Changes in planning laws and a boom in the construction industry stretched the heritage watchdog’s resources to the limit as planning consultation requests rose nine-fold in just three years.
The Superintendence of Cultural Heritage issued 1,099 consultations in 2015. However, changes in planning legislation, which came into force the following year, resulted in a much larger workload as all full development applications had to be referred to the watchdog.
Consequently, by the end of 2018, the number of requests had risen by nine times to 9,773.
This trend was highlighted in the 2018 annual report, which flagged the difficulties encountered by the watchdog to fulfilits duties within the limited resources availability.
The report notes that following an operations review carried out when Joseph Magro Conti succeeded Anthony Pace as superintendent in March last year, it immediately emerged that day-to-day operations with regard to planning consultation and archaeological monitoring “did not work smoothly as they should”.
In this respect, it was pointed out that the workload of 200 weekly cases had to be shouldered by just four officers who, by law, have no more than 30 days to…
