Minister of Housing Water Collin Croal said the ministry has taken note of the complaints made by Guyanese about the waiting time they have to endure when applying for house lots.
However, he stressed that the areas that are to be allocated must include all the infrastructural developments.
These include land clearing, water distribution systems, development of roads among other amenities. “Our ability to respond in a timely manner is also matched with our ability to have the infrastructure work done to develop the areas, and so these are billions of dollars costly. Our President and our Government are committed to helping us to provide resources to have this done,” Croal stated.
More importantly, he said there are times when a house lot is ready to be allocated but cannot due to financial reasons.
For this reason, the Minister is urging applicants to ensure they have the money ready so they can get their lots as quickly as possible. “Please put your money up, put a saving aside so that when you’re called in a position to make payments on your land, sometimes we have a lot of situations where a lot of persons saying 'yes, I’m to be called,' and when they’re called, they have an issue of being able to pay the initial fees.”
He is assuring Guyanese with pending applications that these will be addressed in due course.
The Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) has in its system to date around 81,000 applications for house lots. According to the minister, this indicates the public’s confidence in the ministry’s housing programme.
Croal said when the Government assumed office in 2020, there was a backlog of 70,000 applications.
Now the CH&PA allocated over 11,000 house lots in 2020 and 2021.
“You’ve seen the number of persons applying simply because they’ve seen the success story of the PPP/C Government with the housing programme.”
The PPP/C Government in its 2020 manifesto promised to allocate 50,000 house lots in five years and Minister Croal said the ministry is committed and working to achieve this goal.
