteland, 537 homes on about 24 hectares between Evere and Meiser, goes to public enquiry from 28 August to 29 September 2026. The application comes from the SAU, the Region's public operator. The regional policy declaration of 14 February 2026 nonetheless freezes development of the site for eighteen months, until August 2027. A judgment of November 2025 also halts works on plots larger than half a hectare; the government has appealed and the ruling is expected by the end of the year.

After the Council of State annulled the licences on 29 July 2026, the government announced an agreement with operators on 21 August. The transitional regime provides temporary licences until the end of 2027, a cap of 7,500 bikes for the Region and 2,500 per operator, and runs until May 2028. A tender will then award two licences of 4,800 bikes. The ban on shared e-scooters from 1 January 2027 stands. The proposal still has to clear the council of ministers.

According to La Libre, which says it consulted the register of mandates, the parties of the regional majority finalised the redistribution of some 280 mandates on the boards of the regional institutions in late July 2026. The government had communicated an order of magnitude of 150 mandates and a non-final list after the council of ministers of 23 July. The same paper notes the size of these boards: 29 directors at Sibelga and at Vivaqua, 20 at the Port of Brussels, 19 at STIB.

Bruxelles-Propreté carried out a cleaning operation around Brussels-North station on 21 August 2026, under police escort and with reinforcements drawn from other sectors, removing 5.6 tonnes of waste. It is the second operation of this kind after the one at Brussels-South on 16 July 2026, put at 4,990 kilos by the Region's official press release. Both are presented as pilots meant to measure the resources needed before the roll-out of the Stations Plan, approved on 18 June 2026 with ten million euros a year. The standing deployment around Brussels-North is about ten agents a day.

Iriscare announced on 29 July 2026 the payment, in August, of the annual age supplement, formerly the back-to-school allowance, for more than 300,000 Brussels children, totalling more than 16 million euros. Amounts range from 25.36 euros for children under 6 to 101.46 euros for 18-to-24-year-olds in higher education. Payment is automatic and is added to the July family allowances, paid in August.

The Brussels Parliament's deontology committee ruled at the end of April 2026 on a Brussels MP's combination of his mandate with the chairmanship of Up4North, an association bringing together major property developers in the Northern Quarter. Its conclusion was communicated neither to the complainant, a municipal councillor from Saint-Josse-ten-Noode who reported the case in September 2025, nor to the public. The institutional point is not the combination itself but the absence of publicity for this committee's decisions.

Four associations, RBDH, Inter-Environnement Bruxelles, FéBUL and the Fédération des Services Sociaux, filed an urgent application on 13 July 2026 against the SLRB to suspend the sale of the Ariane site in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert and the Palais site in Schaerbeek. Both plots had been acquired to develop several hundred social housing units, and their disposal is expected to raise around 52 million euros for the debt reduction plan. The applicants set against this the 62,234 households on the social housing waiting list. More than a month after the application was filed, no court decision has been made public.

On 14 August 2026 the municipality of Evere announced it was joining the cessation action brought by the Brussels Region against the RNP 07L flight path. The college of mayor and aldermen appointed a lawyer and the municipality formally joined the regional procedure decided on 11 June 2026, after Schaerbeek and Berchem-Sainte-Agathe. Evere is not the first Brussels municipality to go to court over this route: Koekelberg appointed a lawyer as early as March 2026 in a separate move. The Region states that more than 270,000 Brussels residents are affected by this route and that 96% of measured flights exceed Brussels noise standards.

Faced with the combination of drought and heatwave, Vivaqua has activated the water reserves of two quarries, at Écaussinnes and Ligny, and asked customers in Wallonia and Flanders to limit their consumption. For more than a week the flow of the Meuse at Tailfer has been falling and is approaching the 19 m³/s threshold, below which output from the Tailfer plant, which turns Meuse water into drinking water, would be significantly limited. Fifteen Walloon municipalities have issued water use restriction orders. No restriction specific to the Brussels Region has been documented at this stage.

