An­na-Lisa Paul

The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) does not in­tend to evict bad-pay ten­ants on the streets. First, at­tempts would be made to re­cov­er out­stand­ing monies and if this is not suc­cess­ful, these peo­ple could find them­selves seek­ing al­ter­na­tive ac­com­mo­da­tions as it will not be busi­ness as usu­al.

Hous­ing Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon said, "There are too many delin­quent cus­tomers in the data­base and there must be an ag­gres­sive ap­proach to re­cov­er the debt owed to the HDC."

Ac­cord­ing to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert in the Sen­ate in April, the HDC was be­ing owed more than $100 mil­lion by its cus­tomers. At­tempts to get the ex­act fig­ure out­stand­ing up to Oc­to­ber was un­suc­cess­ful al­though ques­tions were emailed to the HDC's Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Unit more than one week ago. No an­swers were forth­com­ing up to late yes­ter­day.

Speak­ing briefly on the is­sue, Dil­lon said a por­tion of the in­come ac­quired from rental units went to­wards the up­keep and main­te­nance of the gov­ern­ment hous­ing schemes.

In­di­cat­ing that a num­ber of de­vel­op­ments cur­rent­ly re­quire main­te­nance, Dil­lon said peo­ple had been al­lowed to "get away" with not mak­ing their month­ly mort­gage and rental pay­ments in a time­ly man­ner.

"Your rent must be a pri­or­i­ty in terms of your month­ly ex­pen­di­ture," Dil­lon ad­vised bad-pay cus­tomers.

"The on­ly how it can be done is by en­forc­ing that and re­mind­ing peo­ple of their com­mit­ment.

"The agree­ment was that they are rent­ing ac­com­mo­da­tion, there­fore there is a rent that is due every month. It was on the ba­sis that they had the abil­i­ty to pay that they got to rent in the first place."

Com­par­ing the Gov­ern­ment hous­ing arrange­ment to that of a pri­vate land­lord, Dil­lon said, "Nor­mal­ly, land­lords may give you two or three months at most, de­pend­ing on your le­nien­cy and pat­tern of pay­ment. There is a men­tal­i­ty we have to change that be­cause it is gov­ern­ment, you can leave that for last, that's the low­est on your list of pri­or­i­ties."

As part of the HDC's at­tempt to im­prove its client ser­vice re­la­tion­ship and debt col­lec­tion ef­fort, of­fi­cials have al­lo­cat­ed a ve­hi­cle from its ex­ist­ing fleet for use by its Re­cov­er­ies Unit.

Launched last month, the in­no­v­a­tive mea­sure will en­able HDC per­son­nel to vis­it ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3,000 cus­tomers who are in ar­rears at their res­i­dence.

Ac­cord­ing to the HDC, "It is hoped that this ap­proach will re­duce the num­ber of cus­tomers who claim ig­no­rance or non-re­ceipt of of­fi­cial cor­re­spon­dence from the HDC."

No cash trans­ac­tions would be car­ried out by per­son­nel from the unit, How­ev­er, the mea­sure is ex­pect­ed to re­sult in the prop­er up­dat­ing of the HDC's data­base re­gard­ing those who are ow­ing monies and ex­act­ly how much is out­stand­ing and arrange pay­ment plan op­tions.

Dur­ing a key dis­tri­b­u­tion cer­e­mo­ny at D'Abadie last month, Prime Min­is­ter Dr. Kei­th Row­ley urged lucky re­cip­i­ents to pay their mort­gages on time as he said this mon­ey would be chan­nelled back in­to the hous­ing pro­gramme.

Flash­back

Back in April, act­ing Hous­ing Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert told the Sen­ate that the HDC had no in­ten­tion of writ­ing off the debts owed by ten­ants.

At the time, he as­sured HDC staff rou­tine­ly paid vis­its to clients who are in ar­rears and would dis­cuss pay­ment plan op­tions de­signed to re­cov­er the out­stand­ing debts and al­so en­sure they kept cur­rent pay­ments due.

Al­though he was un­able to pro­vide an ex­act fig­ure as to how much the HDC is owed—one of the ques­tions which was asked by the Sun­day Guardian and re­mains unan­swered—Im­bert said up to April 2018, the list of bad-pay ten­ants in­clud­ed 56 peo­ple at the East Grove De­vel­op­ment, Curepe; 132 peo­ple at the Oa­sis De­vel­op­ment, Ch­agua­nas; 18 peo­ple at the Eden Gar­dens De­vel­op­ment, Cou­va; and 146 peo­ple at the Cashew Gar­dens De­vel­op­ment, Ch­agua­nas.