Parts of reports and inquiries into workplace accidents that shed light on how things could be improved should be made public, the Nationalist Party has argued.

Doing so would allow affected sectors and industries to implement safer practices and learn from past mistakes, the party said.

Government-commissioned inquiries and reports are, as a rule, very rarely published. 

The PN was reacting to the latest fatal incident at a construction site in Qormi on Monday - the sixth this year alone. 

The party also called for the Occupational Health and Safety Authority (OHSA) to be strengthened, to be able to cope with the demand.

PN MPs Stanley Zammit, Ivan Castillo and Ryan Callus argued in a party statement that both the OHSA and the Building and Construction Authority needed to be better equipped to cope with the number of active construction sites they are tasked with monitoring. 

They also called for a construction skills card idea to be implemented in a "serious" way. Talks about a skills card for construction workers first began in 2015. Four years later, in 2019, the government rolled out a skill card process, but the certification is entirely voluntary.

The PN MPs also called for improving enforcement and judicial processes, to allow for a massive backlog of OHSA-related court cases to be slashed.

OHSA CEO Mark Gauci told Times of Malta that around 600 reports it has filed for court action concerning workplace safety have yet to be presented to a magistrate.