MANDEVILLE, Manchester – Land usage and appropriate restrictions “on where people can build” will be high on her agenda should the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) be returned to political power following the upcoming parliamentary elections, says Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

“This is one of the things that I am going to be dealing with early in my new term [in] office,” Simpson Miller said on Thursday following post-hurricane visits to informal housing settlements known as Top Bay and Bottom Bay in Alligator Pond.

“We have to take a decision… I think we have to put a restriction on where people can build as we protect the natural and built environment, we (also) need to protect the areas not yet occupied,” she told journalists.

Simpson Miller was particularly perturbed by conditions at Top Bay – a community of several hundred, located on a sand bank above Alligator Pond that is without an access road, running water and electricity.

The prime minister was told by residents that the passage of Hurricane Dean had significantly worsened their plight with the destruction of several homes. She met Hylton Brown, an elderly Top Bay resident, whose face still showed the bruises from injuries he received when an ackee tree fell on his house trapping him beneath.

Up slope from the shambles of Brown’s house, a set of concrete steps stood in the sand as a lonely monument to a three-bedroom house, which was destroyed by powerful winds as Hurricane Dean passed just south of Alligator Pond on Sunday.

Simpson Miller said that quite apart from hurricane relief she would be instructing the National Water Commission (NWC) to immediately begin the trucking of water to the residents of the informal communities.

She pointed out that informal settlements were not the only ones to which the Government would have to pay attention as it moves to address appropriate construction and land usage.

“When we look at Caribbean Terrace, what happened there during Ivan and now Dean we have to take a decision and also Portland Cottage and a number of other areas,… we need to take some serious decisions on it and I am ready to deal with this. We have to take some action and see if we can find some land appropriate that we can have people relocated…,” she said.

She said a major problem was that people often found it “difficult” and painful to leave their homes where they “had lived for a long time”, but she was encouraged by an increasing awareness of the inherent dangers of unplanned development.

“I think that if we work with the people we will get them to co-operate… it is going to take a partnership between the people and the state to get them relocated,” she said.