OPPOSITION spokesperson on housing and sustainable living Professor Senator Floyd Morris is demanding that Prime Minister Andrew Holness provide a clear account of how many actual houses have been constructed by National Housing Trust (NHT) and the private sector since 2020, as he strongly criticised the prime minister’s recent projections for housing development in Jamaica.

Morris said Holness’s claim that his Government is on track to build 70,000 houses during this term is “a mere figment of his imagination, and an attempt to mislead the Jamaican people”.

“The recent projection of the prime minister about his Administration on track to build 70,000 houses, of which the NHT is to build approximately 43,000, of which over 30,000 are at various development stages, is far from the target delineated in the manifesto of the Jamaica Labour Party in 2020,” Morris said.

“The prime minister must be reminded that announcements and pronouncements about houses to be built do not constitute delivery of a house. We need to see blocks in the ground and people getting keys for these houses.”

Morris said when the numbers are disaggregated, “it is pellucid that his Administration will not be able to reach the target of 70,000 houses by 2025. From his numbers, the NHT is behind by over 10,000 houses — and these cannot be completed by 2025. Furthermore, we do not know how many of the 70,000 houses have been built by the private sector”.

Morris is also accusing the Government of not catering to low-income earners in their housing development plans.

“Over the past eight years we have seen the price for houses skyrocketing out of the reach of individuals in the low to middle-income band. When a government agency can be selling a lot for over $20 million on the market, they cannot be serious about getting houses at an affordable rate for our citizens. This is madness!”

While delivering three units under the New Social Housing Programme (NSHP) in Clarendon North Central on August 2, Holness said NHT was at an advanced stage in delivering its share of the 70,000 solutions targeted for development under the Government’s housing policy.

Holness said of the 43,000 units programmed to be built by the NHT, work is at various stages of execution on nearly 30,000.

“The NHT has 5,081 solutions that are at various stages of completion. They have 10,680 units in contracts, meaning that they have gone through procurement [and] they have engaged with the contractors to start construction. And they have 16,867 solutions in the procurement process, meaning that they are now engaging with various contractors through procurement to determine who will actually do the construction. So, the NHT is quite advanced in their work,” Holness said.

The prime minister, who said these houses will come to market over the next few years, added that “this is probably the first time that we have had such a structured programme of building houses and making them available right across Jamaica”.

He also said the Government expects that “by the end of this year we would have surpassed the 300-unit mark”, pointing out that “at present, close to 1,000 Jamaicans would have benefited from the NSHP”.

The NSHP is the flagship programme of the Government’s social safety net strategy as it relates to housing.

To date, 248 units have been handed over while another 53 under construction are at various stages of completion.