Sixty-eight per cent of energy benefit vouchers were not used this year although the cost of energy bills was on the increase, Labour leader Joseph Muscat said this morning.

Speaking during a political activity in Valletta he said this was for a number of reasons including that the vouchers were expiring before they received the bills, using the vouchers was psychologically humiliating as they had to queue up and the vouchers could only be used if one paid the rest of the bill at one go.

Dr Muscat referred to a statement by Finance Minister Tonio Fenech in an interview with The Sunday Times that the promised income tax cuts had to wait. He said that the only circumstance that had changed was that the election was now over.

On the proposed farmers’ market, Dr Muscat said this was part of the solution but it did not remove the need for a reform of the Ta’ Qali Pitkali.

Farmers were currently being sidelined by the Nationalist Party and they were not the kind of people to stay complaining or writing on the papers because they always had to be on the go.

They were not being given the importance they deserved and there was no ministry or parliamentary secretariat for fishing and farming.

The last investment at the Pitkalija, he said, was in 1997 and subsidies to farmers had continued to decrease.

Consumers were constantly having to pay higher prices and farmers were not getting their dues.

Many farmers, he said, traditionally supported the Nationalist Party but now they needed a better government vision.

He said that a road planned in Burmarrad would deplete more farmland.

Dr Muscat pointed out that although there were 1,600 less people than last year are in employment, there were only 770 more registering for work. This showed that people had given up.

On the Labour Party he said that it had got its act together and internal conflicts had ceased. This, Dr Muscat said, was something the party had owed the people.