Another matter brought into focus by Bill No. 143 concerns the operation of Article 102 of the Development Planning Act, which links the supply of water and electricity to planning compliance. The original text required a compliance certificate confirming that development was either in accordance with a permission or had been conceded or approved under successive planning statutes. In practice, this created a formal mechanism to ensure that unlawful buildings could not be regularised indirectly through the automatic provision of utilities. It also entrenched the compliance certificate as the gatekeeper of essential services, with revocation of the certificate entitling the Authority to demand suspension of supply.
Bill 143 does not alter the structure of Article 102 but recalibrates its language. The proposed amendment removes the diffuse references to approvals under past statutes and instead anchors the condition for service provision in two streamlined categories: first, that the development is “legal in accordance with this Act,” and second, that it “has been conceded under any regulation made under this Act.” The distinction is deliberate. A development may be legal in itself because no permit is required under the Act, in which case it is unnecessary to produce evidence of a permission. Equally, where irregularities exist, the path to service connection lies through concessions created under regulations, the very set of concessionary measures introduced alongside the Bill. In this way the law clarifies that legality does not always flow from a permit—it may exist by operation of the statute itself—while still formalising the concession mechanism as the sole route for regularising otherwise non-compliant structures.
The amendment therefore does two things. It simplifies the drafting, replacing a web of references to repealed laws with a single anchor in the current Act. And it reinforces the policy choice to place concessions firmly within the framework of regulation, ensuring that any derogation from full compliance arises only through a transparent and uniform process. In this respect, Article 102 continues to serve its traditional function as an enforcement tool, but under Bill 143 it does so with cleaner statutory language and a clearer integration of concessions into the legal order.
