No strategy for MEPA to address 2,065 pending enforcements

A new performance audit by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that the Malta Environment and Planning Authority (MEPA) is lacking any policies or strategies to address a backlog of 3,500 enforcement notices, which include 2,065 cases where immediate action can be taken. 

In its performance audit on MEPA's enforcement action unit, the NAO reprimanded the authority over the lack of any structure to regularly monitor outside development zones - areas where no building activity can take place - for illegalities.

2,065 enforcement notices were issued between 1993 and 2011 and are still outstanding even if these can be enforced with immediate effect.

The number of executable cases where MEPA can take some form of action against the contravener represents 61% of the total outstanding caseload of 3,500 cases.

On average cases have been pending for an average period of 9.2 years.  Nearly 600 cases date to before 2000.

The report also reveals that the authority is still to recoup around 84 per cent of the invoiced expenses, with respect to DAs taken between 2006 and 2012 within the ODZ. This amounted to €438,329 up to March 2013.

The report quotes MEPA officials admitting that the enforcement section was generally "not awarded high priority in resource allocation". It was only in 2011 that the first professional enforcement job description was created within the authority, enabling the enforcement directorate to employ professional staff.

In more recent years MEPA concentrated on more recent cases and was not in a position to allocate priority to the processing of these 2,065 cases.

But the report also reveals that only 21% of enforcements issued between January and June 2012 have been concluded. Still, the imposition of daily fines in November 2012 is having a positive impact with a number of contraveners removing illegalities within 16 days after being notified of the daily fine.

But since the daily fine mechanism was only introduced a few months ago, its impacts could not be analysed in detail.

Moreover, following the MEPA reform in 2010 the enforcement officers were not involved in the validation of planning applications to ensure that no pending illegalities are on site. This created a situation where the Enforcement Directorate did not have enough resources to deal with outstanding cases and extend its enforcement coverage to ODZ areas.

A lack of routine surveillance over ODZ areas also meant that monitoring was restricted to areas where MEPA receives its complaints or is processing planning applications.

Despite this strain on resources, the Enforcement Directorate has to deal with daily complaints about illegalities from the public. Nearly 3,000 complaints were received between 2007 and June 2012.

The NAO analysed 211 reports of alleged illegalities received in the first six months of 2012. The analysis revealed that on average investigations on alleged irregularities were concluded in 38 days. But the NAO was unable to determine the time taken to conclude investigations in 71 cases where documentation was lacking. The absence of documentation implied that the enforcement work was still in progress, which means that these cases have been pending for an average of 270 days.

44% of MEPA's complaints on enforcement came from anonymous sources, which the NAO believes are supplying imprecise information and abusing the complaints system. In fact anonymous reports take more time to process, as these lack detail and the possibility of follow-up. The NAO recommended that MEPA allocate priority to complaints from a known source.