Facts vs fiction | George Pullicino

Saviour Balzan, in his opinion piece published in this newspaper of 13 October 2024 attributes the blame for planning decisions taken by today’s Labour government on an exercise initiated by one minister in 1989 and concluded by me in 2006.

Evidently Balzan is not aware how the Local Plans were created prior to 2006, better research would have avoided Saviour Balzan attributing Labour Government's faults to the undersigned.

He states that I met him in 2006 to explain “why the Local Plans needed to be changed.”  He should be aware, however, that up to then, our country had only one approved Local Plan out of seven and we were still in the process of finalising the rest. His recollection is incorrect, how could they be changed if they did not even exist? The Government was legally bound to review the 1988 Temporary Development Schemes which, by their very name, were provisional and had been established in a hurry in 1989 as a stop-gap measure to limit the amount of land that was being lost to development.

When establishing the Local Plans a large number of requests were presented by the general public to the authorities. These were passed through a fine filter with clear criteria established after public consultation. Less than 10% of the requests were accepted and today I am therefore more than ever convinced that we did well to finalise the process as we did.

Had we left that exercise in the hands of the Labour Party after 2013 can anyone believe they would have granted less than 10% of the requests? This aspect is important because when Parliament (the House Planning Committee) discussed the proposals, the Labour MPs formally requested a significant increase in the land to be allocated for development, despite their alleged campaign against the proposals which Balzan refers to in his article. Another fact research would have unearthed, he does not refer to the Labour MPs requests for further take-up of land.

Referring to the exercise as “an electoral ploy” is also bewildering when it resulted in considerably more people being disappointed than satisfied. More than 90% of requests were rejected.

Significantly large tracts of land included in the building zones were already built up: places like Imtarfa, Ħal-Farruġ and Mġarr, Gozo, developed during British rule or earlier, were still officially marked as being Outside Development Zones (ODZ) in 2006. Together with disturbed ground, these built-up areas amounted to 75% of the whole area involved in the exercise.

The article alleges that the approval of the Local Plans in 2006 “led to large tracts of land being developed, villages scarred, and towns annexed to each other.” Again, these hyperboles are misleading. The truth is that after the Planning Authority had drafted the individual Local Plans and indicated lands to be included for development, certain inconsistencies emerged. These could have created problems when Parliament came to ratify them, as it was unclear why certain parcels of land were being proposed for inclusion in one Local Plan and similar parcels of land were being excluded on other Local Plans.  It was unclear what criteria were being used by the PA technical team.

The Government felt that, in drafting the Local Plans, the Malta Environmental and Planning Authority (MEPA) had not adequately addressed certain anomalies which already existed in the Temporary Development Schemes of 1989. This was the reason for the Rationalisation Exercise as we named it.

Criteria were therefore formulated and released for public consultation. As it happened there was little to no criticism from either NGOs, Local Councils, residents’ groups or the general public on these draft criteria.

One can never emphasize enough that development schemes enlargement were then made according to clear criteria, mainly to address infill pockets. Among the main criteria were:

The site had to be adjacent to existing boundaries on three out of four sides (or two out of three depending on the case).

The inclusion in the boundaries had to result in a developable area of no more than 17,000 square meters.

Who benefited from that process?  All the names of the persons who had forwarded requests were published in a public document. We had nothing to hide about who the owners benefiting were. Had Balzan deigned to consult this document, requests submitted, he would have seen many “well-known people” who had their requests refused and in some case had lands removed from the development zone.

Balzan pens that “when elected in 2013, Labour retained the changes and refined planning policies to make developers even more content.” The undersigned does not consider a refinement of the 2015 increase in the building density on all lands simply by amending the Height Limitation definition in an annex to the Design Guidelines Document. With the stroke of a pen, where the Local Plans had allowed only three stories to be built, there could now be a higher number.  It is no wonder that two environmental NGOs, Din l-Art Ħelwa and Coalition for Gozo, took legal action against these planning changes, carried out almost by stealth. The Local Plans were changed without Parliament's approval, as is required by the law itself.

In light of all this, one hopes that Saviour Balzan does his research before attributing the faults of others to the undersigned.