You know that the Planning Commission for Outside Development Zones has reached a nadir when it attempts to deflect blame away from itself – for wrongly interpreting policies when granting permits for countryside villas – by dragging in the Planning Authority’s executive chairman.
This is what happened in a meeting of the commission on August 6, as it deliberated on an application for one such villa. The commission protested that the Planning Directorate ought to have informed it of a judgment reached by the planning tribunal, to the effect that the commission was wrongly applying planning policy.
The commission then referred to another case which the PA’s executive chairman, Johann Buttigieg, had been involved in assessing less than two months after the tribunal’s decision.
That decision had been relayed to Mr Buttigieg and yet it was not worked into the case officer’s report on the case in front of it, the commission complained. Since the tribunal’s decision, which was subsequently backed up by the Court of Appeal, the commission has continued to invoke the same rationale, deemed erroneous, to approve similar applications. Prime responsibility for this lies with the commission’s chair Elizabeth Ellul.
The policy in question, under the Rural Policy and Design Guidelines, says that the redevelopment, extension or rehabilitation of dwellings in the countryside can only be done on a site or building whose “use” has been “legally established”. What this means is that the residential status of the site must have been previously formalised by a development permit or must be visible in 1978 aerial imagery.
The tribunal and the court took issue with the commission’s approval of applications for ruins to become dwellings merely on the basis of old notarial documents showing that the ruins might have been a residence in the distant past. In these cases, the purported residential ‘use’ is neither covered by a development permit nor visible in 1978 aerial photographs.
A careful reading of the policy leaves little, if any, room for a different interpretation. Yet, the commission has remained intransigent: in the minutes of the August 6 meeting, it stated that it is “adamant that there is no infringement of the policy”. The commission’s stance is incomprehensible – unless, that is, its logic is that all pre-1978 ruins are automatically covered by a “development permit” because none was needed prior to 1978.
If this is the case, it would be a perverse kind of logic that would give away the commission’s eagerness to approve countryside developments rather than a reasonable application of the policy. This is certainly the message developers are getting. The number of applications and approvals has proliferated to the point where, last January, the erstwhile commission for all applications was split into two bodies to handle the swelling caseload – a commission for applications that fall in development zones and another for ODZ and town cores chaired by Ms Ellul. The number of ODZ development permits now amounts to systematic urban sprawl outside development confines, which have been rendered meaningless by the commission’s approvals.
An immediate reprieve from the encroachments of development in the countryside is needed. The only way to achieve this under the circumstances is to freeze all such applications until amendments promised to the guidelines by Environment Minister Jose Herrera are done. Furthermore, members of the commission must be held to account for disregarding the judgment of the tribunal and court: they must be replaced.