Editorial

For a long time and with some regularity there has been a clamour for reform of the rent laws. Alternattiva Demokratika recently announced it was launching a petition it hopes will attract 10 per cent of registered voters (something in the region of 31,000 signatories) - enough to force a referendum on the issue.

One factor that needs to be examined in the context of this exercise is the influence of empty accommodation on the rental and property market. According to a survey carried out by the Housing Authority in 2003, some 22,000 dwellings in Malta are unoccupied; not by choice but because landlords refuse to rent them out for a pittance.

We would have preferred it if the profile of these empty dwelling places were available. Are they garrets in the main, property of some distinction, or in between? How many of them are habitable, how many are hulks? What is the approximate market price of each? A great deal has been made of an unscientifically claimed market value of anything between Lm750 million and Lm1.5 billion. How many of them are structures to which a young couple could be attracted? Once this figure of unoccupied dwellings is used to demonstrate one point or another, as it is, the relevance of these questions is self-evident.

On the matter of archaic rent laws, the facts are straightforward enough. There are tenants who pay between Lm10 and Lm80 a year for the property they rent and have been paying this amount for donkey's years. During this time the price of property and the income of the tenants have gone up. Landlords claim with justification that they are not getting anywhere near a just return on their assets. Not only, their tenant enjoys possession with little or no responsibility for the property's maintenance.

Landlords resent this, understandably. They are naturally made more furious by the fact that an assessment of property by the Inland Revenue does not take rental income into account, still less does it consider a price for the property based on rent capitalisation. They have more than a point.

They resent even more the fact that tenants can establish residency for life unto the fourth and fifth generation and beyond. The landlord is, in effect, not only deprived of a fair return but as the laws stands he has little or no chance of its re-acquisition. Here is something the government should find no difficulty in doing something about.

Earlier this year, at a meeting in Castille, the Prime Minister declared that his government understood the position of landlords who received a meagre, unrealistic rent and were obliged to carry out repairs that exceeded rental income. He also understood their chagrin at seeing their property 'inherited' by the tenant's family. The government should prohibit tenancy-by-inheritance except where there is just cause at the stroke of a pen.

The distortions of the rental market caused as a consequence of the current laws should not be loaded against the landlord, whose task is not to provide social housing. At the same time, tenants should also be protected from the clutches of any Maltese Rachmann. Any liberalisation needs to be guided by the Latin axiom, modus in rebus.

Still, once the government understands the anomalies of the present situation, it should have no difficulty in pre-empting a referendum on issues created by the rent laws. As a first step it should prohibit tenancy-by-inheritance and liberalise rents, in steps if necessary, in those cases that are blatantly unjust to the landlord and wholly justified by the changed financial circumstances of the tenant.