The chairman of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority dismisses public criticism of the local plans as media hype, claiming that Mepa is in fact setting everyone's mind at rest by creating "lasting value" (Malta Economic Update, November 6). Unfortunately, in most people's minds, nothing could be further from the truth.

The way to create lasting value is surely to provide a secure, well-organised environment which fosters a sense of belonging. This requires consistently good planning and design at the comprehensive as well as the local level to avoid conflicts of interests, scale, function, appearance, and so on.

One way to destroy lasting value would be to grant planning permission, for example, for a high-rise development abutting the small chapel square at San Pawl tat-Targa. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a "road map" to work out that this will ruin the square. Another way is to permit a neighbour to blatantly extend his property up to one's courtyard wall, blocking out daylight and sunlight, in spite of the fact that the property has already been extended once to its maximum permitted area.

Of course, these are not isolated examples. They are typical of the way Mepa continues to permit development that is destroying our public and private places. It is widely accepted that the wholesale plundering of Malta's physical environment began decades ago and Mepa, far from putting a stop to it, is in many people's minds culpably implicated in the whole process. It is not development that people are opposed to but rampant development, bad design, poor planning, shoddy construction - and a string of dubious practices that are probably better left unsaid.

People are justifiably critical of Mepa because they have this strange idea that it was set up to protect the environment, not oversee its destruction.

So, when the chairman claims that Mepa is setting everyone's mind at rest and creating lasting value, who does he think he's fooling?