In a recent UNICEF report, Malta came 34th out of 38 countries in the well-being of its children and adolescents. Malta is also among the very worst in Europe for young people wanting out of school early.

What should we change so that more of our young ones are happy and well?

I do not think anybody ever intended to make less children happy. As with the British empire, I am sure we allowed it to happen in a fit of absent-mindedness. 

But isn’t that why we need to reflect? The popular idea that people should be allowed to learn lessons from their experience does not work when the lesson comes too late. If a child is prone to cross the street without looking, eye-opening prevention is better than waiting for the experience to take its tragic toll!

Unfortunately, unlike the COVID-19 story, most consequences of policies, good or bad, take time to visit us. The catastrophe of global warming will happen in the long run – if vested interests go on conspiring to blind us until it is too late.

Take what is happening with security of tenure in rented housing. The 2018 White Paper promised housing stability for renting families. What security came in fact from the resulting law? Just 12 months! Barring special circumstances, as with language school students, no renting for less than 12 months can take place. It is also rumoured that an incentive scheme is in the offing, encouraging leases of up to three years, but no more.

How can you call this renting stability? Those who defend this policy say it is a step forward from the previous renting chaos: a move from no contract to a contract for at least 12 months.

Claiming that all families have the option to buy flies in the face of the skyrocketing prices- Charles Pace

They also tell us that, if anybody wants to rent, it means they want a house for a short time, otherwise they would buy rather than rent.

The latter is the sort of myth that blinds us to what is really happening. Claiming that all Maltese families nowadays have the option to buy flies in the face of the skyrocketing prices that are getting out of reach of more and more people.

Myths induce an unworried absent-mindedness. We absent-mindedly think that the one to three years security of tenure solves the problem, thinking problems only hit a few temporary foreign workers and families in temporary instability.

Not true. The above security rules are not a side show but the Big Show. They are, steadily and with increasing speed, becoming the ‘new normal’ for renting in Malta.

Till recently, the ‘old normal’ for Maltese renting was for a lifetime, protecting the ‘controlled’ or ‘pre-95’ or ‘pre-39’ houses, variously said to be 10,000 or 30,000 in number.

But as their entitled tenants one by one die, their house quietly morphs into the New Normal, in which a lifetime security suddenly dwindles into this briefest of security of tenure, which the law so ungenerously promotes.

As this happens gradually, one house at a time, we seriously risk not noticing it. Data for February 2020 showed that 77 per cent of new leases, or the New Normal, are for a duration of less than two years! What will be the consequences if, in 20 years’ time, most renting families in Malta will be renting under this New Normal?

Families thrive on stability. If you have to uproot your family from its locality every one or three years, your chances to have a network of supporting neighbours are slim.

If your child has to change school every three years, each change will mean starting again as a stranger in a new school, with its risks and challenges.

The same UNICEF report asks why children tend not to have a good childhood. Three of the reasons it gives are lack of good relationships, bullying  and lack of neighbour support for the family’s childcare roles – all of them dangers we will be attracting if we undermine housing stability!

The government should not waste taxpayers’ money by incentivising leases that are far too short for family stability and mental well-being. Incentives should favour leases that are much longer, as part of the raft of policies we urgently need in order to protect, rather than to further undermine, family and childhood health and well-being.

And families and tenants should unite and speak up!

Charles Pace is a specialist in social policy.