Minister Roderick Galdes is misleading the public when he states that the waiting list for social housing has been reduced by half, the Nationalist Party said Tuesday.
Just a few days ago, Minister Galdes told us that between 2024 and 2025 more than 900 families moved into new homes and that the waiting list had been cut by half compared to 2017.
While until recently the Minister had been quoting a figure of 1,600 pending applications, as of yesterday - through a Parliamentary Question he himself answered in the House of Representatives - it emerged that there are currently 1,890 pending applications on the social accommodation waiting list. This represents an increase of almost 300 compared to the amount that supposedly existed just a few weeks ago.
This is aside from the fact that even these figures are misleading because they do not reflect the real situation, the PN said.
To give the impression that the waiting list had been reduced, Minister Galdes removed from the list those applying for an "exchange" - meaning tenants who want to change their current unit. These applicants, totalling 750, have since 2017 been placed on a separate list, which dramatically reduced the apparent total, at least when compared to 2017, the year the Minister insists on using as his benchmark.
The waiting list was also reduced through the Nikru biex Nassistu scheme - essentially the same scheme, merely rebranded, that the Labour Government introduced in 2017 instead of the Kiri scheme, which the same Minister used to heavily criticise when Labour was in Opposition.
This means that after 12 years of Labour in government, the country remains in exactly the same situation, with applications not only failing to decrease but actually increasing by 300 in just a few months, despite the narrative that we are supposedly living in the "best of times".
The PN said that before the last election, the Minister boasted about the units he would be distributing and claimed that we would have more units than people on the waiting list. This, despite the fact that in the first years of a Labour Government, not a single unit was built.
In the same parliamentary speech on the 2026 Budget Estimates where he referred to the waiting list, Minister Galdes also boasted about a supposed ongoing government project to build hundreds of affordable apartments in several localities, including Kirkop.
Ironically, in the last hours it emerged that the Housing Authority's tender for the social housing apartment block in Kirkop has been revoked because the Department of Contracts found procedural shortcomings during the evaluation stage. This has forced the Authority to restart the assessment of this €3.7 million project from scratch.
The PN called on Minister Galdes to provide a clear explanation of what exactly led to this tender being revoked, and why the Public Contracts Review Board declared that environmental standard criteria at the construction stage had not been met. Minister Galdes must also explain how long this project is now expected to be delayed, given that the entire process will have to restart from the beginning.