It was a pleasure to read the erudite article by my old friend Edwin Vella ‘Tax on vacant properties?’ (November 3). He dealt exhaustively with the moral and policy issues of taxation of property.

As Assistant Commissioner of Inland Revenue in 1965 Edwin roped me in as consultant valuer where I served for some 30 years.

In the course of my duties I must have inspected some 25,000 properties and, with my background in planning, became acutely conscious of the grave injustices and physical harm which the prolongation of the wartime rent laws were causing.

Politicians invariably told me that “it was political dynamite”. They resorted to giving away or subsidising home-ownership plots or even new houses on agricultural land causing urban sprawl and degeneration of the urban cores.

Meanwhile ownership issues were getting more entangled as estates could not be partitioned with the number of heirs mushrooming and some properties in the estates being free and others requisitioned or rent restricted.

As a result of mounting pressure by owners and plannersculminating in an opinion poll by The Sunday Times in 2007, which showed that a substantial proportion of “protected” tenants were better off than their landlords, some remedial measures have been taken in the last 20 years.

But after 75 years a substantial number of properties still have protected tenants and it may be 100 years before all properties are returned to their rightful owners. In the meantime they degenerate further.

An aspect often overlooked is that renewal to present day standards may often have to go across property boundaries such as amalgamating the traditional terran and meżżanin or hiving off rooms from a very large house to make adjoining small houses more comfortable.

These may be impeded by a ‘protected’ tenant in one ofthe units.

I know of a case of a ‘protected’ single tenant in a nine-roomed house refusing to budge and blocking the improvement of three other units which are vacant.

Tax the owners?

Sopra corna bastonate.