Dear Editor,
At his last Press Conference, Leader of the Opposition Aubrey Norton announced that the next Coalition government will introduce a Rent Assistance Scheme as part of its broader housing policy. He explained that his party’s housing policy “will not ignore the reality that as many as 30,000 Guyanese households continue to live as tenants. Even as our policies facilitate greater home ownership, a Coalition government will address the social and financial hardships of families who rent.”
VP Jagdeo, in a panic to attack the idea (one of the most popular and effective social programmes worldwide), distorted it as a policy to get people “to rent all their lives.” Jagdeo is obviously engaging in his usual worn-out politics. He or anyone else who reads the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (OLO) press release on the Rent Assistance Scheme will surely note as follows: (i) the scheme is being proposed as an immediate measure to help reduce poverty and to relieve the high cost of living. Rent constitutes a major portion of low-income family budgets (as high as 40-50% on average). Together with the coalition’s other proposals—such as bill relief for electricity and water for low-income households—these measures highlight a far more structured, sustained, and effective approach to eliminating poverty and raising living standards as compared to the PPP’s one-off, knee jerk efforts; and (ii) the Rent Assistance Scheme is envisaged to work with other aspects of the coalition’s housing policy such as its Rent-to-Own scheme, where the rent payments of dwellers will go towards the purchase and eventual ownership of their homes. On this proposal, last week’s OLO press release stated: “A critical aspect of this scheme is that eligible persons will not be asked to make down-payments. The current requirement for down-payments of several hundred thousand dollars has only served to deny many low-income families access to housing. Under a coalition government, compulsory down-payments will be scrapped.”
The PPP can feel free to borrow and use these ideas while it remains in government for the next couple of years.
Yours,
Sherwood Lowe