In 2011, Joseph Muscat, then Leader of Opposition, said he would “address head on the racket of the local wardens system”.
Local wardens had by then been around for a decade. In 2001, Local Councils were given the power to dispatch local wardens on beats they desired. If councillors had a problem area they needed to deal with, they could take the decision themselves on when wardens could be sent to enforce laws within the councillor’s competence rather than wait to rank somewhere in the priorities at police headquarters in Floriana.
But every government service has a cost and you needed to pay wardens, their management, and the administration of enforcing the fines they handed down. That cost was recovered from the income that came from the fines they issued. Since Local Councils do not raise money of their own they could hardly decide to dispatch wardens as friendly beat cops. If a warden was to be seen, they needed to be seen handing out fines. Which made the whole thing unpopular: a racket as Joseph Muscat called it.
There was one other consideration in that system which is relevant to the point I want to make. Though local wardens were obviously delivering a public service they were not individually employed by the government or by councils. The individuals were employed with private contractors who were then hired by the councils to do the wardening as it were.
This is what gave Joseph Muscat the license to call the local enforcement scheme “a racket”. 2011 was a very different time. Back then any private participation in public service was branded by the Labour opposition as profiteering robbery. How times change.
In February 2014, not long after Labour came to power, the government published its plan. It would cut the middlemen. It would employ directly the wardens and abolish the private sector’s participation in the system and it would centralise command and control of the wardens removing Local Councils from the decision-making process altogether.
The excuse for taking power away from Councils was efficiency. In place of fragmentation into 68 councils (as the system originally was) or 5 regional groupings (as the system had become by the time Labour came to power), there would be centralisation under the authority of one government-appointed apparatchik.
Of course, they ignored the fact that now that decision-making was centralised and taken away from town halls, the government had, by duplicating the function and chain of command of the police force, committed an obvious duplication, the ultimate inefficiency.
Some mayors in 2015 still had the self-respect to complain that powers were being taken from them without any obvious benefit to their communities. In this conference for mayors of southern towns and villages from 2015, then Siġġiewi Mayor Karol Aquilina, pleaded for a reversal of the government’s centralising policy. Of course, he was ignored.
The latest auditor’s report into the conduct of the central government agency running local wardens shows we made no efficiency gains at all. On the contrary things look quite disastrous. There’s a good summary of the report on today’s Times of Malta.
A summary of a summary: the financial records of the agency are in disarray. Debt collection is haphazard. Records of “forgiven” fines are patchy at best meaning that the opportunities for corruption are many and likely taken up.
Add to that the fact that mayors and councillors can no longer decide to despatch some measure of law enforcement to tamper the daily ordeals of petty lawlessness like cars parking on pavements, or rubbish dumped overnight, or any other form of bad neighbourliness that is too small for the police to be bothered with and too big to just ignore.
We have, once again, major gaps in law enforcement and councillors – especially Labour councillors who have conflicted loyalties to town and party – privately complain about the erosion of the quality of the environment with increased chaos caused by cars and other piles of rubbish.
The way Joseph Muscat dealt with this issue “head on” goes down in the long list of things made worse just by Labour “reforming” them.