Too of­ten in the cut and thrust of T&T's two-par­ty democ­ra­cy, the par­ty in pow­er at­tempts to den­i­grate the poli­cies of the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion rather than build­ing on the good poli­cies that have gone be­fore and giv­ing cred­it where it is due.This neg­a­tive at­ti­tude of the coun­try's lead­ing politi­cians–which is le­git­imised and val­i­dat­ed by the coun­try's di­vi­sive pol­i­tics–has a ten­den­cy to re­verse progress that has been made in sig­nif­i­cant ar­eas.

Thank­ful­ly, this is one area in which Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ap­pears to be try­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate her­self from the po­lit­i­cal lead­ers who have gone be­fore her–even though it is still not clear that this was what she meant to do.

At the meet­ing of her po­lit­i­cal par­ty on April 8, the Prime Min­is­ter said that her ad­min­is­tra­tion would make it pos­si­ble for many more cit­i­zens to re­alise their dreams of pur­chas­ing their own home as the Gov­ern­ment was go­ing to pro­vide heav­i­ly sub­sidised mort­gages to any­one earn­ing less than $8,000 a month.

The Prime Min­is­ter's promise was that low­er-in­come cit­i­zens would be able to af­ford to buy a State-con­struct­ed house for up to $450,000 be­cause the Gov­ern­ment was go­ing of­fer mort­gages with ze­ro down­pay­ment and a two per cent in­ter­est rate.

The on­ly is­sue with the Prime Min­is­ter's promise was that her pre­de­ces­sor, Patrick Man­ning, had gone a long way to pro­mot­ing the dream of home own­er­ship as this pro­gramme of sub­sidised mort­gages be­gan in 2007, which is when the Gov­ern­ment's im­ple­ment­ing agency, T&T Mort­gage Fi­nance (TTMF), be­gan of­fer­ing the sub­sidised loans.The TTMF has been al­lo­cat­ed $200 mil­lion to fund the sub­sidy for these sub-prime mort­gages since 2007.

Of the $200 mil­lion al­lo­cat­ed for the pro­gramme, some $72 mil­lion has al­ready been dis­bursed to sub­sidise 1,100 ap­pli­cants, with the sub­sidy be­ing grant­ed to el­i­gi­ble ap­pli­cants–who must meet the es­tab­lished cri­te­ria of af­ford­abil­i­ty and cred­it sus­tain­abil­i­ty–for HDC and THA hous­es and Ca­roni lands.This means that each of the 1,100 cit­i­zens of T&T who have been the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of this State mort­gage sub­sidy to the tune of $65,454 is al­so liv­ing in State-sub­sidised hous­es built by the HDC or the THA.

It al­so means that more than 1,900 cit­i­zens of this coun­try can con­tin­ue to ben­e­fit from sub­sidy, giv­en the $128 mil­lion that re­mains in the TTMF pro­gramme.Ob­vi­ous­ly, this es­tab­lished sub­sidy is a means by which the Gov­ern­ment can al­low many peo­ple to buy their own homes who sim­ply can­not af­ford the price of a house in the pri­vate com­mer­cial mar­ket and at the com­mer­cial in­ter­est rates.In that sense, then, this is a gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy that will im­prove the life of thou­sands of hard­work­ing tax­pay­ers.

But, there are re­al ques­tions about the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of this sub­sidy as the stric­tures of the cur­rent fi­nan­cial en­vi­ron­ment point to the Gov­ern­ment re­duc­ing rather than in­creas­ing trans­fers and sub­si­dies.If the av­er­age sub­sidy amounts to $65,454 for each ap­pli­cant and some 50,000 peo­ple ap­ply, the sub­sidy would need to be in­creased by some $3 bil­lion–or there would be thou­sands of frus­trat­ed ap­pli­cants.

There have been sug­ges­tions that the Gov­ern­ment in­tends to ex­pand the sub­sidy pro­gramme to ac­com­mo­date the Land for the Land­less ini­tia­tive, which was launched by Hous­ing Min­is­ter Roodal Mooni­lal in No­vem­ber last year.

This would al­low ap­pli­cants to pur­chase ful­ly ser­viced lots and con­struct their own homes us­ing the mort­gage sub­sidy pro­vid­ed by the TTMF. If the Gov­ern­ment can find a way to ad­dress the is­sues of the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the sub­sidy, while en­sur­ing that on­ly the most needy and qual­i­fied ap­pli­cants re­ceive the ben­e­fit, this would be one ex­am­ple of a pos­i­tive pol­i­cy from one ad­min­is­tra­tion be­ing en­hanced by a suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ment.