Works to widen Tal-Balal Road have overshot their timetable despite having been started without a permit in the hope of completion before the start of the school year.

A spokesman for Infrastructure Malta said that the completion date has been moved to November.

Controversy on the €4 million project, aimed to ease traffic around Mater Dei Hospital and the university, was stoked when it emerged that work which started at the beginning of last month, were being done without a development permit. Subsequently, it also transpired that heavy vehicles entered private land and started excavation work without the owners having been notified that their property had been expropriated.

The government justified its conduct by saying that the widening of this arterial thoroughfare between San Ġwann and Naxxar had to be done urgently, to avoid disruptions in the autumn.

An application to sanction the work was only published in the newspapers at the end of August.

In a surprise move a few weeks later, Infrastructure Malta announced that rather than add a new lane for southbound traffic as originally planned, it had been decided to double the size of the project by adding another lane in the opposite direction.

Despite this amendment, the agency stuck to the original deadline. 

An Infrastructure Malta spokesman said that although the completion deadline had been moved to November, stretches of the new lanes will be opened sooner.

Asked for the reason why plans were changed when work was already under way, he said that the project was originally meant to be completed in two phases but it was decided in due course to merge them together.

“The ongoing works were originally scheduled to include the first phase only, to widen the road to three lanes, two southbound, from Naxxar to San Ġwann, and a single lane in the opposite direction,” the spokesman said.

“However, as work progressed, the agency allocated additional resources to implement the second stage of the project as well, including the introduction of a second lane in the northbound direction,” he added. 

Apart from the new lanes the project includes new street lighting, footways, pedestrian crossings and new designs for the various junctions.