Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley is calling for a collective response from the experts involved in land transactions to speed up the process to make it easier for Barbadians to own a plot of land or home.
She made the call recently at the Ministry of Housing, Lands and Maintenance’s Housing Colloquium on Transforming the Land Transaction Process at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Ms. Mottley told the audience, which included representatives from legal, financial key public and private sector entities, and members of the public, that the time had come for the land transaction process to be reconstructed with the help of all involved in the varying stages of home ownership.
“I am using one thing here, my power as Prime Minister to convene because the time has come for us to put these things behind us. This meeting … will not be the end of the process…in fact, it is the beginning of the deconstruction and the reconstruction [of the process]. For me, we have put down investments earlier to prepare for this day.
“The time has come, however, for us now to use the collective expertise in the room to deconstruct and reconstruct and give the average Barbadian not the promise but the reality of being able to own land or property in this country first and foremost, that is affordable, that is accessible and that is done efficiently in a quick way,” she stated.
The Prime Minister also stressed the importance of moving to a fully digital platform, adding that systems designed in the middle of the 19th Century could no longer propel Barbados into the fourth decade of the 21st Century.
In this connection, Ms. Mottley insisted that while the rest of the world is moving, the island runs the risk of being left behind if it failed to transition from the outdated analog digital environment.
Elaborating further, she pointed out that land transactions, for example, are settled in other Caribbean countries in a “fraction of the time that it takes here”.
She stressed that successive governments had already laid the foundation for affordable land access via the Tenantries Freehold Purchase Act and gave the undertaking that her administration would continue in this vein by making affordable housing a priority for citizens.
“Everybody needs shelter, and everybody should have the right to security of shelter and it should be affordable and… accessible in good time. If we are to make the cost of land transactions as difficult and as high as they are, and if we continue to make the process even more than the cost [and] the process, as difficult as it is, then we would have failed in this generation,” the Prime Minister insisted.
During the meeting, there were presentations from the Bar Association, Lands and Surveys Department, National Housing Corporation, Planning and Development Department, and Barbados Revenue Authority, among others.