Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer
Opposition Leader Portia Simpson Miller makes her contribution to the 2008-2009 Budget Debate at Gordon House recently.

Daraine Luton, Sunday Gleaner Reporter

OPPOSITION LEADER Portia Simpson Miller says she has no regrets about using National Housing Trust (NHT) funds to finance the Inner-City Housing Project (ICHP).

In an interview with The Sunday Gleaner, the former prime minister, and current president of the People's National Party (PNP), defended her decision to use NHT funds in the ICHP.

"If I am in government and I had money anywhere at all and there are people sleeping on the cold ground and using rock stone as their pillows, as Bob Marley said, I would take steps to lift the poor and the oppressed," Simpson Miller tells The Sunday Gleaner. "As long as there is money and it would not put the fund (NHT) into trouble, I will be using it to ease the pain of the poor."

Insolvent

Simpson Miller's defence of the spending of NHT funds comes days after Prime Minister Bruce Golding told the nation in his contribution to the Budget Debate that the NHT could become insolvent if it continued on its current business path.

In his debut presentation as prime minister, Golding listed the ICHP under the heading of "non-recoverable expenses" as incurred by the trust. He later said at a post-Budget press briefing that he was not against building houses in the inner city but that the cost should not be absorbed by the NHT.

"The NHT has been converted, in terms of the Inner-City Housing Project, into a social-welfare organisation," Golding said.

"We have to build houses in the inner city and maybe we have to seek the assistance of the trust, but it cannot be that the trust must absorb the losses," Golding added.

Beneficiaries

The NHT committed $5 billion for the building of houses under the ICHP but without expanding the size of the project, the cost shot up to $15.5 billion. The prime minister said that many of the persons who benefited from the ICHP had never contributed to the Trust.

Simpson Miller, meanwhile, claims Golding has never been in favour of inner-city housing.

"Everytime he has something to do with housing, he cuts housing in the inner city," she tells The Sunday Gleaner.

Golding, last week, stopped short of blasting Simpson Miller and her predecessor P.J. Patterson for reducing NHT interest rates from a high of 12 per cent to six per cent.

"The top interest rate was 12 per cent then it was reduced to nine and then to eight, and then to six. If there was nothing wrong with that, then why we didn't reduce it this year to four and then to two, and then by the other year, zero. You cannot run a financial institution that way," Golding stated.

Simpson Miller dismissed claims that past governments might have used the trust for political gains.

The opposition leader says that her decision to decrease NHT interest rates was not done with political gains in mind.

"We did it because we wanted more people to benefit. It is not about us looking good, it is about the Jamaican people looking good. It is about those who could not afford the high interest rates; (lowering the interest rates) was to allow them to have proper housing," Simpson Miller argues.

Looking good

"I wonder if Golding is aware how many persons are living in one bedroom in one bed, boys and girls. What about his heart of compassion?" asks Simpson Miller. "I understood it, I wanted to make a difference to the the lives of poor Jamaicans, the working poor, and middle-income people who could not afford to pay the millions for houses that are being built by the private sector," adds the opposition leader.

daraine.luton@gleanerjm.com