Malta’s frozen health committee: €1.3 billion spent with zero oversight as chair claims ‘conflict of interest’

**Parliament’s health chair cites role clash for calling no meetings in two years**

For 24 straight months, while Maltese families debated COVID boosters, queued for cancer-screening delays and watched medical-staff strikes unfold on TV, the parliamentary committee that is supposed to scrutinise all things health has not met once. The reason, according to its own chairperson? A “conflict of interest” arising from his other day job: being the government’s chief medical officer.

Dr. Kenneth Grech, who still signs weekly epidemiological bulletins as CMO, told HOT MALTA he froze the Health Estimates Committee because “I cannot interrogate my own ministry’s budget when I drafted part of it.” The admission, slipped into a brief e-mail reply last week, has triggered incredulity across medical NGOs, Opposition benches and the man-on-the-bus commentary that fuels village-core conversations.

In most democracies, a powerful post such as health-committee chair is coveted; in Malta, population 520,000, it has become a ceremonial ghost. The last minutes posted online date to 7 April 2022 – the same week Robert Abela’s newly re-elected cabinet was sworn in at the Palace. Since then, €1.3 billion in public health spending, including the multi-million-euro deal for the Gozo hospital concession and the yet-to-be-opened Karen Grech rehabilitation wing, has bypassed line-by-line parliamentary questioning.

**Small island, bigger accountability gap**

The stall is felt acutely in a country where politics is a blood-sport and everyone knows someone who works at Mater Dei. Waiting lists for hernia repairs have ballooned to 9,000; junior doctors staged an overtime revolt in February; and only last month, oncology patients protested outside Parliament over shortages of PET-scan slots. Yet none of these crises have been dissected under the committee’s formal evidence-taking powers.

Dr. Grech’s dual role is legal – Maltese law allows MPs to hold public posts – but it collides with the Westminster-style convention that select-committee chairs come from back-benchers, not paid executives. “It’s like asking the referee to also play striker,” quipped Nationalist MP and surgeon Stephen Spiteri, who sits on the committee. Spiteri tabled three written requests since 2022 to restart sessions, all unanswered. “We are the only House in the EU with a health committee in cryogenic freeze,” he said.

**Cultural shrug or democratic drift?**

Maltese voters traditionally reward competence over abstract notions of checks and balances; turnout remains the continent’s highest. But the silence of the health committee feeds a growing narrative that decisions are taken in Castille’s corridors and rubber-stamped in Brussels, bypassing our 67-seat chamber. “People stop me at the grocer and ask: ‘If they don’t bother discussing the hospital, what hope for our road?’” said Gwen Falzon, who runs community health literacy sessions in Paola.

The vacuum also skews media coverage. Without open hearings, journalists rely on leaked e-mails and Facebook whistle-blowers – fertile ground, but no substitute for on-record testimony. Sources at the Office of the Clerk of the House confirm the committee room has been double-booked for ESL classes since January, an irony not lost on satirists who dubbed it “the only classroom in Europe with zero health questions”.

**What happens next?**

Speaker Anġlu Farrugia, who has discretionary power to re-assign chairs, declined to comment “until informal consultations conclude”. Government whip Andy Ellul insisted the pause is “temporary and procedural”, yet could not say when deliberations would resume. Meanwhile, the European Parliament’s health committee continues to meet monthly, forwarding recommendations that Malta’s delegation must defend without fresh national input.

For patients like 34-year-old Sliema mother Claire Darmanin, awaiting bariatric surgery deemed “non-urgent”, the abstraction has real-life weight. “I watch the news and see billions announced, but nobody explains why my operation keeps being postponed,” she said. “A committee meeting won’t cut the waiting list overnight, but at least I’d know someone asked the question.”

Until the chairmanship riddle is solved, Malta’s most sensitive budget will keep gliding through the House unchallenged, watched over by a portrait of Queen Victoria who, for all her imperial distance, at least never had to recuse herself.