While maintaining that the government's rent reform proposals were a step in the right direction, Azzjoni Nazzjonali yesterday said they were not courageous enough, and called for the enshrining in the Constitution of the rights of property owners to dispel their lack of trust.
Referring to the recently published White Paper, which states that the problem in the rental market was due to the lack of trust property owners have in the government, AN leader Josie Muscat said the reform should be carried out in a way that ensured permanent peace of mind.
This would bury, once and for all, the fear that the rights to private property can fall victim to unilateral decisions as had happened in 1979, Dr Muscat said.
AN believed that a thriving rental market could fulfill an indispensable social function and expressed its disappointment at the lack of measures to incentivise it.
A thriving rental market would also mean the government would have to invest less in social housing, while the need for new development would be reduced, alleviating the impact on the environment.
Pointing out the shortcomings of the White Paper, Dr Muscat said the blanket sunset clause of 20 years on the rent of commercial property was "plain wrong" and a "serious injustice", leading to unfair competition, and should be redressed.
Businesses that rented property at market values were competing with others renting at nominal prices, he pointed out.
AN proposed that those with a turnover of €50,000, or less, should be given a sunset clause of eight years, while those with a bigger turnover should be given five.
It also believed that the proposal whereby the rent cannot be inherited for more than one generation was "lame" since, in many cases, the current tenant is himself an inheritor of a rented property.
It proposed that if the current tenant was under 50 years old, the rent could not be inherited.
It also called for a study to identify how taxation on rent would negatively impact the market, with the aim of revising it, and proposed that those who opted to keep their buildings vacant would have to keep them maintained.
"No one has the right to undermine the value of other people's property and diminish the state of their urban environment by leaving their own dilapidated," Dr Muscat said.
AN questioned whether the government has made any revenue analysis of the reforms.
The majority of tenants falling under the 1959 laws were pensioners, who, in most cases, had a diminishing disposable income and would suffer most from these reforms, possibly falling below the poverty line, it pointed out, proposing that the government would put aside the increased revenue from taxes on rented property to subsidise the rents of those who genuinely needed assistance.
AN also questioned how the government justified the squatters of public land in St Thomas Bay and Mellieħa, wondering whether it was going to start discriminating between those who squatted on private property as opposed to public land.
AN could not understand why political parties have, once again, been exempted from a law that applied to the rest of society. It challenged them to state how they would be benefitting from this anomaly and to publish the list of these properties and their market value.
"Malta cannot afford to maintain the practice whereby political parties have one law and the rest of society has another," Dr Muscat said.