President calls for policies to address poverty

President Marie Louise Coleiro Preca said that homeless people are not given necessary visibility despite the fact that it is a reality that needs to be urgently tackled.

Coleiro Preca said that when she inaugurated the new Parliament, she had appealed to Parliament to do their best to create new laws aimed at drastically dropping relative and absolute poverty rates.

She said that unfortunately, according to figures issued by the National Statistics Office (NSO), a quarter of the Maltese population was classified either as poor or at risk of poverty.

“Some people who earn a minimum wage are unable to cope with cost of living and as such we cannot delay the introduction of a social wage,” Coleiro Preca said.

“According to NSO, there are 22% of those residing in community housing that do not even have a personal bathroom or shower, or complain about leaking roofs  and inadequate windows and floors,” she added.

Coleiro Preca said that she is worried over the fact that a large number of those who find themselves homeless are more often than not young people.

“Some of them are people who would have just served a prison sentence, so they would have nowhere to go. Others are people who would have just emerged from an out-of-home care or an institution and would be finding it difficult to integrate with their society holistically,” she added.

Coleiro Preca said that various initiatives were being created in response to this, in order to improve the wellbeing of Maltese society.

“We working to promote the wellbeing of all those who live in the country, including those who suffer poverty and social exclusion,” she said referring to the launch of the President’s Trust last week. The Trust is aimed at supporting young people who are socially excluded without any educational or career prospects.

The president said that she hoped the country’s economy would consider the weak and vulnerable members of society to achieve social justice.