The City of Brussels is raising its additional percentages on property tax from 2,950 to 3,457 for the 2026 tax year, taking the municipal share from 36.875% to 43.2125% of the indexed cadastral income. For owners who live in their own home, an automatic municipal allowance fully offsets that increase and adds a flat 100 euros. The allowance covers neither the regional share nor the Agglomeration share, and comes on top of the regional BE HOME allowance. Brussels Fiscality began sending assessment notices in July and August.

On Friday 14 August 2026, two blasts at 22 Treurenberg, in the Single Resolution Board building, killed Sergeant-Major Olivier Francotte of the 21st company of the Brussels Fire Brigade and seriously injured a second firefighter and two Sibelga staff. A contractor laying fibre optic cable had drilled into a low-pressure gas pipe; around a hundred people had already been evacuated before the explosions. The Brussels Labour Audit Office has opened a case. This is the first death in service documented on this card, and it comes three weeks after the suspension of a five-day strike over SIAMU resources, whose strike notice runs until the end of September 2026.

At the end of July 2026, Actiris counted 97,392 registered jobseekers, 3.4% more than a year earlier, for an administrative unemployment rate of 15.7%. Two movements run in opposite directions in the same release: the number of jobseekers receiving benefits fell by 40.1%, or 20,848 fewer people, while 33,075 of them, 34% of the total, are now registered with a CPAS/OCMW, a share up 70.6% year on year. Jobseekers under 25 rose by 17% and young people in vocational integration internships by 30.2%. The shift from federal unemployment insurance to the CPAS/OCMW, funded by the municipalities and the COCOM/GGC, continues.

Samusocial turned away 244 of the 299 families that asked it for emergency accommodation in July, more than four in five and 83.5% more refusals than in June. Those families included 238 children, 65 of them under two and 15 infants under six months, and 1,555 people are on the waiting list kept by BelRefugees. The figures cover the month before the announced closures: the federal government cut 300 places at the end of June and a further 700 on 16 July, effective before winter.

The petition to keep shared e-scooters in Brussels has cleared the 1,000-signature threshold that obliges the Brussels Parliament to take it up: 1,595 signatures on 12 August, the most-signed initiative on democratie.brussels. It targets the decision to ban these vehicles from 1 January 2027. The threshold guarantees a public debate, does not oblige the majority to change position and suspends nothing. According to BRUZZ, the file could reach the Mobility Committee before the first plenary, announced for 21 September.

Forty-two families from Dilbeek, Lennik and Roosdaal are suing the Belgian state over the RNP 07L approach route, the Bruegelvogelvrij collective announced on 11 August. The route passes over north-west Brussels, including Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, Koekelberg and Berchem-Sainte-Agathe, with an aircraft every two to three minutes on busy days, night included. Introduced as a trial in 2025, it runs to October 2026, and the easterly wind's return brought the noise back in early August. Three sets of proceedings now target the same route: these Flemish residents, the Brussels Region since June, and the municipality of Lennik, which is preparing its own.

The CPAS of Berchem-Sainte-Agathe went from 520 to 625 food-parcel recipients between March and July 2026, 20% more in five months, about a hundred people for a municipality of roughly 25,000 inhabitants. The centre links the rise to the first unemployment exclusions of 1 January 2026. Over the same period, the budget for buying foodstuffs through the European FEAD and ESF+ funds fell from 27 to 15 million euros. Demand rises because of a federal reform, aid in kind falls because of a European and federal arbitration, and the gap is absorbed by a municipal centre.

The Council of State heard two appeals on 10 August against the night-time closure of shops in the North Quarter between 1 and 6 a.m.: one brought by Schaerbeek shopkeepers, one on the Saint-Josse side by a sex worker and the organisations Espace P and Utsopi. The auditors reject urgency in both cases and, for Schaerbeek only, also rule on the merits in the municipality's favour. The signal is favourable but qualified, with doubt over an extension beyond the end of September. An auditor's report is not a judgment: no judicial decision has been made.

