Opposition challenges $11.4b NHT drawdown as Government defends Senate bill

The parliamentary opposition has criticised the government for moving ahead with a multibillion-dollar transfer from the National Housing Trust to help fund the budget.

Opposition members say the Trust does not have the level of cash flexibility being claimed by the administration.

During debate in the Senate on Friday, opposition Senator Cleveland Tomlinson said the policy direction was unfair to contributors, arguing that many Jamaicans paying into the NHT are not receiving enough value from the agency.

He said borrowers who obtain NHT-backed financing through outside lending institutions are denied certain benefits they would have received from a direct NHT loan.

“So the subsidy for the life insurance, they don't get that. The subsidy for the peril insurance, they don't get that. So what you're finding here is that the people's money taken from their salaries to support a fund where they can access financing for housing solutions at lower costs is being diverted. And now the NHT has an external financing programme whereby they can access financing through private commercial partners, and they do not get the subsidies that they could have accessed,” Senator Tomlinson said.

He argued that a prudent administration would not remove $11.4 billion from the Trust, but would instead leave the funds in place so that support available through the NHT could also be extended to people borrowing through private commercial lenders.

Senator Tomlinson further maintained that taking $11.4 billion out of the NHT weakens the agency’s capacity to continue offering those subsidies.

Leader of Government Business in the Senate, Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, rejected the criticism, saying the drawdown would not damage the NHT’s finances or disrupt how the institution functions.

“The transfers cannot be converted in the short term into closing the affordable housing gap,” she said, adding that “the constraints which exist are other than cash-based, and even simply increasing loans, increasing loan amounts only drives up the prices that again marginalizes the very people who you want to be able to have access to affordable housing.”

The government secured passage of the bill in the Senate on Friday afternoon.