The Chamber of Architects (Kamra tal-Periti) is proposing further changes to a hastily-issued legal notice on the avoidance of damage to third parties on construction sites, an extraordinary general meeting of the Chamber was told.

The meeting was the second in three weeks.

The legal notice was issued after a number of buildings collapsed into building sites as a result of excavation works.

Chamber president Simone Vella Lenicker said that a lot of progress had been made since an extraordinary general meeting held two weeks ago. The legal notice as published featured a number of changes from the original draft and addressed some of the Chamber's concerns. 

A major milestone was reached on Friday morning, when Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg and Parliamentary Secretary Chris Agius, together with the chamber and the Malta Developers Association, announced the setting up of a register of contractors, which will be followed up by the establishment of a system of licensing and classification. This announcement was in no small way due to the Kamra’s insistence that registration, licensing and classification were long overdue, and were one of the reasons why safety and quality on construction sites was often lacking.

Architect André Pizzuto, vice president of the Chamber, outlined the proposed system, which will be based on registers on building construction, excavation and demolition contractors. These would then be further classified on the basis of risk, as defined by European standard Euronorm 1990, namely high, medium and low risk. When undertaking a project, the architect in charge would commission or carry out a risk assessment and would indicate the type of contractors required to carry out the envisaged works.

The well attended meeting of the Chamber of Architects.

The chamber's proposals retain the figure of the Site Technical Officer introduced by legal notice in 2019, however the minimum qualifications held by such a person would depend on the risk category in which the contractor is registered.

The Chamber said these proposals are expected to address the current slowdown being experienced by the industry following the overly hasty introduction of the new regulations on June 25, particularly on sites where demolition and excavation works cannot proceed without the appointment of a Site Technical Officer.

The EGM also unanimously agreed that other issues also needed to be tackled, including the role, responsibilities and competences of the Site Technical Officer; a clear division between the Works Specifications that must be prepared by an architec, and the Method Statement which must be prepared by the contractor in order to state how the Specifications are to be implemented and achieved; a clearer distinction between temporary and permanent works; and also the removal of various inconsistencies between the Maltese and English versions of the Legal Notice.