I share completely the views of Charles Pace about some still very dangerous elements in the Rents Bill that will soon be debated in Parliament. In this respect, I have, as I know is the case with others, passed on my views to the responsible parliamentary secretary, Roderick Galdes, a real gentleman on the government benches if ever there was one!

The main thrust of my submission is the complete freedom being allowed to landlords to establish their claimed rental at the start of the rent relationship period. This way, landlords are being allowed to be their own completely unbridled masters, especially when it comes to whatever trends they want to see ingrained in the rental (indeed the whole of the property) market.

No, even the initial rent being requested must – if this government really is Socialist – be congruent with certain elements like, for example, the employment income of the would-be tenant. If this present unfair incongruence is not changed in the Bill before Parliament, then all the consequences in the examples brought forward by Pace will become fact.

I know that property owners will jump up with the complaint: “But this is interfering with my property rights.” But social justice, other legal concepts and even wise economics will easily respond that there are no such things as absolute rights and that this also applies to the ownership of property.

The property market has a dynamic that impinges on the structure of our society

Nobody, I repeat, nobody should be able to cause individual (for which also read familial) harm to society simply because he has an asset that he wants to profit from and on which he, and he only, wants to arbitrarily decide.

So, yes, even the initial rent charged at the beginning of the rent relationship should be tied to clearly established norms. To think otherwise, namely that the market will solve the present obscene imbalances of its own accord, is to live in cuckoo-land. Since when have freedom and the market been guarantors of social justice?

The proposal in the draft law that all rental agreements will henceforth have to be in writing and registered with the Housing Authority is certainly in the right direction. But questions still loom here.

What action will the authority take when such rental agreements are submitted to it by the landlord or would-be tenant? Will the legal format and contents of these agreements be vetted for fairness and justice equity with all partners? Will the authority vet them for their legal correctness, for instance, balance of quid pro quo? Or will they just be piled up on the top of some filing cabinet to gather dust? As I see things, the Housing Authority is going to need a good increase in staff if it wants to carry out its social duties properly.

Hopefully, the authority will ensure that whoever writes up these agreements has, at least as part of his character and qualifications, not only a sense of law but also of social justice.

Something that practically nobody has mentioned in this big national debate is the relationship structure of the Housing Authority with the Planning Authority. Why indeed should there be such a relationship? For the very simple reason that what is often called the property market (rental or even outright ownership) has a dynamic that impinges on the structure of our society.

To simply allow anyone to reason based only on that diabolic Maltese saying of is-suq isuq is simply obscene!

When we insist that nobody should never have the power to arbitrarily throw people out onto the streets leaving them without a roof over their head, we are also saying that the Planning Authority and the Housing Authority should be constantly in touch and collaborating to ensure there is enough affordable housing for the citizenry of this country and also for foreign visitors (the amount of the latter should always be very carefully controlled).

Yes, the Planning Authority has to accept that there are times when it has to say many more noes to developers than yeses, irrespective of what Sandro Chetcuti and his Malta Developers’ Association may say…

As I said in an earlier article on this topic, ‘roll on the parliamentary debate’.

John Consiglio teaches in the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy at the University of Malta.