Whether the fees Mepa imposes on applicants for its services remain at the level they have been hoisted to this year or are repealed as demanded by the Labour opposition, there is some muddled thinking evident in the debate going on about them. The muddle lies in the effort to convince the public that the fees are paid by speculators and straight developers.

That is not the case. It obviously is not so in regard to house owners who apply for a permit to carry out some relatively small alterations in their property or a larger one like building a garage.

It is also not so in the case of those who develop for resale. At the end of the day Mepa permits’ costs are included in the total costs incurred by the developer. The selling price is, in the first instance, set with intent to recover those total costs, in which Mepa tariffs remain a minute proportion, but have certainly shot up in absolute terms.

The would-be seller offers property at a price that yields him a profit.

Should the developer manage a sale, which will be at a price determined by the market, especially in the current soft circumstances, in the final analysis it is the buyer who, among other things, pays for the Mepa fees.

The Prime Minister, therefore, is quite off target when he posts his reply to opposition criticism, as he did over the weekend, as if taxpayers are subsidising developers and speculators, in addition to those who use Mepa’s services for their own direct use.

That is a type of spin which does not help to move the argument forward.

Nor does the opposition succeed in moving it forward when it calls for a repeal of the new fees, so that the old fees of long ago remain in force.

It is high time that there is general understanding, if not agreement, that the public administration is not there to make indiscriminate hand-outs. Hand-outs should be part of public welfare, for which resources have to be raised.

The argument is that there should be fees for public services. Differentiation should take place by reference to use value. In that context I feel it is correct that Mepa should recover its services through appropriate fees, subject to the overriding proviso that Mepa operates efficiently and effectively. There should be regular audits to ensure that, as there ought to be in the rest of the public sector.

Once oversight mechanisms ensure efficiency and effectiveness for public services, users of those services should pay according to a fair system. An element of fairness has been introduced by relating the new tariffs to the size of the property for which a permit is applied for. That can be considered as a social aspect differentiating between someone who applies, say, to build a villa with a footprint of 300 square metres, and someone who wants to build – or buy – a flat of, say, 120 square metres.

Rather than simply repeal the legal Bill which introduced the higher tariffs, I would prefer to see a bilateral discussion to try to formulate a basis for Mepa tariffs which is based on efficiency and effectiveness, as well as on fairness. The opposing political stances that have been adopted have not yielded new positive space. Yet they did reveal an old shortcoming, seen at its worst in the belated review of the water and electricity tariffs, which the government had left static for years on end, notwithstanding the massive capital expenditure made by Enemalta over those years.

In the case of the Mepa tariffs it was the Prime Minister who revealed, in almost scandalised tone, that the tariffs had last been reviewed in 1993.

That is indeed an astonishing fact. The cost of public services rises annually, if only through drift and without additions of fresh outlays. This means that static fees are reducing in real value each year and also that each year the gap between revenue and expenditure deteriorates progressively.

Assuming other things remained equal and even that Mepa was efficient and effective between 1993 and now, that is what happened in its accounts. Making the same assumption is why the government had to introduce subsidiary legislation to subject users of Mepa’s services to such a massive hike.

Public services fees which are unrelated to welfare should be revised regularly, if the administration is to avoid the sort of increase announced by the government for Mepa.

The Prime Minister cannot escape the fact that his government and those of his predecessor were mainly responsible for this gap having been in office for 15 of the 17 years referred to by him.

One should add that it is not only fees which should be revised regularly to reflect rising costs. Personal income tax allowances and related benchmarks should also be revised upwards to reflect the falling value of money.