Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1538131
4 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 AUGUST 2025 INTERVIEW Claire Bonello: 'Planning bills take Malta back to feudal times' FRUSTRATED, angry and visibly disappointed lawyer and activist Claire Bonello insists government's planning bills send Malta back to feudal times. As I sit down for this interview in her Valletta office, Bonello im- mediately corrects my description of the two planning bills tabled by government as a reform. It is dis- ingenuous calling it a reform, she says, insisting that a better adjec- tive would be "an atomic bomb". A long-time ally of environmen- tal NGOs in their court battles to challenge development permits that fly in the face of policy, Bonel- lo says the amendments will create legal uncertainty, rather than bring about clarity as Prime Minister Robert Abela suggested. Bill 143 and Bill 144 will amend the Development Planning Act and the law regulating the Environment and Planning Tribunal, respective- ly. "One of the bills proposes that the Planning Board, when taking de- cisions, can deviate from planning policies. When you start deviating from policies it means that effec- tively there will be no policies. Why are you creating a law which allows the authority to deviate from the law?" she tells me. Calling it piecemeal legislation, the lawyer slams the lack of consul- tation by the government. She says the excuse put forward by Plan- ning Authority CEO Johann Butt- igieg that consultation would lead to property price speculation is "a joke". "You are consulting with those who have submissions and appeals in place, and are best placed to take advantage of the reform and spec- ulate in the background," she says. Bonello also criticises govern- ment's announcement of an am- nesty for illegal developments, saying it is the last in a series of reg- ularisations by governments, with the last being in 2016 under then Parliamentary Secretary Deborah Schembri. She also calls out the "instrumen- talisation" of people with cancer by MPs and ministers in a bid to justi- fy the amnesty. "Every time an amnesty or regu- larisation is proposed, they come out with the cancer card. […] If we are going to justify these laws by using cancer patients, we will never have proper laws. But you have to look at the long-term, and you will see there have been a series of reg- ularisations over the years, and so it never stops," she says. Lawyer Claire Bonello is the bane of developers, having successfully challenged in court building permits that breached planning policy. She sits down with Karl Azzopardi to discuss the reform to planning laws being contemplated by government, which she likens to 'an atomic bomb'.