Mia says HOPE investigation is still coming

The investigation that Prime Minister Mia Mottley promised last year into the controversial Home Ownership Providing Energy (HOPE) housing project will still happen, she insisted on Wednesday night in Parliament.

In a Budget response that touched on several areas, Mottley conceded there were “teething problems” but was adamant that the project aimed at providing hundreds of houses for low-income earners would not be abandoned despite the opposition criticism.

“Even though we have had issues and challenges with HOPE, we have said we are not moving away from the objective because most things when they start have teething problems, and the teething problems must never be an obstacle to progress.

“Now I am still going to have the departmental enquiry but when the Auditor General chose to take the files to see whether anything was amiss in HOPE, we said let him go because we do not want to stop him in any way.  And Mr. Speaker, we didn’t stop him and when he is finished then the departmental enquiry will start.  But I’m also sure that you will find that those teething problems are being corrected along the way every step of the way,” Mottley informed the House of Assembly.

Mottley, who is also minister of finance, said HOPE would continue its objectives, targeting people who earned between $1 000 and $2 000 per month, including self-employed persons with inconsistent incomes.

In this connection, she said all commercial banks and credit unions will have access to the mortgage insurance facility to derisk more people who fall into that income group and were seeking mortgage financing.

Explaining that there had been some hiccups with HOPE project houses at Vespera Gardens, St James that impacted the solar voltaic applications on roofs of the houses, Mottley told the Lower Chamber: “The biggest hiccup is that the [Fair Trading Commission] has not put us in a position to be able to deal easily with the issue of batteries. And in the interim, the [Barbados] Light and Power reached grid instability and without batteries, they can’t bring other people into the system now.”

The prime minister noted further: “That is why in this Budget . . . we have said that the Smart Loan Fund of $15.3 million will now be made available to agents who went and bought PV systems, installed them but cannot get them connected because the Light and Power is not prepared to connect them because of the same grid instability, and batteries are not yet available.

“We expect to get the batteries by the end of this year – early next year, but in the interim, the people have to live and, therefore, we will take their loans on board and we will give them a one-year moratorium on payments until such times as they can start to earn money from it, this is because that is the kind of creative ingenuity that we have done here with this Budget.” (IMC1)