Updated at 4.30 pm with the Labour Party statement
A public consultation process to revise the Villa Rosa local plan is purely intended to justify the government’s “deceit and abuse” about its plans for the area, the Nationalist Party said on Saturday.
The PN said that the government was “hiding behind legal technicalities” to justify its refusal to discuss the revision plans in detail within parliament’s development planning committee.
It insisted on the government being fully transparent about its “sudden plan to change the local plans”.
The PN statement – its strongest to date about the Villa Rosa controversy – was signed by its MPs Stanley Zammit and Rebekah Borg, who serve as shadow ministers for planning and the environment respectively.
The party’s position on the plans, which were approved by cabinet as revealed by Times of Malta, has gradually shifted over the past two weeks.
PN leader Bernard Grech was initially evasive about the plans, saying the PN needed to first see what the government wanted to do while emphasising the need to give investors peace of mind about development plans.
The party then said it wanted a holistic review of all local plans, while again calling for transparency about the government’s Villa Rosa vision.
On Saturday, the party accused the Robert Abela-led government of leading a secretive government “where the interests of a select few are prioritised over the interests of Maltese and Gozitan citizens.”
The PN noted that a government plan to change another local plan – that of Xewkija in Gozo – appeared intended to help specific businessmen who had built illegally in the area.
It said Abela and his predecessor, Joseph Muscat, had turned the country’s planning system into a “permit machine that disregards, first and foremost, the quality of life of the people.”
“We have also now discovered, from the documents published by the Planning Authority, that the proposed review of the Local Plan for this area covers an additional area beyond what is defined as Villa Rosa in the 2006 Local Plan,” the PN said.
That discrepancy was flagged by activist group Moviment Graffitti, which has said it intends to hold a protest near the Villa Rosa site at St George’s Bay later this month.
The Villa Rosa project has been in the pipeline for years but never got off the ground. The site owner, developer Anton Camilleri known as Tal-Franċiz, obtained a permit in 2018 for a relatively low-lying development in the area. Before works got under way, those plans were revised to feature two huge towers and more open space. Those plans remain at PA stage.
‘An opposition without credibility’- PL
In a statement, the Labour Party said it was the Nationalist Party that ‘with a stroke of a pen’ changed the Local Plans and gave virgin land, like the whole of Siġġiewi, up for development.
Malta’s local plans were drawn up in 2006, under a Nationalist government.
“On this, the Opposition certainly has no credibility and it is a Labour government that has spared virgin land, such as Ħondoq Ir-Rummien and the Marsascala bay from development,” the statement read.
The PL said the opposition is either lying or is misinformed when it speaks about transparency, as a revision of local plans is defined by the law and requires two phases of public consultation.
The statement ends by calling out the PN leader Bernard Grech for his “cheap politics” to score political points, and how a Labour government always consults with the public, even when it is not legally bound to do so.