Most political administrations like to avoid handling the proverbial hot potatoes, hoping that they either cool down over time or that a future administration would have to deal with them instead.
One of the slow-burning issues which suddenly seems to be igniting more intensely is that of property rights, in the form of landlords whose property was rented out before 1995 for miserly rents.
These landlords understandably claim they are being deprived of their property-owning rights. Local and European courts have been delivering judgments supporting their claims.
On the other side of the equation are tenants, many of them vulnerable or financially distressed, and who are facing housing insecurity due to the courts’ decisions, despite the tenancy ‘guarantees’ that the pre-1995 rent laws seem to give them.
The courts’ judgments delivered over the past several months impact both people living in private rented accommodation and farmers who work the land that was leased to them, often at meagre rates.
Landlords argue that “rental rates must always reflect the value of the property leased”. The constitution protects them, but successive administrations have always ensured that their entitlement never infringed on tenants’ right to humane treatment.
The issue of landlords’ rights and tenants’ distress is coming to a head. The can can no longer be kicked up the road. It has become an urgent priority that needs to be addressed without further procrastination. But it is also a complex issue that cannot be resolved in one-size-fits-all fashion.
Some landlords, as we report today, are proposing that the state steps in to subsidise rent costs and they have held talks with the government over the matter. Their desperation is understandable, but so are the concerns of fearful tenants and farmers.
The government says it understands the fundamental sensitivity of the issue and is working towards a “just remedy”.
The prime minister has promised tenants who could potentially be affected by the court decisions that the government will not abandon them.
Taxpayer interests, however, should also be built into the constituents of any resolution. There have to be question marks over the solutions proposed by both landowners’ lobbies and tenants’ representatives that would rely on taxpayer money being splashed out to ensure that every expectation is satisfied.
Again, this long-standing issue is by no means easy to resolve. The right of owners to enjoy their property is protected under the constitution, as confirmed by the courts.
Equally important, no vulnerable tenants should have their lives turned upside down because a political administration lacks the will to address what is primarily a complex legal dilemma, besides being a social one.
It is worrying that the government has not done much in the last seven years to tackle the problem. Ministers Roderick Galdes and Michael Falzon admit they do not even know the extent it; how many are the distressed tenants who live in properties leased prior to 1995.
The Nationalist Party has done well to press for a solution. The prime minister should now take up the challenge made by the leader of the opposition to sit around the table and develop a strategy towards finding a fair solution to the pre-1995 rental conundrum, a solution not based on throwing hard-earned taxpayer money at the problem.
In the context of a looming election there is a risk of politicians making grand promises of reform just to curry favour with the electorate. The time to act is now.
A good starting point would undoubtedly be the setting up of a bipartisan task force, which would include representatives of both landlords’ and tenants’ interests, to propose legal solutions.