Malta’s Mediterranean appeal and charm should be central to future development – GRTU deputy president
The government should take stock of Malta’s infrastructure and urban environment in order to better help guide investors in terms of their future investments and better plan in terms of the country’s physical development, deputy president of the GRTU responsible for tourism and the hospitality sector Philip Fenech has told The Malta Independent.
“This should be done in order to keep the island’s Mediterranean appeal and traditional charm,” he explained.
Speaking about development in Malta, Fenech highlighted that no economic activity, even tourism, doesn’t bring with it certain collateral problems, but stressed that the trick lies in not going overboard and being able to control those issues.
When one speaks about tourism, he explains, it refers to many different industries, not just hotels and restaurants. As an example, supermarkets and grocers also grow as tourism numbers rise, mainly due to tourists who rent private accommodation wanting food supplies. In addition, Airbnb-style apartments and hotels need to be furnished with furniture, so those businesses also get more work, he said.
“Tourists do not only come for the island’s sun and sea, as was the case in the past, but we have opened up a lot of different tourism sectors. As an example, the events sector has grown enormously, which includes areas such as conferences, special weddings and lately music tourism. Music tourism has become a big thing on the island, and we are hosting all types of concerts for all ages.”
“Because tourism growth came suddenly and quickly, whereas before there was a struggle to fill the shoulder months, over the past five years the shoulder months have been growing shorter. In the past, the October to May period was quiet. People would make money in summer but lose a considerable amount of it in winter as they would not want to lose their staff, meaning that their costs remained high but they were not capable of filling their capacity. Now we have all worked together to shorten the shoulder-month period and there is still more to work to be done in that respect.”
“There was also a lot of consumer and business confidence. Many people think of investment in a certain way, where people think that the government builds the infrastructure and then people start investing. What actually happens is that when the economy starts moving forward, businesses would expand. For example, a restaurant would make a profit and purchase the airspace on top of it, expanding it or building apartments. When one sees their restaurant packed, or that there is more demand for your hotel, then the inclination is to expand a business. This happened in a big way and on a large scale, but at the same time, the public sector was thrown way behind.”
“We found ourselves in an infrastructurally stressful situation, where all resources were stretched. So the cleaners working with the cleansing department, the workers in the health sector, maintenance workers and others found themselves dealing with an increase of one million tourists in a short span of time, meaning more cleaning needed to be done, that there was more traffic, more injuries needing treatment etc.”
“This happened hand in hand with all other new investments, which is why we are now seeing all this construction and these public sector projects. We have, essentially, a big bang, and it cannot be postponed to, as some people want, November or January when things are slow. The need for infrastructural works are so imminent that you cannot even afford to waste one single day.”
If there are storm water issues due to certain buildings, and the need to increase electricity capacity for example, these do not simply go on hold until winter.”
“Infrastructure Malta came out with a programme for the next seven years, spending €700 million on roads. Now there is a whole master plan and they are starting off from priority areas to alleviate traffic congestion as much as they can. Air Malta and low cost airlines are increasing routes, so there will be growth everywhere. We are seeing growth in demand and growth in capacities which is coming from the private sector due to business confidence, as well as the government getting its act together to keep up with all of this.”
Told that there have been arguments that all the works going on are being done to the detriment of the environment, and that the country is growing too much reaching a point where it just cannot handle it, he said that Malta needs to better manage this growth. “We also need to manage our works. When you close a street, it does not only affect the immediate area. Malta is small, and our demand in traffic and passenger movement, deliveries, the supply chain is constant. This needs to be seriously managed, and to a certain extent is.”
“But change is happening so fast that some people are not even realising what is changing. We need to seriously take stock of the situation, such as what planning applications there are for hotels and apartments in order to see where the trend is heading. We shouldn’t interfere in the market but if we have this information, we would be able to, as a country, guide the investors as to whether their plans would lead to over-capacity.”
On the issue of trees, he spoke of the importance of increasing their number. “If before a certain number of trees were enough to help the ecosystem and equal out the pollution, we now need to realise that we are generating more pollution as we have more throughput due to more tourism and the fact that we are in full-employment. More tourism also means having more foreigners here working as we do not have enough people to run our hotels and restaurants.”
The fact that there are open spaces is important and having empty fields filled with trees is good for everyone, he said “as they can be an escape for those who live in urban areas. But at the same time, in the ideal situation they should also find areas on the side of main roads and plan for such space in order not to turn our localities into concrete jungles.”
He also believes that in high-rise constructions the roof garden concept can be better adopted. “We have a long way to go there. It needs to be introduced and encouraged by the ERA and PA, and buildings should be masked with greenery. For example, if one looks at Valletta it looks beautiful, with all the inlets and bays. But then one looks the other way towards Sliema, looking at the new apartments on top of each other... If they had to all be nicely greened from the outside it would look totally different.”
He believes that Malta’s urban areas do look like a hotchpotch of ideas put together.
He acknowledges that local councils did great jobs in refurbishing their centres, some using cobblestone, and many contribute to the Mediterranean character of their locality. “But then at the same time, and here comes the problem, many entrepreneurs with their enthusiasm to invest went with the idea of building a mini-Manhattan.”
“We need to be careful as we do not want to lose our Mediterranean traditional charm. We do not want to end up like Dubai. We need to be careful, and something I have observed is that we were trying to cram in certain big structures that can be too big for a particular plot of land. It is like they are cramming in to build a lot of capacity, but this will result in collateral damage in the whole area when it comes to the efficiencies of deliveries, traffic etc.”
Fenech urged the government to better cluster the island into areas, in order to better segregate entertainment areas from, for example, traditional villages.