The new Malta Environment Authority would be focused on protecting the environment and improving the sector, assuming the role of an effective regulator, Environment Minister Leo Brincat said yesterday.
The House Environment and Planning Development Committee would then become a committee that effectively scrutinised environmental and planning policies.
Introducing the Environment Protection Bill in second reading, Mr Brincat said the law would ensure that the new authority would be given a vote on the board of the other authority, the Planning and Development Authority.
It would have an identity and legal structure with immediate effect, save for certain transitional provisions. The government would encourage the concept of spatial planning. Thus, developers would have to take into consideration areas in the vicinity of their construction sites.
The government would keep its promise and give eNGOs the opportunity to name persons to serve on both the environmental and planning authorities.
An extra day without a demerger is not in the interest of the environment
For the first time, Mr Brincat said, Malta would have an autonomous authority that would focus on environmental protection, where the environment would be given equal importance to development. The conflict within Mepa, between planning and environment, would be eliminated.
The new authority would consider the environment as a common good. The majority of its board members would be independent and have environmental knowledge.
The government was seeking to increase transparency and reduce bureaucracy without weakening the environment. All activities stipulated in the Bill would be regulated by the environmental authority to ensure consistency.
The Bill provided that the public should have access to environmental information and participate in the formulation of plans. The government would ensure that the authority was a stakeholder in decisive national processes.
The authority would have the power to investigate matters related to its environmental responsibilities. While there would be an emphasis on self-enforcement, the authority would be entitled to require compliance through enforcement and any damage to the environment remedied.
Mr Brincat described Mepa’s environmental branch as weak. Employees had left the authority because they were demotivated and had been set aside. He had met Mepa employees and listened to what they had to say. The government had adopted a bottom-up approach and taken on board several suggestions made by employees’ unions, and he was optimistic the process would be successful.
The ministry was striving to demerge Mepa in a short time and in the best possible way. An extra day without a demerger was not in the interest of the environment.
The government was being consistent throughout the process. Before the election, the PL had felt an environmental authority would strengthen the environment. It had voiced its concerns that Mepa was not only weak but also appeared to be an accomplice or impotent with regard to abuse by other government entities.
He referred to the cases of Merkaptan, black dust and Wasteserv’s incinerator. In the waste oils case, the Water Services Corporation had ignored repeated Mepa appeals to take those who broke environmental laws to court.
Mr Brincat said that when he raised the possibility that Wasteserv submitted wrong statistics to Mepa, there had been complete silence from the PN. In other countries, the regulator would take severe measures against such individuals.
Concluding only the second reading of the Bill before Parliament’s summer recess showed the government did not ride roughshod over the people and NGOs. After the four weeks of consultation, the Bill would be debated in committee stage, and positive and doable proposals would be taken on board.
The Mepa demerger was not a general election gimmick. During the Mepa reforms in 2010, the PL had insisted on the proposal to demerge Mepa, as did the Church’s Environmental Commission. The PN government had lost a golden opportunity and had not made valid arguments for its opposition to demerging Mepa.
Speaking about good governance, Mr Brincat said that surveys showed the majority of the Maltese believed that Mepa was a nest of corruption.
Interjecting, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said that the Opposition did not agree in principle with the Mepa demerger. It merely recognised the government’s electoral mandate to carry it out. The government wanted to demerge Mepa to centralise power in Castille.