Editorial

Addressing the media at Castille yesterday, the Prime Minister, Dr Lawrence Gonzi, devoted the major part of his introduction to the highly controversial extension of development zones, a day after the deadline for the submission of reactions and counter-proposals passed.

Dr Gonzi managed, to a large extent, to put the revision exercise into some perspective. He made the point, for example, that 18.5 per cent of the area now benefiting from the extension criteria - the criteria themselves, he noted, were hardly criticised - is already built-up, but at present outside development zones. The whole of Mtarfa, for example, was outside a development zone at present; while in other areas building had taken place which was covered by regular permits.

Another 25 per cent was made up of streets and open spaces, while he drew journalists' attention to the fact that no less than half a million square metres had already been proposed to be included for development in the revisions of local plans, which had been undergoing a consultation process since 1993.

The Prime Minister also made the point that a substantial part of the land freed for development according to the new criteria had been purchased by engaged or married couples from the Church before 1988, when the temporary development areas came into being.

Development of those plots has been frozen for all these years and Dr Gonzi said that it was a matter of social justice that they were now being given for development. Indeed, he said, this would go some way towards relieving the very real problem of skyrocketing property prices which young couples have to face, since a large proportion of the cost of property was the cost of the land itself.

However, there is one aspect of the problem in his otherwise cogent case for the extension exercise that Dr Gonzi did not mention. If the unfreezing of many plots acquired by couples and other owners so many years ago was a matter of justice, then what about the unfreezing of rents on so much property all around Malta, rents which have been frozen for over 60 years?

Surely the government realises that a healthy rental property market, which - except for short lets to foreigners and as holiday accommodation - disappeared a few decades ago, would help address the property problem particularly for those couples who cannot afford forking out tens of thousands of liri, besides hundreds of liri every month to repay their mortgage, when they could pay a reasonable rent until they afford to buy their own property.

It is obvious then that if the government says that it is guided by social justice in unfreezing land acquired over 18 years ago so that it can finally be developed for housing, the social justice argument becomes even more compelling in the case of landowners who receive a pittance in rent frozen at 1939 levels.

If there are victims of social injustice they are precisely owners of old property who have seen its value practically vanish because it is occupied by tenants who are also given the privilege of passing on their tenancy, after their death - at the same rent - to their next of kin or even to complete strangers who move in with them a couple of years before their death. Also, for these landowners who have been carrying this social burden for so long, inflation is not to be considered at all.

This gross distortion of property values is not only a growing social injustice but is also keeping owners of unoccupied old property from developing it for rental purposes. Very few owners have taken advantage of the 1995 amendment allowing new leases to be contracted freely by both owner and tenant, no doubt in view of the extraordinary protection which the law gives to tenants.

The government promised to review the unjust rent laws, and a report drawn up by a commission established some years ago was supposed to have already been published. Alternattiva Demokratika a year ago had launched a campaign for rent reform, with the intention of collecting 30,000 signatures for the present rent laws to be repealed in a referendum, but that campaign seems to have fizzled out.

So while the property situation worsens, some landowners remain at the mercy of their tenants, who have all but dispossessed them while paying them peanuts in rent, and when they agree to buy the property they occupy pay only a tiny fraction of its real worth.

So if the revision of boundaries is also, in some cases, a matter of social justice, it should be complemented by a radical reform of the rent laws which have perpetrated social injustice on an obscene scale for decades.