PRIME Minister Andrew Holness says a policy decision has been taken to return the National Housing Trust (NHT) to its original mandate of building houses for Jamaicans, while pointing out that governments have over the years been guilty of diverting funds from the entity to assist in funding the budget.

Holness was addressing 110 excited NHT beneficiaries who yesterday received keys to their new houses at the Twickenham Glades housing scheme in St Catherine. After over 40 years of existence, Holness said, the NHT was in need of review to ensure that the original mission is still relevant to the circumstances and conditions of today.

The prime minister, at the same time, pointed out that a record number of houses (12,019) are currently being built by the NHT, costing more than $100 billion. He added that 95 per cent of these houses are considered to be affordable to low-income earners. At the same time, the prime minister revealed that the NHT has spent roughly $95 billion on the planning and designing of 9, 641 houses to ensure that when the current batch of 12,019 is complete, construction of more units will begin right away. He said the cost of these houses will be roughly $8 million.

“Our belief is that shelter is an entitlement to Jamaicans and we should give a guarantee to our citizens for this. The first thing we have said to the NHT is to build the houses. Use your resources that have been piling up, year on year, that people start to salivate on it and say the NHT has this massive reserve which is not true. It would appear so because you are not converting those reserves into houses at a fast enough rate and we have put some of that into other places.

“We have put some into education and we have put some into the fiscal sustainability programme. If the cash reserves were converted into housing then you couldn’t really take anything out if it, because it would be in housing,” Holness said.

Former chairman of the NHT, Howard Mitchell, recently criticised the entity over it’s high-end development of Ruthven Towers in St Andrew which has over 80 units, starting at $27.7 million. He argued that the NHT may have lost sight of it’s original mandate. However, Holness defended the move yesterday, saying that the NHT has a duty to provide Jamaicans with access to different categories of housing.

“We see the misalignment of vision and reality in the public commentary on the decisions and actions of the NHT. There are some who are of the view that the NHT should be involved in social housing; so much of the criticisms that you would see when the NHT advertises housing units at Rutheven Road, for example, it rubs people the wrong way because in their mind, the cost of housing and the availability of housing, these are issues the NHT is designed to address, to bring down the cost of housing and make them more affordable and available.

“It rubs me the wrong way when I hear the blanket criticisms without context of what the NHT is doing, as if to say the construction of one development on Ruthven Road somehow immediately destroys and deprives everyone else of housing, as if to say the people who will benefit from Ruthven Road are not contributors as well. The mandate of the NHT is to build houses for contributors,” Holness said.