The tourist sector in Malta has gone through yet another season of adversity. One of its identified maladies was the poor state of the environment – and the most obvious ailment was the fact that, at the peak of the tourist season, Malta looked like a construction site, with bulldozers ruling the roost and tower cranes crowding the skyline.

This not only scares away tourists and puts them off a second visit; it also has a negative bearing on the lives of’ Maltese citizens, who have to cope with the manifold problems of pollution all year round.

The construction industry is the perpetrator. It is driven by rapacious speculators who, so often, behave as if they are lords of all they survey and manage to achieve their ends.

Rural Affairs and the Environment Minister George Pullicino (himself an architect by profession) has now sought Cabinet approval of a memorandum designed to regulate construction site management.

Proposed Regulations

It has been reported that these regulations will, in future, oblige contractors to appoint site managers at all major construction sites. Such managers would be accessible for public enquiries, or other communications, around the clock, and construction sites will have to be properly cordoned off.

If and when passed, these regulations will apply to all major projects. Projects under this heading are sites with a frontage of 25 metres or more, and of four storeys or more. They must also involve excavation work three metres deep or more.

The regulations will also apply to projects in “areas of high development density” such as Sliema and St Julians, St Paul’s Bay, Mellieha and Marsalforn, and will prohibit construction work in tourist zones during the tourist season, unless specifically authorised by the Malta Tourist Authority.

This initiative is long overdue but does it, in reality, offer more of the same?

There are in existence minimal regulations regulating the construction industry. Construction sites are supposed to be cordoned off and sprinklers are required to control excessive dust. Construction material must be adequately covered during transport. All of these regulations are only honoured in the breach. By merely putting them together in one composite set of regulations, the situation is not likely to improve.

If anything, there will now be more loopholes available to the insatiable wolves.

Does this mean that the regulations will not apply to major projects with a frontage of 24 metres, and to smaller projects in areas with development density less than that prevailing in Sliema?

Question

The Times gave a cautious editorial “warm welcome” to the Minister’s initiative, but asked “Will It work?”

In the same editorial, The Times asked whether this is “Another Chimera?” And it raised the issue of enforcement, which it described as “the rock on which so many other environmentally friendly initiatives have foundered in the past”.

The answer seems to be obvious and gives rise to an even more pertinent question: is this a foil, intended to put critics off the scent?

A government that says what it means, and means what it says, would have known how to administer the Litter Act, once it was on the Statute Book. It would have been able to regulate the activities of the construction industry in terms of the elementary provisions at its disposal. It would have found a way to nip in the bud all illegal building. It would surely have achieved some success in reducing exhaust emissions from vehicles, and from other notorious sources of pollution.

In each case, it has failed to rise to the occasion.

At the heart of the matter is the issue of political will and the competence to implement that will.

Words and good intentions are not enough. Neither is the formality of adding more regulations to the Statute Book.

At issue is the Rule of Law and its enforcement without fear or favour in the face of speculative greed, the high-handedness of ruthless profiteers, and procrastinating or fumbling bureaucrats.

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