Tale as old as time: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they fall in love and they live happily ever after. Of course, the part of the fairytale which no one ever talks about is the fact that they need a palace in order to be able to do so. No one ever speaks about the hunt for the palace, the realisation that they can barely afford a budget apartment in Birżebbuġa or the two or three jobs that each of them have to take on just to be able to get by. And no one certainly ever talks about what happens when it all literally comes crumbling down.

These past couple of months have not been great for the construction market. Everyone has been saying that property prices would crash sooner or later, but no one envisioned that it would be the buildings themselves that would fall Humpty Dumpty-like, almost killing or injuring several people and leaving families homeless. In this construction town where anybody and everybody can become a cowboy contractor, it really begs the question: what is it going to take for people to be clapped down on for negligence?

Every person who is part of the industry needs to have some form of permit and be able to prove that they can actually do the job which they are claiming to be experts at

I myself have been going through it till quite recently. I would ask people for names of so-called builders and they would show up at the house and give their opinion about the building and what they planned to do with it. Not a single opinion matched. One would say he needed to build things one way and the next day another would come in and say that that was absolute rubbish and that what he actually needed us to do was stand on our heads and sing in Hindi. Prices didn’t just vary, they fluctuated from day to day depending on the weather and whether or not they had fought with their wives the night before. We didn’t know who to believe or who to trust: on one sunny occasion, we were even introduced to a project manager who actually worked at a confectionery full-time.

It is up to the authorities to regulate and make sure that things like this do not happen. Project managers, builders and every single person who is part of the industry needs to have some form of permit and be able to prove that they can actually do the job which they are claiming to be experts at. We can’t continue to let the construction monster gorge on trickster and fraudster greed. It is this kind of impunity that causes people a great loss of money and God forbid, their lives. It’s bad enough that we already have to pay overinflated prices for things to be done, but the fact we are giving so much for so little is beyond the pale.

Let’s stop giving the villains the happy ever afters.