Build first, ask later

Summary

Nearly 70,000 buildings in Malta were constructed without permission and then legalized after the fact. The approval rate at board hearings? 97.6%. The planning system hasn't failed — it has been repurposed.

Board hearing statistics are based on 24,595 sanctioning hearings in the PA database. See methodology for coverage details.

Start with one hotel

PA/04201/23 — British Hotel, 41 & 265-273 Triq il-Batterija, Valletta. An entire 6-storey, 35-room "diffuso" hotel — complete with reception, breakfast areas, offices, kitchenettes, laundry room, and guestrooms — sanctioned "as built, as shown on proposed drawings in its entirety." Approved in January 2024. This is not a garden wall or a minor extension: it is a fully operational commercial hotel in Malta's UNESCO World Heritage capital, built first and permitted afterwards.

A 35-room hotel in Valletta. Built without planning permission. Then legalized with a rubber stamp. You might assume this is extraordinary.

It isn't.

The scale nobody talks about

"Sanctioning" — applying for permission to legalize development that has already been built without authorization — accounts for 46,878 planning applications in the database. Add the separate Regularisation (RG) fast-track system, and the total reaches over 70,000 retroactive legalization cases.

That's not a loophole being exploited by a few rogue developers. That's the system working as designed.

But here's what makes it worse.

The rubber stamp

When sanctioning cases reach the Planning Board for a decision, the numbers are extraordinary:

The board refused only 549 sanctioning cases out of 24,595 hearings — a refusal rate of just 2.2%. The average votes for sanctioning approvals were 3.1 for and 0.0 against, meaning these are not even contested decisions.

Build first. Apply later. Get approved. It's not a gamble — it's a near-certainty.

This raises an obvious question: when did it get this bad?

The 2016 surge

Something changed dramatically around 2016-2017. The sanctioning rate didn't just creep upward — it exploded.

Sanctioning rate over two decades

Total PA applications nearly doubled: 4,934 (2015) to 11,107 (2017). Sanctioning applications tripled: 1,014 (2015) to 3,719 (2018). At current rates, roughly 3,000+ illegal developments per year are being retroactively legalized through the PA route alone.

And the system briefly tried to push back — then stopped.

Sanctioning approval rates climbed and never came back down

Approval rate here is calculated against decided cases only (Grant + Acceptable, divided by Grant + Acceptable + Refuse). Pending cases are excluded.

There is no crackdown era in this data. The sanctioning approval rate climbed steadily — from about 56% in the early 2000s, through 70% in the late 2000s — until around 2010–2011, when it took a step change up to ~88% and has stayed there ever since. The 2016+ surge in volume therefore happened against an already-high approval rate, not a recovering one. Total PA application volume was itself anomalously low between 2011 and 2014 (1,939–3,909/year, against ~5,000–7,000 either side) during the MEPA-to-PA transition, but the approval rate during those low-volume years was higher, not lower — which rules out the "low volume reflects stricter scrutiny" reading.

So who's driving this?

The specialists

Some architects have built entire practices around retroactive legalization:

Several architects have practices where 40-50% of their work is retroactive legalization. These are filing patterns in the database, not declared specialisms — but at this rate, sanctioning is no longer incidental work for these practices, it is a substantial share of their book.

The two-track legalization system

Malta effectively has two separate routes for legalizing illegal development:

1. PA sanctioning (regular planning application route)

• 46,878 cases with "sanction" in description
• Approval rate: 82.3% (33,212 approved, 6,176 refused)
• More scrutiny, some refusals

2. RG regularisation (dedicated fast-track)

• 23,793 cases processed separately
• Approval rate: 99.5% (22,162 approved, 109 refused)
• Virtually no refusals, effectively automatic legalization

Together, these process 70,671 retroactive legalization cases in the database, or approximately 4,000+ new cases per year at current rates. The RG route is the more permissive of the two — it functions as a rubber-stamp legalization pathway.

RG volume by year

The RG route exploded in 2017–2018, processing over 4,500–5,000 cases per year before settling to ~1,650/year — a steady-state rate that, combined with the ~3,000/year PA sanctioning route, gives the combined ~4,650 retroactive cases per year cited above.

What gets sanctioned

Each case is bucketed into a single primary category by keyword, in priority order, so the rows sum to the 46,878 total:

People are not just sanctioning garden sheds. The data includes 7,850 entire dwellings (apartments and maisonettes) and 2,402 swimming pools built without planning permission. This represents substantial, valuable development being processed after the fact.

