Lately, members of Malta Tenant Support have been much sought after by political parties keen to find out more about the hot topic of the moment – renting in Malta.  This is very welcome.  Somehow, our group of 2 years has amassed a wealth of experience and expertise that is very valuable.  It is quite a responsibility we have.  Somehow we must ensure that we leave nothing out.  There is so much to say that inevitably, I, for one, am always kicking myself a few minutes after the meeting at some omission or other.

A few days ago, we met with a political party and had a very intense discussion about the problems tenants face.  We also discussed possible solutions.  The attitude was one of listening to what we had to say – in fact, I had to kick myself several times during the meeting.  This would have been unheard of only a year ago. 

Recently, our group had put together a list of measures we would like the state to take to improve matters for tenants living in Malta.  We discussed this list at the meeting.  These humble measures were mostly well received.  It was only later, some time after the meeting, that I put shape to some  thoughts lurking at the back of my mind, which I will now set down in this blog, for my peace of mind.

Malta’s rental market was completely liberalized in 1995.  The only legislation on renting is found in the very generic Maltese Civil Code, which concerns all ‘things’ let, not just accommodation.  In the 22 years since then, landlords have been completely free to charge whatever rent they wanted, to include in their rental contracts any clause they wanted, tenant-fair or unfair...  

Nothing wrong with with that, you’d say.  But actually, from the limited research I have done on renting policy in different  countries, there is plenty wrong with that. 

To go back to that list of measures.  Most of them are commonplace in most countries all over the world.  And have been for decades.  A register of landlords and rental contracts.  A licence to let your property (incidentally there is a licensing system for short holiday lets in Malta, but nothing for long lets – says it all, doesn’t it?).  The landlord to pay all of the letting agent fee.  The upholding of certain standards of accommodation – electrical, gas safety certification, mould free certification, the EPC, compulsory since 2009 under EU law... The formation of a deposit holding scheme by an independent body.  A minimum contractual period of 4 years.  The rent increasing by a maximum of 20% over 4 years.  The insistence on non cash rent payments.  A complete overhaul of the Arms billing system which will allow tenants to automatically be on the correct tariff for people living in their primary residences, and which will allow tenants to have access to their own bills.   Special legislation to outline rights and responsibilities of both landlord and tenant.  This is by no means exhaustive, but is a start.

What’s been troubling me is this:  landlords have made the most of the complete liberalization of the rental market.  Bil-Malti, is-sidien tad-djar għamlu festa, dawn l-aħħar snin.  Iffangaw, u kif.  Rents are sky high.  Standards of rental accommodation are abysmal.  Tax evasion is rife.  Landlords are mostly unprofessional and often abusive.  Tenants feel sordid every month when they hand over huge amounts of cash to their landlords.  Most tenants are on the extortionate summer residence tariff.  Most tenants do not have access to their own Arms bills. Most tenants do not have access to the Arms redress mechanism.  The electrics and plumbing in most properties are shocking.  Many properties have a problem with mould.  Deposits are unjustifiably retained by most landlords, who seem to think that they have a right to that money, no matter what.  Rental contracts tend to be of 1 year, with the result that the rent goes up every year or you’re out of the property, out of the community you were building roots in, on to the next property.  Contracts are mostly tenant-unfair...

So the question I am asking myself is this:  How will it be possible for our members of parliament, from both sides of the House, to propose tenant protection measures when landlords have been glorying in their liberty to take advantage of the precarious situation tenants find themselves in for more than 2 decades now?  Other than Malta, I do not think I have come across a single country in the world, from my admittedly limited research,  that has allowed the complete liberalization of the rental market to the same extent. 

 Even if the modest measures listed above were put into place overnight, would it make that much of a difference to the lot of tenants?  Would the rents come down to acceptable amounts?  How is a landlord, accustomed to getting an undeclared €700 euro per month for a tiny, run down apartment, going to suddenly decrease the rent?   

If this is going to be the burning issue for the next general election – and it is clear that it is – how are politicians going to sell this one to the Maltese landlords?  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and has been for quite some time now.  Is it even possible to put it back in again?

My opinion is that this  situation must not be  a political football.  There are many tenants, living in despair, being denied access to the most important of human rights – decent, reasonably priced accommodation of reasonably secure tenure.  Both PN and PL share the responsibility for the current housing crisis.  This has been a long time coming.  Instead of political expediency, both parties need to come together and agree to not be partisan about this.   All three rental regimes need urgent attention:  the social housing sector, the private rental sector and the emphyteusis rentals.  Malta is currently at Ground Zero of rental policy.  Somehow the genie must be put back into the bottle.  This is not about votes and it will be highly irresponsible if it is made out to be.

