The St Peter’s Pool syndrome

The shenanigans taking place at St Peter’s Pool in Delimara by the owner of a makeshift bar need to stop. Videos of the man throwing stones at tourists, insulting them and shoving them out of his place are as damaging to Malta’s tourism product as the viral videos of loud, drunk and indecently dressed young tourists causing mayhem in Swieqi. 

But this leader is not about tourism or the obnoxious behaviour of an idiot who thinks the world owes him a living. No; this is about the planning illegalities on site and the people who stand to benefit from the impending ‘reform’ that government wants to push through. 

The makeshift bar has no planning permit. The building extensions to a rural room have no planning permit. No change of use was ever sought to turn agricultural land into a public car park. A caravan was placed on site for residential purposes. The list of planning illegalities is endless. An enforcement order on the site issued in 2022 is suspended because the owner is appealing. 

But the site has a history of enforcement orders being issued for planning infringements. The Planning Authority had slapped two enforcement orders in 2016. Another one goes back to 1997. In each of these three actions, the PA website says that the case was closed because the planning infringement was removed by the authority and the cost was to be recouped from the owner. 

It appears though that the owner continued to ignore the PA and persisted in illegally developing his site. The attitude towards tourists is just the outward manifestation of this person’s complete disregard to the rule of law. 

And this man’s attitude towards planning rules is not an exception. There are countless examples of individuals—big and small—who have shown a complete disregard to planning rules. 

So, when Prime Minister Robert Abela started quoting pitiful cases of people suffering from cancer to justify his atrocious planning reform, he was being disingenuous. Along with the odd cancer patient, there are countless other individuals who knowingly and repeatedly broke planning rules and the St Peter’s Pool man is one of them. 

The reform is now subject to a public consultation exercise that will end on 15 September. The government has not withdrawn the two bills that were tabled in parliament before the summer recess and we seriously doubt the planning bills consultation will lead to meaningful changes. 

Planning Minister Clint Camilleri confirmed recently that the local plan proposals put forward by the PA for the Villa Rosa site in St George’s Bay—which were cut and paste from the plans developer Anton Camilleri had put forward—will remain unchanged. 

If the Villa Rosa local plan exercise is anything to go by, it does not bode well for the more radical reforms the government wants to introduce in the planning process and the appeals stage. 

Irrespective of what the prime minister’s head of secretariat says, the public consultation on bills 143 and 144 was an afterthought. It only came about when government realised that its reform could not be rushed through parliament because the Opposition was not going to play ball and civil society roared in disapproval. 

The government is still in time to withdraw the bills—it would be a sign of goodwill that it intends to listen and take on board suggestions being made by various environmental groups, architects and residents. 

However, if this is not what the government intends to do then it should be clear about its intentions. It might as well say that it wants to appease developers because their contribution to the economy is more important than safeguarding the environment. Worse than the planning bills themselves is a government that tries to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds in a fake balancing act that always ends up favouring big business and developers. Ordinary people deserve honesty—we deserve better.