Retirement, St James -Head of the Community Organisations for Management and Sustainable Development (Comand), Dave Allen has expressed concern that the island’s provident societies are losing their control over the management of the communities being developed under the state-run Operation Pride project.

As a result, societies have planned a December 1 meeting to discuss issues including:

. control of the funds they raise,

. the pace of site development,

. the cost of lots, and

. the provision of jobs at the community level, which is seen as a way to provide stable incomes and prevent the mortgaging of homes.

According to Allen, the National Housing Development Corporation (NHDC) began offering mortgages to individual society members about a year ago, and this has led to beneficiaries being asked to make their payments directly to the NHDC’s accounts. Prior to that arrangement, payments were made to the provident societies. This change has not gone down well with Allen.

“We understand, once you are dealing with people’s money there is the business of trust. And we would like to see the state, on behalf of the people, play an oversight role to ensure that we the provident society carry out our fiduciary responsibility, like the auditing of our accounts, holding annual general meetings and things of that nature,” he said.

“This is a new process and we want to ensure that there is transparency and we don’t mind the state playing an oversight role to ensure accountability and transparency. But for NHDC to sign on our account and things like that would have robbed us of our independence and autonomy. So there is a problem of governance there that we need to deal with,” he added.

Attempts to get a comment from the NHDC were futile this week, as calls were not returned. But according to a recent newspaper ad, beneficiaries are responsible for ensuring that their payments are funnelled to the NHDC’s accounts and the corporation reserves the right to cancel any sales and certificates of possession where they have no record of payments being made.

“We have some differences with the NHDC, in terms of the autonomy of provident societies and I am hoping that we will have consultation on the whole Pride process,” Allen said. “We need to revisit the process so I have asked for consultation with all provident societies because we are not an agent of the state, the people initially sought to save with us with a development agenda.”

The Operation Pride project was formulated as the government’s vehicle through which the numerous squatter settlements across the island would be regularised. But it has been plagued with controversy ranging from allegations of impropriety to escalating prices that place the housing solutions outside the reach of the beneficiaries.

According to Allen, who is also head of the Retirement Development Trust, some of his members have complained about sharp price increases and at least one individual has indicated that he cannot afford the lot and will have to give it up.

“We were told that it was $18 per square foot, now we see that there are variations in the price well above the cost. I have seen land which we were estimating for $52,000 now priced at $132,000,” he said. “I have not seen the whole range and I now want to examine the entire thing. The December 1 meeting is to discuss that and other issues.”