Dear Editor,

Jamaica’s building code review, scheduled for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, has been welcomed as a step towards resilience in the face of hurricanes and climate change. Yet the country’s challenge is not the absence of legislation. Jamaica has long possessed a framework of laws — the Building Act of 2018, the Town and Country Planning Act, and municipal by-laws — that require safe and resilient construction. The real weakness lies in enforcement. Codes exist, but they are too often treated as symbolic gestures rather than binding obligations.

The institutional history of local government explains much of this paralysis. Parish councils, which transitioned into municipal corporations in 2016, have traditionally borne responsibility for enforcing building regulations. However, they have been chronically under-resourced. In many parishes, fewer than a dozen inspectors are expected to monitor thousands of construction sites, ranging from hillside developments to coastal hotels. This mismatch between mandate and capacity has left municipal corporations unable to regulate effectively.

Montego Bay offers a telling example. Successive councils have warned against construction in flood-prone areas such as the North Gully, yet enforcement has collapsed when demolition orders collided with the realities of poverty and housing demand. This pattern is replicated across the island. In Kingston, hillside homes continue to rise without engineering approval, leading to landslides during heavy rain. Along the coasts, hotels and residences encroach on shorelines despite the prohibitions of the Beach Control Act, eroding natural buffers against storms. Hurricane Melissa in 2025 exposed the fragility of these practices, as informal housing in St James and Westmoreland was devastated — structures technically illegal but tolerated in practice.

The reasons for enforcement failure are systemic. Municipal corporations lack sufficient technical staff and engineers to monitor construction. Their financial dependence on central government transfers leaves them unable to sustain robust inspection programmes. Compounding this is the absence of modern data and monitoring systems. Councils often operate without updated cadastral maps, digital permitting platforms, or reliable records of construction activity. This information gap makes it nearly impossible to track violations in real time, leaving inspectors reactive rather than proactive. Most critically, the Building Act of 2018 envisioned a building authority to provide institutional backbone, but its activation has been slow, leaving municipal corporations without the regulatory support they need.

If Jamaica is to achieve resilience, the focus must shift from drafting new codes to strengthening institutions that enforce them. This requires fully operationalising the building authority with genuine regulatory power, funding municipal corporations to expand technical capacity, and investing in modern monitoring systems that allow enforcement to be data-driven. It also demands a cultural shift: Communities must be educated about the dangers of informal construction and the collective benefits of compliance.

A building code without enforcement is like a lock without a key — symbolic, but powerless against the storm. Jamaica cannot afford another cycle of legislation without implementation. Hurricane Melissa was not merely a natural disaster, it was a warning that resilience will not be achieved through paper tigers. Success depends on institutional strengthening, adequate resources, and the courage to enforce laws already written. Only then can Jamaica build a future that is truly hurricane-resistant and sustainable.

Richard Vernon

Mayor of Montego Bay