The decision on whether to give the go-ahead for the construction of a controversial Gozitan waste transfer station was postponed by a week because of a technical glitch in the planning authority's website.

The project's planning report was not uploaded completely because of its large size which meant that 40 pages from the environment impact assessment report were missing.

Malta Environment and Planning Authority chairman Austin Walker was informed of the glitch a few hours before yesterday's meeting during which the board had to take a decision on the application and decided to postpone it to allow people time to view the full report.

The project involves the construction of a waste transfer station which will receive and process non-hazardous waste and small amounts of hazardous waste before being shifted to Malta.

The application, submitted by WasteServ, has drawn harsh criticism from the Sannat and Xewkija local councils which argue that the development will be situated in an area of high heritage importance.

The Superintendence of Cultural Heritage has also objected to the project because of the archaeological sites in the earmarked site.

During the meeting, Mr Walker informed the board members of the missing pages in the report and apologised to the developers for the inconvenience.

Although the full report was available on the planning authority's internal system, it could not be accessed by the public.

It is not the first time Mepa has had this sort of problem. Mr Walker said that when files of a certain size were uploaded, several pages went missing.

"It was just a technical glitch in the software which will be rectified," Mr Walker said.