In an ef­fort to ramp up the con­struc­tion of new hous­es, new­ly-mint­ed Hous­ing Min­is­ter David Lee has promised that the Gov­ern­ment will make funds avail­able to the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) to pay con­trac­tors.

Af­ter tour­ing HDC con­struc­tion sites on Mon­day, Lee said HDC had been do­ing good work but projects had slowed down un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion be­cause con­trac­tors were not get­ting pay­ments on time.

Lee said, “I’ve seen good de­vel­op­ments tak­ing place and good work, but as I said, it could be ramped up if pay­ments or the process of pay­ment flow can be made much faster. I know the con­straints of HDC. I know the con­straints of the coun­try. So, one of my biggest re­spon­si­bil­i­ties would be to see how best HDC and the Min­istry of Hous­ing can get fund­ed to ramp up the hous­ing stock mar­ket for the Min­istry of Hous­ing and by ex­ten­sion, HDC, and by ex­ten­sion, the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go, be­cause there’s a high de­mand for hous­ing through­out Trinidad present­ly, that we re­al­ly have to fast-track the con­struc­tion of hous­es.”

Asked how he plans to get these funds af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the Dr Kei­th Row­ley gov­ern­ment left T&T with a huge deficit, Lee said the Gov­ern­ment will “get it done.” 

Asked about oth­er pri­or­i­ties for his min­istry, Lee re­vealed he had a tour with the Land and Set­tle­ment Agency (LSA) up next.

But when it came to the squat­ting pol­i­cy, he said that was still be­ing worked on. He said poli­cies like that were not “now for now.”

“The Hous­ing Min­istry is still work­ing on it. Our squat­ting pol­i­cy will be im­pact­ed based on what LSA re­search team have de­vel­oped over a pe­ri­od of time. It is not a now for now thing,” he said.

Lee, along with Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Hous­ing Phillip Alexan­der, toured sev­er­al HDC de­vel­op­ments in South, Cen­tral, East and North Trinidad on Mon­day.

Lee said it was quite an eye-open­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, as he wasn’t aware of sev­er­al hous­ing de­vel­op­ments across the coun­try.

He de­scribed what they saw as “quite en­cour­ag­ing.”