The Council of the Kamra tal-Periti has issued a statement regarding the draft amendments to the Avoidance of Damage to Third Party Property Regulations.

The amendments were published on Monday following the recent spate of structural collapses which occurred adjacent to construction sites.

The Council said that together with its team of technical experts, a review of the proposed draft has been made and has this morning issued a preliminary position to all periti, which will be discussed and approved at an Extraordinary General Meeting to be held this coming Friday, the 21st of June.

Periti have been given until Thursday at noon to submit their comments in writing to the Council, following which a final draft will be circulated, it said.

An Executive Summary of the Kamra’s initial reactions argued that “the rush to implement these piecemeal changes to the regulatory regime that governs the building industry is ill-thought.”

It pointed out that “our regulations and legislative instruments need a complete overhaul, as the Kamra has repeatedly stated since 2007.”

The Council added that however, “attempting to amend the current regulations without having considered their impact on other pieces of legislation as well as on current practices and capacity of the industry is a recipe for further confusion and lack of clarity, rather than addressing the issues of safety which these changes purport to address.”

It also argued that “even if the purported aim is to address the dangerous process of demolitions and excavations adjacent to existing properties, the Legal Notice proposes to address all other construction activities, but, at the same time, fails to address the other dangerous process of loading party walls, and their foundations, designed to carry two or three storeys, by many more floors.”

“The amendments claim to clarify the roles of the figures engaged on a site,” said the Council. “However, there are glaring incongruences with roles defined in other legislation, and rather than clarifying, the proposals introduce new roles without defining appropriate competences, while ignoring the existence of figures already defined in other legislation, such as licenced masons.”

The Council stated that, “it also ignores the blatant lacuna regarding the legal obligation for registration of contractors, who are liable, as per Civil Law, jointly with the perit, for the structural integrity of buildings.”

“The proposed processes for the submission of method statements, geotechnical investigation reports and geotechnical design reports are cumbersome and more intent on establishing who does them, who submits them, when and to whom, than on establishing the criteria for their preparation,” said the Council

The Kamra went on to say that it is of the opinion that this is a result of the “lack of research to understand how such instruments are used internationally, and trying to adapt them to the local situation, with no regard for scale or complexity of projects.”

The proposed draft, it said, “seems to imply that the measures proposed therein are to apply retroactively to ongoing projects. This will have implications on the capacity of the industry to respond in a meaningful manner.”

“In our view, the proposed Legal Notice in its current form is not acceptable,” the Kamra said. The full version of the Kamra’s analysis on the draft will be published at the end of the consultation process following the EGM.

Photograph: Kamra tal-Periti

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