The government claims it is on track to fulfil one of its key electoral promises to rebuild all of Malta’s roads, with Transport Minister Chris Bonett recently telling parliament that the project is “95% complete”.
But despite this, the government has turned down repeated requests to provide Times of Malta with a list of the roads that were rebuilt, saying that listing them all would be too much work.
Back in June, Bonett told parliament that the government had rebuilt 1,315 roads over the past six years, since the €700m project was launched in 2018.
The project was a key electoral pledge in the Labour Party’s manifesto ahead of the 2017 general election, with the party pledging to fix all Malta’s roads if re-elected to government.
Describing the intensity of work carried out as “unprecedented”, Bonett told MPs that works on the remaining 200 roads would be completed by the end of 2025. This cost over €634.2m to date, Bonnett said, with another €65.8m earmarked for the remaining roads.
Which roads?
Days after Bonett’s claim, Times of Malta asked the transport ministry for a list of roads that had been completed, those still in the pipeline and how much each completed road had cost.
Despite repeated assurances that the list would be provided, this never transpired.
A freedom of information request asking for the same information was filed in August, eventually making its way to the door of Infrastructure Malta, the entity responsible for roadworks across Malta and Gozo.
But the entity turned down the request saying the resources needed to compile the list and provide the information sought would “substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the public authority from its other operations”.
It remains unclear how the precise figure of 1,315 roads completed roads was reached without the authorities already having totted them up.
Nor is it clear how the government has identified the remaining 200 roads without this list or how their total cost was calculated.
Boilerplate replies
This is not the first time that this pledge came under scrutiny. Early last year, then-transport minister Aaron Farrugia told Times of Malta that the pledge only referred to residential roads, rather than all roads, a claim which Times of Malta found to be mostly false.
It is also not the first time that the transport ministry has been reticent to provide information about ongoing, publicly funded roadworks.
In June, Bonett provided identical boilerplate replies to a series of parliamentary questions by Nationalist Party infrastructure spokesperson Joe Giglio about the cost of four ongoing projects, before eventually tabling the costings days later.
Meanwhile, residents in several localities have reported facing seemingly endless roadworks and delayed road projects.
Residents in the northern town of Manikata have turned to the ombudsman to investigate delays to the ongoing roadworks in the area, with the project now in its final stretch, three years after works began.
Roadworks in the town of Msida faced similar delays, eventually being completed earlier this year, nine months behind schedule.
Transport Malta last year pledged to step up its monitoring of contractors in an effort to cut down on delays in works being completed.
Verdict
Although government officials say that 1,315 roads have been completed, the transport ministry and its public entities refuse to provide a list of roads that have been completed and those yet to undergo works, arguing that this would take too much time and resources.
Several requests, including a freedom of information request, have been turned down on this basis.
This claim therefore cannot be verified, as authorities refuse to provide the relevant information.
