There can be no environmental or cultural heritage conservation without adequate planning legislation and a proper structure plan

Until 50 years ago, Malta’s heritage had survived through some rather arcane legislation, consisting of the old Antiquities Protection Ordinance of 1925 and the Aesthetics Building Ordinance, which had as its main purpose “the safeguarding of the symmetry of surrounding buildings”. These laws were essentially framed for protection of monuments, rather than for the conservation of natural beauty, and they had very few teeth.

In 1961, an old and primitive code of police law, which curiously had provisions in it covering building, was amended by declaring the whole of Malta a ‘Planning Area’. And through this fortuitous amendment, the Planning Area Permits Board was formed and, in 1970, the Town and Country Planning Act was passed by the Nationalist government. But although enacted it was never put into force. And it was revoked by a Labour government some eight years later without it ever having had the force of law.

The Labour government then introduced the Building Development Areas Act with the power to grant building permits all over Malta. This Act actually revoked all planning schemes and set out policies on building permits that were not site specific. Importantly, there was no structure plan and no development zones. Its major shortcoming was that it did not recognise the particular geographic limitations of Malta – treating Malta as though its size was infinite! Everything was effectively up for grabs.

This led to the period of greatest abuse in our planning system. The fate of planning permits and the environment were largely in the hands of the relevant Minister for Public Works, who tended, in most cases, to wield that power as though Maltese land was his personal fiefdom, there to serve not the country’s needs but the political agenda of his party, or even his own personal whims.

On the arrival of a new Nationalist government determined to sort out the tangled planning development mess which they had inherited, a Building Permits (Temporary Provisions) Act was put in place in 1988 to bring some order to the situation while Malta’s Structure Plan was drawn up.

The Structure Plan – the first ever – was completed in 1990 and the Building Permits (Temporary Provisions) law continued to hold sway until 1992, when the Planning Development Act was passed and Malta’s first national structure plan and a proper regulatory authority, the Planning Authority, were fully established.

For three decades up to 1992, therefore, through successive building booms – as speculators and anybody with money to invest in Malta bought land and buildings – the construction developments of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, were allowed to let rip with no proper control being exercised, massive political abuse by the individual ministers of governments then in power which used land as a means of boosting political support – as well as in some cases lining their own pockets – with consequent irreparable damage to the countryside and the built environment.

I regard 1992, when Malta’s Planning Authority was formed, as the turning point – when for the first time in three decades some sort of order was to be imposed on Malta’s built and natural environment. The perils of non-planning were behind us we must naively have thought.

But of course life is never as neat and simple as that. Within 10 years of its establishment, the Planning Authority became the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, as the realisation grew that planning for building development on its own made little sense unless full account was taken of the impact on the environment. And also as Malta began gearing up to join the European Union, where it was known that the emphasis on conformity to environmental regulation would be high. In a small country like Malta, where every construction development invariably had a direct impact on the environment, this made eminent good sense.

But the essential need to establish a clear firewall between political intrusion (through the Minister for the Environment) into planning decisions and into the day-to-day processes of Mepa eluded us. The construction development juggernaut rolled on unabated. For a start, politicians of both parties appeared to be in the pockets of the construction industry. Furthermore, often the people put in to the key planning Board and Planning Commission posts were carefully picked not to rock the political boat. Sometimes they had clear conflicts of interest.

Moreover, planning case law had been built up in such a way as to allow very wide interpretation of the planning regulations. One of the most abused aspects was the so-called Outside Development Zone (ODZ ) applications, where under certain circumstances the Board was allowed to sanction development in an area where the law said it could not. This was interpreted so liberally that any clever architect could make a case for sanctioning, thus making a complete mockery of the development zone concept, with agricultural land and scenic areas increasingly built upon.

To cap it all, flouting of the law was endemic. Illegal structures were built, then sanctioned instead of being removed. Enforcement of the law was honoured more in the breach than the observance and, for the most part, there was simply not the political will to enforce it.

The situation was exacerbated by a relentless surge in property construction caused by lax building controls and the repatriation under a tax amnesty of Maltese money invested in banks abroad. All this reached a head just before the last general election four years ago, when a number of notorious cases of abuse and corruption – and a general public dissatisfaction with the progressive loss of Malta’s natural environment – led to the ‘environmental deficit’, as I called it, becoming the key election issue in 2008.

The environmental deficit had been given particular prominence when the government pushed through a vote in Parliament extending, rather than reducing, the building development zones to placate some voters and the construction industry in an act of institutionalised vandalism carried out in the face of overwhelming public concern. Under pressure, Prime Minister Gonzi, fighting for his political life, gave an undertaking that if he were voted back to government he would make tackling the environmental deficit his top priority.

He was indeed returned to power in 2008 and a root and branch review of the Environment and Planning Authority and the other regulatory authorities was put in train The upshot is that the Environment and Planning Authority has been greatly improved. It is now much better led. A new Development and Planning Act has been passed. Political interference has on the whole been notable by its absence. Confidence in the planning process has improved. A National Environmental Policy has been put in place with clear targets and benchmarks for improvement.

While the last four years have seen improvements, the danger of renewed political chicanory in the run-up to the next election remains. The reality is that the last 50 years of planning and environmental history have been a battle about greed, exploitation, abuse, misgovernance and political ineptitude, which the current improvements cannot ever erase.

Martin Scicluna is the

Director General of Malta’s only independent think-tank,

the Today Public Policy Institute.

He writes here in his personal capacity