Prime Minister Joseph Muscat on Sunday said the government planned to bump up pensions again as the country reaped the fruits of a soaring economy.

Speaking during a short telephone call on the Labour Party’s ONE Radio, Dr Muscat said pensioners deserved better and the government would be delivering.

He said that while he was happy to have met with pension-aged citizens in recent weeks who were happy with the year-on-year increases in their pensions, he still felt they deserved better.

This, he said, was possible thanks to sound financial management and an economic strategy that was today bearing fruit.

Dr Muscat weighed in on the findings of a recent EU-wide survey that showed how his government was the most trusted in Europe.

According to an end-of-year Eurobarometer survey, the percentage of those who trusted the government in Malta went up a whopping 12 points since spring to reach 63%, the highest among EU states, along with the Netherlands.

The number of those who ‘tend not to trust’ the government went down since spring, also by 12 percentage points, with the ‘do not knows’ staying at the same 12% level, according to the survey.

Dr Muscat said he felt the burden of the increase in the electorate’s trust and wanted to meet the people's expectations.

He then turned to the sister isle, hailing the recent opening of the Barts Anatomy Centre as a milestone in “turning Gozo into a centre of medical excellence”.

The facility was inaugurated on Wednesday.

Dr Muscat said the anatomy centre was the “beginning of a long-term relationship” with the Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentistry, noting that the school could now count 59 students in their first and second years of study in Malta and Gozo.