One seriously doubts whether anybody has read the pamphlet on the Rent Reform White Paper that was dropped in our mailboxes (at huge cost to the country) given that the papers are full of stories about the Simshar tragedy, the bus strike, and other issues, but absolutely none about the important rent reform bill.

Undoubtedly, this being Malta, when the White Paper becomes legislation everybody will wake up and, as happened in so many other cases, the last being the Crowne Plaza Development Brief, everybody will cry foul.

Tackling rent reform has long been overdue, let us say for the past 50 years, since what was legislated due to the war and the consequent poverty then, has remained there until now.

Even though a cut-off period was established in 1995 as a starter on the road to full reform, people still did not believe anything would change, neither landlords nor tenants. They just continued to grow older. Ninety-four per cent of all lease contracts entered into before 1946 were Lm120 or less per annum. Of 18,654 dwellings rented before 1996, almost half were Lm50 or less.

While there is a huge glut of vacant housing stock, home ownership has increased from 68 per cent in 1995 to 75.2 per cent in 2006, while the value of mortgage accounts during the same period increased from Lm442m to Lm865m with the per capita value rising from Lm11,400 in 2003 to Lm17,800 in 2007. It’s as we all suspected: our young people are getting more and more into debt as the housing stock is limited and prices keep going up. So, even if for no other reason, it is important to free the market and get the landlords to believe more in the rental market, and bring to the market vacant housing stock that has either been mired in inheritance issues or else abandoned due to the uneconomic costs of rehabilitation.

Having said that, we believe that a reform, which aims to establish a more just and level playing field, should not begin by exempting party clubs or band clubs, let alone bocci clubs or pigeon clubs, from the reform. Would not that re-create a second class of landlords?

The very first recommendation states the importance of unequivocal bi-partisan support that no party in government will resort to interventionist measures to address housing issues. We would welcome a clear government decision to remove all properties it has taken from people under one guise or another, by expropriation or any other means, and hand them back, with a clear and definite timetable, to their rightful owners. Even Poland, and other former communist countries have moved faster than we have on this thorny issue.

The White Paper dwells at length on the issue of commercial properties with reason because commercial properties should have never had their rents locked by a law aimed at preventing residential units from coming under the clutches of greedy landlords. The GRTU has come out strongly, as reported in this paper two weeks ago, against this part of the reform. It has come out with the brainwave that rent reform should address residential units but not commercial properties. This beggars belief: how can GRTU countenance the fact that two shops next to each other where one pays Lm200 a week in rent and the other Lm200 a year? On the contrary, we urge the government to increase the rapid implementation of the full liberalization of this sector. This is the private sector we’re talking about: the government has no right to take our taxes so that Mr X does not go out of business, any more than we have any right to obtain government help to continue working.

As regards the residential sector, we would like to make two preliminary remarks:

• We would have liked a distinction to have been made between those who have no other property and rent and those who do have other property and rent as well. Actually, there is such a distinction in the White Paper but with an income of e25,000 or an economic worth of e125,000 it will probably hardly affect anybody at all. A form of means testing must be brought in.

• There is also a recommendation that in order to ensure that a benchmark of what constitutes a fair market value for the level of rent to be charged for a property, the government should identify and introduce an index mechanism that will establish the market value of the level of rent for a premises in a particular area and locality. Though not so apparent today, this will create a huge problem later on. For you just cannot introduce a one-size fits all rule for rents as these vary from one street to the next, even from one end of a street to the other, according, for example, to whether they have views or not, and so on.

All in all, the proposed reform is long overdue and credit must be given to those who have finally enabled it to see the light of day. As has already been clear from the public meeting that Minister John Dalli had with sections of the population, there is a huge complexity in this area as people have enormous creativity in such legal matters. As the White Paper itself states, the reform will entail a reform of the Civil Code. Great care must be taken to cover all eventualities so that the end result will respect the spirit of the law and not create further injustices.

Lastly, we feel that although the document mentions the social aspect of the present lease laws, a structure, a net, should be created to cater for those cases that inevitably will face problems, perhaps even hardship and poverty, as a result of this reform.