Just to hammer the point home.  Some basic Maths.  The recent Caritas study identified that  a family of 4 needs a minimum of 936  euro per month (€953  - €17  social housing costs per month) to just get by. If that same family is in the private rental sector and pays €500 per month on rent when the income is €1 000 per month, can you please see how this is untenable?   Can you see that it is impossible to square this particular circle?   

Recently Malta was the dream of many a tabloid journalist of low journalistic standards.  The Maltese Minister of Economy, Investment and Small Business, was allegedly seen in a German brothel.  A television crew, from the media house of the Nationalist Party, visited the brothel with a hidden camera because this, of course, would somehow verify the story.  To the outraged horror of many Nationalist Party supporters, the Minister responded with a precautionary garnishee order on the journalist who first published this story.  Because, of course, every scandal in Malta has a red / blue tinge to it.  Forget all the Maltese against corruption or wrongdoing, a la Iceland or a la Romania.  We are not one people against corruption.  No, of course not, we are football supporters, and a ‘lose’ for one party automatically means a ‘win’ for the other. 
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A few years ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue about what this actually meant.  In fact, all the partisan,  titillated tittering on social media everywhere was testament to the lack of understanding of what was meant by a precautionary garnishee order.  The biggest confusion of all was that this was a war on the freedom of the press.  Maybe so, but precautionary garnishee orders wreak their havoc with everybody’s lives, not just the guardians of the fourth pillar of democracy. 

The five months we spent, as a family of 5, without access to our bank account, and my salary reduced to the minimum wage, will forever be seared into my memory.  It was a time of humiliation, fear and huge stress.  Our younger children were then 5 and 8 years old – it was not the life we had envisaged when we moved to Malta.  And why this punishment? Basically we had found out that we were on the incorrectly applied summer residence tariff, misleadingly named the domestic tariff.  So we had already overpaid by 1 600 euro and we refused to continue overpaying.  This was an incorrect bill and, in my book, you stand up to be counted and refuse to pay. 

In my ex landlord’s book, you do not fulfil your responsibility as a landlord and make sure that your tenants are on the correct tariff for people living in their primary residence.  No, of course not.  Somehow the tenant is meant to be telepathic and imagine that there is such a dastardly, absurd billing scheme.  Moreover, if they find out, you disclaim all responsibility and insist that they pay.  If they refuse to pay, then slam them with garnishee orders to bully them into payment. 

I will never forget that momentous day in August 2013, when I found out that my bank account and my salary had been garnisheed by our ex landlord.  That day I was irretrievably changed – I will forever now look askance at governments everywhere, but especially Maltese administrations.  The abuse, the indifference, the political grandstanding, the entitlement, the spin, the deflection – these are evident to me from a hundred miles away.  Because, of course, the precautionary garnishee order, would not have been possible if Malta had good administrative policy.  I asked for our bill to be recalculated on the correct tariff.  Why not?  It doesn’t cost 100% more to distribute water and generate electricity to tenants than it does to homeowners.  So this is a brazen discrimination – one that is unconstitutional and against EU law (consumer protection) to boot.  The answer was no so I had to attend court once a month for 2 years. 

It would have been far easier for us to pay up that day.  But I couldn’t.  I had uncovered a state sanctioned (Arms is the sole, state owned utility billing company) Arms / letting agent / landlord fraud triangle, where all three had something to gain from keeping tenants in the dark.  I just couldn’t. 

As it happens,  when the judgement came,  my ex landlord  hadn't won.  It was ruled that just as ignorance was no excuse for the tenant, it was no excuse for the landlord too.  He should also have known.  In my book, he, a landlord of several properties for many years,  should have known more than us, just 10 days in the country.  But this is law, not ethics.  The law cannot cater for every single inconceivable injustice.  

So precautionary garnishees are  unjust in many cases.  They don't depend on the merits of the case.  So if the plaintiff loses, he doesn't suffer any consequences.  Also, in our case, we didn't have a spare 2 000 euro lying about in our account.  So, every month my salary was reduced to the minimum wage and the balance was lodged in court by my employer's lawyer, who charged about 80 euro each time for the privilege - a total of about 400 euro on top of the garnishee.  

This was the beginning of my life as an activist for tenant rights, but not only.  A few weeks ago, I finally put an end to the injustice of my 15 years’ UK teaching experience not being recognised by the Maltese Department of Education.  From now on, I will be paid at the top of the Teacher Salary Scale, which should have been the case when I first started my teaching job in Malta in 2010. 

