Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1544097
The following are excerpts from the interview. The full interview can be found on maltatoday. com.mt as well as our Facebook and Spotify pages. PHOTOS: JAMES BIANCHI / MALTA TODAY The PN is proposing to lower VAT for restaurants to 7%. Fi- nance Minister Clyde Caruana has said the measure could cost around €100 million. Has the PN done its own costing? This is not only a PN idea. If you look at the pre-budget documents submitted by the Association of Catering Establishments over the past two years, and the Chamber of Commerce document just published, this proposal is there. The reason is simple. Right now, hotels charge 7% VAT on food they serve to guests. Restaurants charge 18%. And supermarkets selling ready-to-eat food charge zero. So, for the same service you are paying 18% outside the hotel and 7% inside. That is an unlevel playing field. There is also the fact that in a number of Mediterranean countries the VAT rate for restaurants is lower than the standard rate. But will prices actually go down? I have rarely seen a scenario where they do. That is a valid point. There is the possibility that prices are lowered, but in operations that are already established and stable, if the saving is not passed on to the consumer, I hope it will at least make that restaurant more sustainable. If it becomes more sustainable it will make more profit. If it makes more profit, it will pay more income tax. So, if the government collects less in VAT, it will collect more in income tax. We have to see this from two tracks and I hope they balance out for the consumer, for the operator, and for the government. What exactly is a 'quality tourist' for the PN? A quality tourist is one who leaves more in the Maltese economy while having less impact on the environment and infrastructure. We want to do more with less. Malta is one of the countries most impacted by tourism in the world because of our size. Our land area has not grown, but our population has risen from around 450,000 to almost 600,000, and tourist numbers have gone from 2.7 million to four million. The tourist-to-resident ratio we have is among the highest anywhere in the world. The impact is felt everywhere—in sewage systems that could not cope in certain summers, in energy blackouts during peak season, in rubbish left on streets. We need to balance what tourism is costing us against what it is actually leaving behind. What about Airbnb and short lets? Airbnb is a reality and we cannot avoid it. Close to 40% of tourists are now staying in private accommodation rather than hotels. The problem is this phenomenon spreads the negative impacts of tourism. When you have a hotel, one hotelier is responsible for waste, behaviour and order. When you have 600 tourists spread across 200 apartments in a residential block, you have noise problems, waste collection problems, neighbours being inconvenienced. The government closed a public consultation on new rules last December, yet here we are at the end of March about to enter another summer with no regulation in place. We need to go beyond pilot projects. There is also the impact on housing. Apartment owners in Valletta are choosing to rent to tourists rather than to young Maltese families, reducing the supply of affordable residential accommodation in the city. If you were tourism minister in a PN government's first 100 days, what would you do? The first thing is to get everyone around the table. And I mean everyone, not only those who are investing in tourism. The communities need to be there too. Tourism does not need shock treatment. We cannot stop flights overnight, cap tourist numbers, or halt development. That would be the worst thing we could do. What tourism needs is consistency in direction. The Vision 2050 document is a start but the government cannot expect that, in such an important sector, everything rests on a handful of initiatives. We need a real, shared vision of where we want to get to and how, and we need to hit the ground running to deliver it. 5 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 29 MARCH 2026 INTERVIEW