We refer to the report Controversial New School Accepts 300 Students (October 17). Now that the Archbishop’s Seminary primary school has opened we Tal-Virtù residents can already see through headmaster Fr David Cilia’s claim that “with 450 new students who will start over the next three years, there will be a maximum of 32 minivans. From my experience, very few parents have the time to drop off and pick up their children from school”.

A visit to the school entrance during opening/closing hours reveals that a great many pupils are, in fact, ferried by their parents. The resultant traffic confusion will get worse next year and the following as the school accepts more students.

The Malta Environment and Planning Authority approved the expansion of the school’s student population from 250 to 825 without even asking for a traffic impact statement study this will have on the residential streets of Rabat and Tal-Virtù – despite the latter area being designated by Mepa as a “residential priority area”. Nor was any traffic management plan requested.

Mepa washed its hands of this responsibility, saying this was within Transport Malta’s competence. Yet, when we wrote to Transport Malta asking why it did not warrant such a study it did not even have the decency to reply. Perhaps if it had, an inconvenient truth would have emerged.

The school’s new staff car park currently under construction will provide another access to the school right through the heart of Tal-Virtù. Yet the Mepa permit does not oblige the Seminary to ensure that this does not turn into a de facto second entrance to the school.

Mepa never replied to the concerned residents’ various letters, memoranda, petitions or judicial protest highlighting the various other flaws in the Mepa case officer’s assessment of the school’s application and the planning policies that were being broken. The Mepa chairman wrote to say the authority would “start the process of investigating your complaints” and that “you shall be duly informed of these proceedings in due course”. But no reply has been received, despite the residents’ lawyer’s reminders.

Although the Mepa board dismissed the authority’s audit officer’s scathing report, claiming the extension fell under a national policy, this conclusion is debatable.

The “national policy” only deals with the removal of an exam, not where new schools/extensions should be built. One could have argued there was no need to build the Seminary’s primary school next to its secondary school as they have a completely different set of teachers. Also, the school could have used the ballot system instead of exams.

This Mepa board decision sets a precedent whereby any further expansion of this school and other projects can be justified even if they are completely at odds with the local area plan.

Significantly, the application to expand St Augustine College, Pietà, submitted at roughly the same time as the Seminary school’s, is still not approved over a year later, with the applicant being asked to change various site plans and submit a traffic management plan. Strange how differently the Seminary school’s application was treated.

The reaction of Mepa, Transport Malta and the local Church’s highest officials to the alleged injustices surrounding this case confirms the impression many have formed that they are inconsistent, weak with the strong and strong with the weak and that there is acquiescence in rule-bending at the highest levels to pay only lip service to the “better quality of life for all” these institutions are supposed to ensure.