Progress on the Arms front has been slow.  It is now 3 and a half years since the precautionary garnishee order.  Three and a half years of tenants being overcharged, of tenants not having access to their own utility bills, of landlords pocketing balances of overpayment because of this, of tenants not having access to meter readings...  A shocking, scandalous state of affairs for a European country of the 21st century.

I’m going to up the ante.  Arms has been contemptuous of tenants and their right to be billed on the same tariff as homeowners.  There were media reports of Minister Without Portfolio Konrad Mizzi promising that tenants would not need the permission of the landlord to be billed on the correct tariff.  This was meant to have happened by October of last year and then December of last year.  Nothing.  The Arms website still has absolutely no mention of tenants. 
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I cannot let this one go.  I think the EU has a duty to make sure that its member countries uphold EU law.  So, how can it allow Malta, which currently holds the EU presidency, to behave with such contempt towards all tenants?  

Recently, there’s been a flurry of articles on renting in Malta, and also noises from both sides of the political divide, on rent regulation.  I catch myself feeling in turn euphoric that things may change and then despondent that this is very probably pre-election posturing.  (I know -  LOL at the ‘very probably’.)


I’ve seen many  conversations and articles on social media over the last year that sadden me.  Working single parents ‘living’ in rental accommodation on 800 euro per month, paying 70% of their income on rent; people unable to work for one reason or another, ‘living’ on 420 euro per month in social security payments, in hovels at 300 euro rent per month; young working people, starting out in life, unable to afford to rent, let alone climb the first rung of the property ladder; I’ve seen photos of homeless people, sleeping on the streets; the death of a homeless man sleeping rough under a bridge...

And, then of course, there are the comments which sadden me even more.  The complete lack of empathy and humanity.  The poor Maths and the lack of imagination.  €800 euro per month income minus €500 euro per month rent = not enough to live on, for a single person, let alone a single parent or a family on 1 minimum wage.  Then there’s the vast number of Maltese and non Maltese workers on inadequate Maltese salaries, not much more than €300 euro greater than the minimum wage.  Their lives are embattled and debilitating in the daily, penny-pinching grind and the unexpected bills.

We then have a political class that fights over an increase of €1.50 per month for the more fortunate tenants in social housing, who pay €203 PER YEAR, and who the Nationalist Party says should be paying €185 PER YEAR.  The Labour Party agrees.  So, tenants in social housing will now be paying €185 euro PER YEAR.  They will also be receiving refunds of this ‘overcharge’ this year.  For the record, I have absolutely no problem with tenants in social housing paying €185 euro per year.  No problem at all.  What upsets me is the fuss, the time, the newsprint... given to this.  How much buying power does €1.50 per month have today?  Does this kind of political grandstanding even work any more?  Do the powers that be think that people are that innumerate?

All over the world, different countries manage the tension between the property rights of a landlord and the human right of everybody for a decent roof of secure tenure over their head.  There are so many different measures available.  So many.  So much so that when I was asked to list them in an interview, I panicked because I was sure that I was going to leave too many out.  And yet, in Malta, we are at Ground Zero, when it comes to the private rental market.  Since 1995, the rental market has been totally liberalized. The pendulum has swung from decidedly pro tenant to decidedly anti tenant. Tenants have been abandoned by successive administrations to market forces.

The mythology of a totally free rental market is huge in Malta.  People (usually landlords and populist politicians) swear by the laws of supply and demand.  They want the rental market to be just like any other market.   People forget that tenants are a captive market – they have to have a roof over their heads.  So, at the end of the day, they will have to accept to pay 60% of their income on rent, if all rents are high.  The laws of supply and demand are not enough on their own to manage the sensitive dynamics of a country’s rental market.

Even the UK Tory government,  great espousers of free market ideology, believe in rent calming measures and built in tenant protection.  In fact, a few days ago they proposed minimum rental contract periods of 3 years and banning tenant letting agency fees in the White Paper on Housing.

Yesterday, I watched the programme Xtra on TVM, one of the themes of which was renting.  Paula Mifsud Bonnici and Silvio Schembri were the guests.  There was no recognition of the urgency with which Malta – not PN or LP – needs to address this housing crisis we have.  No urgency, whatsoever. Silvio Schembri mentioned a few of the many initiatives countries all over the world have implemented. I could see no such solutions in anything Paula Mifsud Bonnici said.   There was far too much political point scoring and not enough quiet reflection on how we got here and how can we get out of here.  I don’t think that either political party underestands the gravity of our housing situation. But I sense that there is a growing anger and despair amongst many tenants living in Malta.    These need a state intervention NOW.