Vasant Bharat

Member of Parliament for St Augustine Vasant Bharath will meet with the president of the Students Guild of the University of the West Indies in St Augustine to mobilise students against increases to rentals for apartments in the area following Government’s proposed property tax reform.

“We cannot force landlords, as you would appreciate, to lower their rents because again the rent act in Trinidad and Tobago is non-existent anymore so you cannot even take them to the rent board as you used to be able to do previously,” Bharath said. “We have a situation where we can either use some kind of coercive techniques with the landlords, but I cannot see that working because effectively they are going to say look, we now have an additional burden to pay and we are passing it on.’”

Bharath spoke in an interview after a panel discussion with the Friends of Chaguanas Thursday night at Gaston Court in Lange Park. He was responding to concerns from UWI Guild president, Hillan Morean, that students at tertiary-level institutions were being forced to fork out hundreds of dollars in rent each month. “I have worked with the students’ guild over the last six or eight months with regard to the crime issue at UWI and (we were) even able to get to an extent, extra police protection in the area and so on, so I expect to be in a position I would hope now to see if I can mobilise them to bring some form to bear on the landlords,” Bharath said.

He said the situation looked bleak for UWI students who rented both on and off campus. “The problem with the landlords too, is that they do not have a landlords’ association. They are all individual landlords, so they do not have a representative association who you could go to as a body and say, ‘Look, we need to have this done,’” Bharath said.