The decision announced last week, that owners of residential units which infringe the sanitary laws are being allowed to regularise their situation, is welcome.

No one has dared tell the public how many residential units are caught in this trap, but the word on the street is that a good part of Buġibba and Marsascala are in this situation.

What this means is that such residential units cannot be sold as prospective buyers will not be given a loan from the bank because architects are obliged to draw up a report to certify that the abode in question’s dimensions (etc) are within stipulated regulation.

All this derives from lax enforcement over the past years when this sort of abuse went by unchecked. Today, matters are different: To get a compliance certificate you have to fulfil all the conditions and be within all the regulations. And only if you get a compliance certificate, you can get an Enemalta connection.

Having said that, one must also point out that sometimes even this is circumvented: There have been cases when the electricity supply is provided through a garage registered separately. The authorities must also make sure that the recent softening approach towards temporary connections is not abused in a similar manner.

The new system should therefore jog the stagnated situation in the real estate market and hopefully add to some growth in construction and other related sectors which are facing a downturn. But there is also a darker side to this issue.

This ‘amnesty’ should not become a precedent, though we very much fear it will. It has happened on more than one occasion when election campaigns are in full swing.

Each time, Mepa and its complicated process is being sucked into the campaign, and each time, the government of the day is pressed to open its hands and grant what Mepa has blocked.

In some cases, undoubtedly Mepa’s decisions to block things would be wrong, but in some other cases it would be right. By relaxing the rules every time an election draws near, the country is the ultimate loser because despite all its efforts to enforce the rules, we seem to suffer from amnesia every time we go to the polls.

The sanitary rules are there because they make sense, they are not rules created to cause undue harassment to people, residents and developers alike. There are rules, for instance, regarding the size of rooms, and the least distance that rooms in different residential units can be from each other.

In many of the cases being regularised now, the rooms are far too near the rooms of the other residences, the height too low or the rooms too small.

On a general level, one can see that many of the apartments that are being built are on the small side. They show you a main bedroom, and there is barely room to fit in a double bed.

This, to our way of seeing things, is the completely wrong way to go about things. It is no wonder that so many apartments lie unsold or even unfinished for they just have no potential, they are white elephants that will plague our towns and villages for years to come.

Even if this and future governments continue to relax the rules or enforcement, such tiny boxes will not find people to purchase them. Experience continually shows that people prefer good buildings, with good-sized rooms, and proper building techniques as against shoddy buildings, shady developers and the like. It is only those who are unwary of such pitfalls, and those who are naïve and enter contracts without first checking everything properly that get caught in these traps.

Ultimately, this is the reflection one always makes any time the government of the day comes up with some sort of amnesty, and this is one such incident. An amnesty always gives the wrong perception: Those who have obeyed the laws and the rules feel cheated because while they obeyed the rules, there are those who did not and they are benefiting. It also means that people get together to disobey the rules, and our political instability means they can get away with it.

While this relaxation of the rules may be on the soft side, there are many other more serious infringements of the rules that time and again are regularised. A case in point regards those who abusively have built summer rooms on public land. Again, there have been cases where these even had electricity connections.

Our position is not against the residents in these buildings without a permit, for many times they are the victims twice over of the abuse, especially since they may have purchased the building without knowing about its problems, and they deserve support and redress. But what we are against is the way some contractors have got away with putting up such shoddy dwellings, and the way that our political system sometimes works.