The amnesties on planning infringements currently being contemplated by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority are, at best, an exercise in defeatism in the face of several thousand cases of illegal development that have been festering for years on end and which have not been brought to their conclusions.

Instead, what is being contemplated is the blanket sanctioning of widespread illegalities.  Such a move sends the completely wrong message to the effect that you can get away with illegal development as long as you bide your time.

With planning in this country, give its size, being an extremely delicate area, it is no wonder that environmentally-minded NGOs are up in arms over the prospect of the amnesties, even though the exact details of the policy are still to be made public.

The general plan is to wipe Mepa’s enforcement slate clean of the 10,000 or so cases of illegal development that had taken place before 2013, as well as regards illegalities committed outside development zones before the planning authority had been set up in 1994.  In the process, Mepa is expected to reap some €20 million in fees paid by contraveners.

There are convincing arguments in the amnesty’s favour. With a clean slate, Mepa enforcement staff would at long last be able to move on to and apply their full attention to newer and perhaps more serious enforcement cases, as well as the argument that Mepa could very well do with an additional €20 million, which could be fed into different aspects of its multi-faceted operations.

And while the full details of the amnesty have not yet been disclosed, and as such full judgement on the matter will be reserved until they are announced in their entirety, there are certain tenets that stand over and above the nitty-gritty details of what illegalities the amnesties will cover and how they will be settled.

The numerous counterarguments that through such a policy Mepa will become a facilitator as opposed to a regulator of development, and that such sanctions foster further abuse, in fact, hold a great deal of water.

There is another major problem with the concept of this amnesty. This appears to be a case in which planning rules and regulations were not properly enforced against thousands of people who broke them, and now an amnesty is to be introduced to make up for the lack of action.  But where does this leave the people who had abided by the rules to their detriment while their neighbours disregarded them to their benefit?

Should those who had abided by the law perhaps be given a moratorium period in which to carry out the same illegalities as their neighbours had before 2013, so as to level the playing field?

This is not just about planning or the environment, this is also about democracy and social justice.  Is the country really willing, with the stroke of a pen, to allow 10,000 contraventions of the law to go unpunished?

Instead of dreaming up amnesties for planning contraventions, the authorities should be devising concrete plans of action of how to best address and finalise these thousands of backlog cases, and applying the law to those who broke it. This has to be done through the imposition of the appropriate fines and the rectification of illegalities through demolition or through the imposition of other, perhaps less severe corrective measures on the owners.

This would, of course, prove to be a highly unpopular move with those 10,000-odd people whose cases have been lingering for so long, for one reason or another, and who are now are now tantalised with the prospect of their intransigencies being regularised and rendered legal.

But offering a blanket amnesty to so many illegalities in one fell swoop would also reflect very poorly on a government that has already been accused on so many occasions of relegating the environment and planning issues as secondary to business and investment concerns.