Slowly but surely the reform of Mepa is getting there; there being putting in place what the Nationalist Party promised during the last election campaign. Last week’s national conference saw a broad appreciation of the outlines of the proposed reform plus the suggestion of some adjustments to be made here and there.

So far, the proposed reform is being built along the lines proposed by the reform document presented by the Management Efficiency Unit, in the sense of strengthening the processes rather than proposing a radical re-organisation of the whole set-up.

The public still does not know what compelled Prime Minister Gonzi to promise a Mepa reform. We do not know what he got to know in those chaotic months before the barely-won election in 2008. He was never specific as to what kind of reform Mepa would get. The signal he sent the electorate, when he took Mepa from George Pullicino’s hands into his hands was that Mepa needed his own way of handling, a decision which gives one sort of impression, but which places the prime minister right at the front, where perhaps a prime minister should never be.

Other than that, there was never, at no time, any other indication as to which direction the reform should have been headed. Towards a radical redimensioning, as Prof. Serracino Inglott has suggested, or towards a more pro-environment stance, as PL is saying?

What the MEU reform plan suggests is a tightening up of the procedures, putting the emphasis on speed targets (although we still have to see if this will work in practice) and making a lot of noise on ODZ ‘zero tolerance’ (though we are coming to see this is not so zero as many may think). Other than that, most points of the four pillars as proposed would seem to be tinkering with the system, tightening up a screw here and there, but no major changes.

Prime Minister Gonzi was most clear last week: this is the fourth reform of Mepa, he said, and there is nothing to say there will not be other reforms in the coming years. Nothing is written in stone.

One has to take the long view: on the one hand, the present system is a far, far cry from the non-system in the 1980s where, as Dr Gonzi quite rightly put it, politicians decided if you were going to get rich or if you were going to remain poor.

Nevertheless, for all the improvement Mepa made to the system, the main issue, that is, the gobbling up of Malta’s prime resource, land, has gone on apace, after the voracious 1970s and 1980s came the equally voracious 1990s and this present decade. Today, for all the (fake?) insistence and accompanying scandals about ODZs, our construction industry is still going on at full swing, creating flats that are not sold, and dwelling units that remain unlived-in. And there is still a lot more construction that could be made, if one considers all the space in the development zone that is still not built, and all the two-storey units that can be turned into a basement plus three storeys plus a penthouse.

The issue still facing most of Malta, whether Malta can take this amount of construction, whether the infrastructure will be there before the construction begins or rather, as has always been the case, around 30 years after the construction has ended, is still not settled. The theory underlying Mepa seems to have remained the same: consider each application without reference to the totality and if this application has the right to be approved, then approve it and let it join the rest.

Nor does this reform seem to tackle the issue of quality, of design. This paper is super-sure that if we all could go back 40 years, we would not have allowed an area such as Bugibba to become what it has become, nor any other high-density area like Tignè. It would not seem that the proposed reform will really tackle this issue, either.

The past years and months have seen public opinion inflamed about certain applications and permits that in the opinion of many should have never been granted. In a way, it has to be admitted that the proposed reform does want to tackle these issues, although one may equally say it’s bolting the stable long after the horse has escaped.

But last week’s conference also pointed out at the huge backlog of enforcements that have lain there in many cases for long years and about which nothing much has been done. On the other hand, and there’s an issue of justice here, an ordinary citizen in a village core who seeks a permit to repair a roof many times is informed that his balcony, for instance, changed years ago from wood to aluminum, is in breach of the law and without a permit and has to be tackled first before any application can be considered. While at the same time big developers go ahead with illegal developments and nobody does anything about that.

One fundamental issue thus is; what is the use of reforming Mepa when the Mepa of today still has to be given the proper tools to do its duty. Prudence and right reason would suggest that first Mepa be brought up to standard, and only then should reform be considered.

The risk is that, as Dr Gonzi himself admitted, in a few years’ time, this reformed Mepa will require yet another reform. This is the way of things, maybe, but surely the pre-electoral public opinion was looking for something more definite than a ‘Mepa simper reformanda’.