It is becoming increasingly difficult for migrants in Malta to find “dignified” accommodation, human rights NGO director Neil Falzon fears.
The Times of Malta sought the Aditus Foundation director’s view on the housing situation after it emerged this week that foreigners living in Malta are the most likely to end up living in overcrowded households, with 13 per cent of non-EU residents confined in crowded homes.
“What we encounter in our work definitely confirms the main conclusion: it is becoming increasingly difficult for migrants to find accommodation that can be defined as dignified,” Dr Falzon said.
He said living conditions were worsening while rent prices continued on an upward trend. This, the director pointed out, was also the case with “squalid places such as garages and tiny shared places”.
While Maltese people were also experiencing pressure as a result of rent prices going up, the figures, published by Eurostat on Thursday, confirmed that migrants were more vulnerable to this form of exploitation, Dr Falzon said.
Squalid places such as garages
“At the heart of this is the criticism of the fact that Malta’s private rental sector is almost entirely unregulated, allowing landlords to do as they please in terms of prices and rental conditions,” he said, adding that the recently-published data confirmed what NGOs have been saying for some time and noting that organisations had been lamenting the state of the housing situation “for quite some time”.
Detailed proposals had also been put forward to the government, he said.
On whether he believed that the authorities were taking the issue seriously enough, Dr Falzon said he feared this was not the case.
“The recently-announced measures go some way but fail to address core problems. We also think that the Ħal Far open centre also send a very wrong message: that it is fine to house migrants in sub-standard conditions, at times for years. If government can do it, why not a landlord, right?” he said.
While NGOs have been raising the issue of housing problems for years, it recently emerged that the issue has also started becoming even more of a worry for the Maltese people. According to the most recent Eurobarometer survey, more than a quarter of respondents listed the housing issue a concern. This meant the Maltese were now more worried about housing issues than crime.
Questions sent to the office of the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Accommodation, Roderick Galdes, were not answered by the time of writing.
Population growth is the only plan - PN
Nationalist Party MPs Marthese Portelli and Ivan Bartolo expressed dismay at the way the government's drive to increase Malta's population was leaving more and more people by the wayside.
"There is no long-term plan about how many foreign worker this country needs," they said, adding that this was leading to cases of exploitation of foreign labour.
"This is leading to evident problems of cheap labour, as highlighted by Yana Mintoff, and to housing schoolchildren in containers," they said.
The PN would guarantee that everyone had a roof on their head, they said.