An unpromising promise

We have all been promised that within a month we will have available for our perusal a White Paper on Rent Law Reform. The last time this promise was made, in the autumn of 2004, the minister responsible took a few more months lee way. Perhaps Minister John Dalli merely needs to review the draft that has lain unseen for all these years before he can keep the promises made by his predecessor.

It should be one elephant of a reform proposal given its mastodontic gestation period and one reasonably hopes it will not be a mouse that will see the light given that previous similar announcements had given birth to nothing at all. Caution, prudence and indeed scepticism are certainly warranted by the long delay.

If the government's actions in 2007 are anything to go by, the promised reform may be nothing of the kind.

In 2007, the PN government confirmed the actions of the 1979 MLP government expropriating an untold number of properties without compensation by rendering these leases redeemable for a pittance. In 2007, the PN government closed the last loophole left, shattering the hopes of a few owners and securing the electoral loyalty of a much larger number of tenants and their families.

Will Mr Dalli express the Cabinet's electoral calculations or will he seek to release pressure on the property market through sensible rent reform? It is not merely a matter of justice to landlords who have been obliged to bear the burden of social and opportunistic housing for over 60 years. It is a matter of having the vision to acknowledge the unbearable pressures placed, particularly on young families, by the exorbitant price of property and the near total absence of reasonable rents.

While property markets stumble and fall in other economies, ours is sustained by a consolidated tradition of property hoarding unequalled elsewhere. Few places on earth boast of such a vast surplus of housing as that documented in Malta in the 2005 census.

Elsewhere economists quake at the sight of far less. Here our laws and the lack of them sustain a property bubble in the blind faith that it will be eternal.

At two persons per property, it would take an increase of population of 100,000 to occupy the 50,000 said to be vacant in 2005. The native population is expected to decrease in coming years and nobody can reasonably expect an influx of 100,000 foreigners in the foreseeable future. Over the past three years the number of vacant properties must certainly have grown.

Just to keep up the fun, the government introduced the FAR policy through Mepa in 2006. It is purported to be the basis for all the high-rise buildings under construction and 13 pending applications for such developments. It is a belief in property speculation and the untrammelled right of speculators to put their money anywhere they choose.

Who needs high-rise development in country with a record housing surplus? The answer is: Who cares who needs it when speculators want it. If there are serious people, and very rich people are assumed to be very serious people by definition, who want to invest in such projects, why should the government interfere? Funny that the government bans onshore wind farms on aesthetic reasons and then pulls the door off its hinges to allow high-rise development. Whatever happened to planning?

Gathering dust somewhere in the Mepa archives lies a document entitled the Housing Topic Paper; it makes perfect sense. It points out the growing housing surplus and the associated risks, the unstoppable squandering of resources in land and building materials. Every politician in office since 1995 has had this technical document at his/her disposal.

Its advice is unequivocal. It has been uniformly ignored.

The very idea that Mr Dalli should be able to propose a far-sighted and wide-ranging rent law reform addressing social injustices and economic imperatives seems almost preposterous when set against this anarchic background. He would have to take on his Cabinet colleagues and all their backers in the construction industry. My guess is that he is too shrewd to be wise.

I am not in the least inclined to give the latest White Paper promise the benefit of the doubt. Still, I would love to be surprised. I promise to declare that I am astonished if the reform is anything more than a damp squib.

I would not be surprised to find that if and when any law is amended as a result of the White Paper, this will be held aloft as evidence of election promise-keeping and courageous legislation just as the 1995 rent law reform was boasted of undeservedly for years. And nearly half the population will be glad to believe it.

And so the years roll on. When, finally, the fat is in the fire, the present incumbents hope to be long gone or, if they are still around, they will claim that they could not have known, that they had not been warned in time and courageously embark on a repair of the catastrophe they will have caused. They are all environmentalists today are they not?

Dr Vassallo is the outgoing chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green party.