Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne, while welcoming Government’s decision to build a palliative care centre and hospice for the terminally ill, has criticised the arrangement of an operational lease with the Barbados Association For Cancer Advocacy in contrast to the gift of lands at Jemmotts Lane, St Michael, to the Afreximbank.
Speaking yesterday on a resolution piloted in the House of Assembly by Minister of Housing Dwight Sutherland to lease three parcels of land at Coverley Estate, Christ Church, totally 9 810.8 square metres to BACA, Thorne contended the lands at Jemmotts Lane, St Michael, should have been used instead.
Lands will be leased to BACA for an initial 25-year period at an annual rent of $1 000 which will be reviewed every five years.
Thorne said while Government and the Opposition “are strategically united on this matter, we are tactically divided”.
“This country will continue to lament the loss of what I will call the Jemmotts Lane lands, all five acres of those lands. In the aftermath of the disposal of those lands . . . or the alienation of those lands, this country is now aware that the Government has alienated a large portion of land at Jemmotts Lane which ought to have been within that burgeoning area, within close proximity to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.”
“This Government must now take and accept the blame for having alienated those lands for purposes other than medical,” he said.
“I am wondering whether a facility such as the one that is now being leased to this noble and compassionate group (BACA) could not have been better situated within that burgeoning facility, with the QEH at its centre.”
The Opposition Leader also welcomed the proposed arrangement to have the National Housing Corporation more involved in the transactions related to applicants building on the land.
Citing the West Terrace project built in the 1980s as “perhaps the best prototype for housing development in this country”, he explained in that project “the lands were vested in the NHC, but the beneficiaries of conveyances were not left to the banks and the builders. Instead, the Government at that time, through the NHC, did have an arrangement in which the NHC conveyed those lands to each owner individually and then there was a separate agreement between the builder and the owner but all under the supervision of the NHC”.
Thorne urged the Government “to continue to use the NHC in these transactions and to abandon other enterprises that have crept into this market.”
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