Religious buildings singled out in policy revision

Unlike band clubs and post offices, “places of worship” will no longer benefit from rules which allow the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to deviate from the local plan when approving community facilities.

The MEPA has published a proposed amendment to a policy aimed at facilitating the regeneration of town centres approved by the previous administration in 2013. 

When announcing the revision in September MEPA gave the wrong impression that current regulations exempted religious buildings from full adherence to planning rules. 

In fact the present policy does not directly refer to places of public worship, but to “social and community facilities for the locality”. ‘Religious buildings’ are only mentioned as an example of community facilities alongside “local clubs and post offices”. 

The public was invited to send its submissions on the policy revision in September but not a single submission was sent by the public during the period of public consultation on this policy objective. MEPA has now proceeded by publishing the full text of the proposed policy change, which has once again been issued for public consultation.

Now MEPA is proposing the following wording for the policy to specify that deviations from local plan policies apply to ‘social and community facilities for the locality (e.g. local clubs, post offices, etc) but excluding social, community and other facilities intended as places for public worship’.

The present policy is intended to give MEPA a degree of flexibility in identified situations where a justified departure may be deemed sensible or desirable from a planning point of view. But the policy does not allow any departure from height limitations established in the local plan and was mostly aimed at encouraging the rehabilitation of old buildings and the opening of offices in towns and villages. 

In all cases where MEPA resorts to this policy it is obliged to indicate in writing the planning grounds upon which the specific departures from policies are based. 

Other instances where flexibility is encouraged with regard to issues like zoning concerns cases involving the rehabilitation of old buildings, properties with a façade on main squares, and properties with a legitimate operating licence aiming for expansion.

But the aim of the present policy revision is restricted to the exclusion of places in connection with public worship from the list of instances in the 2013 ‘General Policy relating to Regeneration/Consolidation Initiatives’, when MEPA may consider departures from local plan policies. 

MaltaToday is informed that the reason behind the proposed policy change is that places of worship such as prayer rooms, chapels and mosques may attract a larger number of people than other community facilities, and thus have a greater impact on neighbouring residences.