The perverse incentive

With a 97.6% board approval rate for sanctioning, a 99.5% RG approval rate, and architects who specialize in the process — why would anyone apply for permission first?

Notable cases that prove the point

PA/00897/26 — 90 Triq Emanuel Benjamin Vella, Birkirkara. An entire apartment sanctioned "as built in view of no existing permits." Filed in January 2026, decision posted as Acceptable in March 2026. The application acknowledges that the dwelling has no planning history whatsoever — it simply exists, and the planning system's role is reduced to documenting its existence after the fact.

PA/08423/24 — 82 Triq Felice, Żabbar. "Proposed sanctioning of entire property" including a new basement level, internal wall shifts, changes to site configuration, and facade alterations. The development was built so differently from the original approval (PA/03418/18) that the applicant sought to sanction the whole building rather than list individual deviations. Approved.

Why this matters

A planning system where 30%+ of applications are retroactive — and nearly all of them succeed — is not a system that controls development. It is a system that charges a fee to legitimize it after the fact. The incentive structure is perverse: why endure the months-long process of applying for permission when you can build first and apply to sanction later with a 97.6% chance of board approval?

The data suggests that a growing portion of Malta's population has reached exactly this conclusion. Between the PA sanctioning route (36.6% of applications at peak in 2024) and the RG regularisation fast-track (99.5% approval rate), there is now an established pathway for legalizing unauthorized construction. The planning authority has become, for a third of its caseload, a notary for fait accompli.

The 2016 inflection point — when sanctioning rates surged from ~20% to ~30% — demands scrutiny. The approval rate was already at ~88% by then; what changed was that many more people decided to use the route. Was this a deliberate policy shift, or the cumulative effect of individual decisions? The coincidence with the broader construction boom documented in "The great erasure" (The Great Erasure) suggests that sanctioning and demolition are two faces of the same phenomenon: a building culture where the planning system follows development rather than directing it. The most pressing question is what happens if the sanctioning rate continues its upward trajectory. At 36.6% in 2024 — the peak so far — Malta is approaching a tipping point where retroactive legalization could become the majority of planning activity — at which point the concept of "planning permission" becomes largely ceremonial.

International context

In England, retrospective planning applications (the equivalent of sanctioning) are treated identically to prospective ones — they receive the same level of scrutiny and face the same approval criteria. Crucially, building without permission is an enforcement matter: local authorities can issue enforcement notices requiring demolition or restoration, and failure to comply is a criminal offence. There is no equivalent of Malta's RG fast-track with its 99.5% approval rate. The English system treats unauthorized development as a problem to be corrected, not a fait accompli to be rubber-stamped.

Media sources

• "Build now, sanction later: 663 seek permit for illegalities flagged by public" — MaltaToday, 30 June 2022. Confirms the build-first-sanction-later pattern: of 3,192 complaints about illegal development in 2021, illegal construction was confirmed in 59% of cases, and 663 owners applied to legalise violations after the fact.
• "Activists decry Planning Authority's sanctioning of illegal buildings in defiance of court rulings" — MaltaToday, 31 August 2024. NGOs protested outside Castille over the PA sanctioning developments whose permits were previously revoked by courts, corroborating the finding that the sanctioning system operates as near-automatic legalisation.
• "'That's the point of sanctioning': Abela shrugs off concerns on Caqnu's forgiven illegalities" — MaltaToday, 15 July 2025. The Prime Minister defended sanctioning of a 45,000 sq.m illegal development for EUR 1.8 million as "an existing legal remedy," directly confirming the institutional acceptance of retroactive legalisation described in this discovery.
• "Demonstrators to Abela: Stop PA's backdoor approval of illegal developments" — Times of Malta, 31 August 2024. Coalition of NGOs and resident groups protested the PA's sanctioning of developments declared illegal by courts, with developer Joseph Portelli named as having three additional illegal projects with pending sanctioning applications.
• "Planning reform will allow owners to pay to keep illegal developments" — Times of Malta, 27 July 2025. Reports the government's proposed reform allowing owners of illegal developments to pay fines to keep them, with the PA facing over 5,000 pending illegal development cases -- confirming the systemic scale of build-first-legalise-later.
• "Momentum calls for urgent law to ban sanctioning of illegal ODZ development" — Times of Malta, 11 July 2025. Reports PA's approval of illegal structures at Montekristo Estates against a fine of EUR 1.8 million after 20 years of flouted enforcement notices, corroborating the near-automatic sanctioning rate.