The window dressing authority

Following the recent revelations about the Malta Transport Authority's (ADT) suspension of its emission alert scheme, it can now be reclassified as the Window Dressing Authority. It can join the ranks of all those other parastatal bodies, commissions and quangos which create a falsely favourable impression of the government, instead of actually doing anything substantial.

What better term to describe an authority which has been taking the public for a ride for over a year? The Emission Alert SMS 4 Clean Air Campaign was announced with much fanfare in 2005. It was supposed to encourage civic-minded citizens to report vehicles belching out toxic and polluting fumes to the ADT.

Anybody who saw a car emitting clouds of exhaust fumes could alert the authority by means of a text message. At least three text messages reporting a particular vehicle were required to set the testing system in motion, preventing abuse by those people intent on vindictive or baseless reporting.

Similar campaigns are in place all over the world. In Jakarta, citizens are encouraged to inform the authorities of polluting public vehicles by snapping the culprits on their mobile phone and sending the image to the traffic authority. Malaysia followed suit and invited the public to help enforcement officers to keep an eye on traffic offenders so that action could be taken against them.

Citizens were requested to send pictures of the commission of traffic offences to a road safety website. Indonesia uses a text message alert system for people to lodge healthcare complaints.

In Edinburgh, the system has been used for the reporting of petty crimes and vandalism. If the messages lead to prosecution, the senders of the text message get a mobile phone top-up voucher.

In Malta, we were not so lucky. We simply had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our bit and we were assured that "the authority will call the owner of the car for an inspection within three days". The former chief executive officer of the ADT, Gianfranco Selvagi, said the system the authority had in place was "foolproof".

The campaign was off to a good start. In the first three days, 639 reports of excessive emissions were lodged and over the course of five years a total of 207,000 text messages were made to the ADT.

It seems that there were quite a few civic-minded people who were willing to play their part and to try to enforce anti-pollution laws.

Unfortunately, their faith in the ADT was totally misplaced. The ADT's "foolproof" system turned out to be not so foolproof after all. In fact, it was inoperative from 2008 to date, as the authority ignored more than 70,000 text messages reporting polluting cars.

This inaction was not publicised. The authority, which has public relations officers fielding queries round the clock, did not think it necessary to inform the members of the public that their text messages were being ignored. The matter was only brought to light because The Times honed in on the revelations made about this issue in the Auditor General's report.

Even then, the ADT's only response was to issue a half-hearted apology and to try and defend itself by saying that random testing of vehicles and VRT tests had still been carried out regularly. In order to bolster this pathetic defence even further, the authority said that the campaign had only been suspended temporarily while the manual and time-consuming system was revamped and switched to an automated system.

The authority did not explain why no one bothered to tell the public that their texting was futile. But - we were told - testing of vehicles was to resume at once. The general reaction to this was one of derision, with only one lone PN apologist finding the ridiculous explanation satisfactory.

There is no way public trust in the ADT is going to be easily restored. It has managed to destroy a positive initiative which could have lead to the diminution of environmental pollution.

The increasingly sceptical public is attributing many possible explanations to the ADT's dereliction of duty. Someone suggested that the testing campaign was suspended in the run-up to the last general election.

This is not so far-fetched. We have all become accustomed to the laxity in enforcement mechanisms during the election campaign.

But it's more likely that the ADT is simply acting in much the same way that ministers and other authorities do - with a distinct lack of accountability or assumption of responsibility. No one ever shoulders responsibility for the cock-ups or discontinued schemes set up in a blaze of publicity.

Take some recent examples of such occurrences. The Commissioner for Children reported that the Child Abuse Hotline is no longer operational because of lack of funds. The Smart Women ICT training course with its surfeit of publicity has fizzled out miserably beyond the very basic stages. And the reaction from the ministers who had presided over the introduction of such schemes? Muted and dismissive.

Speaking about the ADT fiasco, Transport Minister Austin Gatt merely expressed his disappointment, but made no mention of who should assume responsibility for it. Nor did he utter the unutterable word "resignations". He could just as easily have been describing his mild disappointment at being served with a one type of cola instead of another.

With that kind of attitude being shown by our MPs, it's no wonder those working in the civil service and parastatal entities begin to emulate this blithe disregard for accountability. That is why we are lumped with underperforming authorities and pre-election schemes with bloated publicity budgets but little efficacy.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt