There is no contradiction between price control and competition. This basic economic tenet may not be one which emerges from the bishops’ recent pastoral letter dealing in unambiguous terms with the current high rentals and unaffordable accommodation realities in the country.

As all those who have an interest, even if purely academic, in this serious national problem await with much trepidation the publication of the long promised White Paper, and even as the Prime Minister has made it clear that when published this will contain elements that may displease the building contractors and property owners’ lobbies, it is important that certain principles be clearly put forward so that nobody gets into too much of a huff even when the document sees the light of day.

First, certain much touted so-called “principles”. For starters we can just pick on that much loved and abused “Is-suq isuq” (the market reigns supreme). No, the market is not God, and nobody can ever be permitted – throwing the idiotic, parrot-like “supply and demand” dictum in the process – to steamroll over the acute needs of the weaker in a society simply by brandishing such economic blasphemies.

No one, not even developers and multiple property owners. The so-called “Sacred right to property” is not, whatever the ECHR may choose to say in its sentences, the same thing in a country 17 miles by nine and in much bigger countries.

It is difficult to understand how rare it is to find in our courts’ pronouncements clear expression of the basic human right that nobody should ever – whatever may be a property owner’s demands or so-called “right to the enjoyment of owned property” – end up being thrown into the streets for not being able to pay a suddenly exorbitantly increased rental.

The Prime Minister has made it clear that the coming White Paper will propose that all rental agreements will henceforth have to be registered.

This is a very good measure, but how it will be implemented, and what will follow after it, may well be even much more worth watching.

I can well see owners of property licensed for renting to tourists reacting. They need to be much more seriously controlled than they are now. Ditto those who will be hit hard by the Income Tax Department as such register of rentals becomes yet another useful weapon to use against tax avoiders.

Ditto, too, for those obscene and downright dishonest rentiers who on the hidden side of a written and registered rental agreement will, without any conscience, seek to squeeze some sorts of premiums or additional payments in some form or other from their victims.

Nobody should ever end up being thrown into the streets for not being able to pay a suddenly exorbitantly increased rental

Even if the non-owner occupancy percentage of property among Maltese citizens has been quoted to be as low as 20 per cent, that is still, at least in my book, a sufficiently high number of people who simply cannot afford to pay some of the obscenely high rents that are suddenly being demanded. 

If the new White Paper will make it compulsory that no monthly rental charged can ever be at a percentage level higher than 30 per cent of a family’s monthly income, it will in acting sensible also in reality not be acting totally original. All Malta’s banks have, for donkey’s years, practised the methodology of relating a borrower’s required monthly repayments to his earned income. So, yes, people who rent to others must be obliged to be reasonable and not greedy.

Developers, speculators, landowners, multiple property owners, will, I am sure, be reacting in various ways once the White Paper is published. It has been mooted that some of them, already seeing a threat to what up to now has been a totally jungle-like scenario allowing them to do what they want, will be reacting by simply withdrawing properties from the rental market.

 What that firstly will mean is that prices for the sale of property will go up even further for first-time buyers. But, at some stage after that, it will then be even easier for the government to legislate – giving wise tax benefits - in favour of rental-purchase systems.

Yes, property speculation in Malta must simply end up being pushed to an end-stage situation where recognition of the high social implications of this area must become a “you can run but you cannot hide situation” for all unscrupulous operators.    

There are indeed many types of players in this unscrupulous reality which we presently have around us. And one of them is the Planning Authority. 

The PA is looked upon by most objective citizens as a body that is only interested in looking good in terms of an ever-increasing annual number of building permits issued.

In the manner in which it operates, it is now seen by the majority of honest Maltese citizens as a fiefdom totally controlled by developers, architects, property owners, et similia. It has allowed a system of “buy-bring-down-build multiple apartments” to run rampant over all sorts of properties with important architectural, historical, environmental, and local culture characteristics, and has become the major contributor to the uglification of many parts of the Maltese islands.

 In short the PA reeks of total absence of a social and environmental conscience, much as they will try to deny it.

So, roll on the White Paper. We’re in for some interesting times ahead.

John Consiglio lectures in the Department of Banking & Finance at the University of Malta.

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