The environment, housing, development and planning were the primary topics, with GSD Leader Keith Azopardi and Trevor Hammond speaking in regards to the Housing Stock, Queens Cinema, regulation of e-Scooters, combatting pollution, issues with parking and transport, just to name a few.

The GSD were excited to announce their vision of a long-term Gibraltar 2050 plan, a 30 year plan which they believe is needed for aspects like development, planning, housing needs and economic objectives, a plan that they hope will be carried out by any future government going into the future.

‘Appalling’ is the adjective used by the GSD’s Trevor Hammond when talking about the current air quality of the environment. He said, ‘Air quality is fundamental not just for our environment but our health and that is something that appears to be lost to people.

‘We are going to look at bunkering and how that industry practices its operations. We will also look at the dockyard and the GibDock activity. Again, unacceptably polluting at the moment, both in terms of the noise and in terms of the air.

‘Vehicles of course need to be tackled and we will also look to dis-incentivize the use of polluting vehicles through various measures, and particularly, incentivize the use of cleaner vehicles which are obviously electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, even vehicles with smaller engines, they all contribute to a better environment.’

He further said, ‘We’ve just seen the Queen's Cinema knocked down, we still intend on building a theatre there. We don’t believe the plans for the Theatre at John Macintosh Hall are at all sensible or indeed reasonable, for instance, one of the very few remaining bat colonies lives on the roof of the John Macintosh Hall. 30 years ago there were nearly 50,000 bats in Gibraltar, now we are down to under 2,000 bats in Gibraltar, and 800 of those are in the roof of the John Macintosh Hall. To disrupt that for the sake of putting a theatre there where we can so easily do it somewhere else and the obvious place of the Queens Cinema site as the GSLP said they would in their last manifesto and haven’t delivered, its nonsense and tells you all the environmental credentials of this government.’

Keith Azopardi said: “It looks like one of the big key differences between us and the GSLP in this election, given what Fabian Picardo said on Monday that he would build rental housing if necessary and clearly they fall short of making a commitment, well I can certainly announce today that in our manifesto we have the commitment to build 500 rental housing public stock to assist the need for rental housing. The population of Gibraltarians has grown 25% over the last 20 years, but the rental stock has been static as far back as the late 70s.'

02-10-2019 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR