OPPOSITION Spokesman on Housing Dr Horace Chang suggested yesterday that the National Housing Trust (NHT) has been failing to fulfil its vision of funding housing solutions for low-income Jamaican workers.

But, in response permanent secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and NHT officers attending yesterday’s meeting of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) put up a strong defence in favour of the entity’s programmes.

The discussion was among the highlights of the weekly meeting of Parliament’s PAAC at Gordon House.

Dr Chang said the NHT has been focusing on finding solutions for the middle class and not paying enough attention to low-income workers, which was its original mandate

He said that, because of this, the Trust has been unable to provide benefits for more than 25 per cent of its contributors, since its inception in 1962.

Senior general manager at NHT Donald Moore said, while only 17 per cent of its income is contributed by workers earning $10,000 or less per week, that wage group has been obtaining 37 percent of the loans it has been providing.

“What we are trying to do is to provide solutions to all our contributors. So, for example, at the very, very low end of the scale, we are talking about service lots on which they can use their own means in sweat equity and so on. We are trying to do more houses for less. So, all the time, we are trying to see what solutions the contributor at the very lowest level of the income scale can afford. That is the work that we are doing currently,” Moore said.

Chang, however, noted that the NHT’s housing stock this year was way below projections, and its delivery was below “if not significantly below” projections, while there should have been improvements if the programme was working.

“You are doing little bits of everything and not doing any thing very well, except for the administration. You need to focus on how you can get financing to these contributors,” the opposition spokesman said.

Permanent Secretary in the OPM, under which the NHT falls, Onika Miller, took offence to the suggestion that the Trust was ineffective.

“I totally concede the point that there are things that we need to do better, and we need to do it more efficiently, and in fact leveraging the partnerships is the way to go. And, to the extent there are persons who are contributing, that you have mentioned, who are in that underserved category, we must find solutions to be able to address them,” she said.

“So, I am not at all saying that we are doing everything that is absolutely possible, but I don’t think that the overall characterisation ought to be that the Housing Trust is not doing what it needs to do,” she added.

Opposition MP Edmund Bartlett, who chairs the PAAC, summed up that the policy direction of the NHT was not of its own doing, and therefore the Government should take the blame if the policy was failing.