The public inquiry into the renovation of Bockstael station in Laeken was held with a file drafted in Dutch only. A local resident turned to the Permanent Commission for Linguistic Control, which declared his complaint admissible and well founded. The commission's doctrine has been consistent since 1994 and was restated in its opinion no. 56.353 of 21 October 2024: the applicant files in a single language, but the authority organising the public inquiry must make the essential documents available in both languages. The City of Brussels replies that no bilingualism obligation rests on the applicant, which is accurate but does not answer the grievance. The permit was issued in Dutch only, a second complaint and an appeal to the Council of State followed, and works began in August 2026, the appeal having no suspensive effect.

On 7 August 2026, the BelRefugees Citizens' Platform, the Bico Federation, the Samusocial, the Ama Federation and the joint trade union front called for a mobilisation on Tuesday 18 August 2026 at 5.30 pm, place de l'Albertine. The scheme concerned, the Brussels Deal, has funded some 2,000 reception places in Brussels since 2022 with 42 million euros a year, because of the saturation of the federal Fedasil network. The federal government cut 300 places in late June 2026 and a further 700 on 16 July, bringing capacity down to about 1,000. The associations estimate that about 1,000 people already live on the street in Brussels. The Samusocial, a signatory, is not a campaigning nonprofit but the bicommunity operator responsible for emergency accommodation.

According to Social Integration service figures for January-June 2026, about 99,000 people lost their unemployment benefit. 52,600 filed an integration income application, that is 53%. More than 43,600 applications were accepted, or 83%, and about 9,000 refused, mainly because household income was judged too high. In total, slightly more than 44% of excluded people receive an integration income. The application rate remains 34% in Flanders, 43.9% in Brussels and close to 49% in Wallonia; the refusal rate is not broken down by region. These data stop on 30 June 2026 and do not include the fourth and fifth waves of exclusion from 1 July.

After the Council of State annulled the free-floating shared mobility licences on 29 July 2026, the Brussels government is working on a transitional solution of up to four months so that shared bikes stay in service after 1 September 2026. The existing licences remain annulled: the transition organises an interim regime. Lime, the operator excluded in the 2023 award and the party behind the appeal, could be allowed to operate bikes alongside Bolt and Dott. The new licensing ordinance is still under parliamentary debate. The ban on shared scooters on 1 January 2027 is not called into question. A meeting between regional bodies and operators was scheduled for mid-August 2026.

On 8 August 2026, the citizens' collective Free Air 4 Brussels published an estimate of the cost of making the RNP 07L flight path permanent for the Brussels Region: 4 to 6 billion euros cumulatively over twenty years, including about 3.18 billion in property depreciation and 1.55 to 2.64 billion in soundproofing. The calculation rests on two studies by IGEAT, the ULB environment and spatial planning institute, commissioned by different authorities, according to which RNP 07L exposes eight times more residents than the RNP-ILS 01 alternative, that is 271,483 to 400,000 inhabitants against 33,791, and 96% of overflights breached noise standards, 100% at night. The route has been in use since April 2025 and extended until October 2026. The costing comes from a residents' collective, not from a public authority.

Belgium's three main trade union confederations (ACV-CSC, ABVV-FGTB, ACLVB-CGSLB) called a national interprofessional strike for 12 May 2026. Brussels Airport officially asked airlines to cancel approximately 50% of their departing flights, with an estimated impact of 60,000 passengers. Public transport (trains, buses, metro) is also disrupted nationwide. Brussels Airlines separately reported an adjusted EBIT loss of EUR 55 million in Q1 2026 (despite +11% more flights), due to higher fuel costs driven by the Middle East crisis.

Visit Brussels −€5.7M: the 2026 Iris Festival did take place on a single day (Saturday 9 May), confirming the cut announced in March. The budget trajectory 22 → 8M EUR by 2029 is maintained. The City of Brussels (alderman Wauters) provided complementary entertainment (programme 'Enjoy BXL by terraces').