OPPOSITION LEADER Mia Mottley wants a better housing deal for the few remaining families in Church Village, Bridgetown.

During debate on a land resolution in the House of Assembly on Tuesday, she also called on the Government to get cracking on the tenantries land transfer programme.

She urged Minister of Housing and Lands Michael Lashley to present a case for Church Village residents "to get free housing before he leaves" office.

The remaining Church Village families had been complaining that the programme under which their neighbours had long been resettled in Lower Burney, St Michael, seems to have been abandoned, she said.

Mottley also charged that the programme under which the Government subsidised the purchase of tenantry lots by families living on them for years had been "virtually dead for the last two years".

"Tenantries and tenants have not been able to get their subsidies moving at the UDC (Urban Development Commission) and the non-plantation tenantries . . . are being told that the Ministry of Housing does not have the money to provide the subsidies," she told parliamentarians.

The Member of Parliament for St Michael North East also raised concerns about Government's "zero lot line" home-building programme and a scheme under which National Housing Corporation (NHC) rental units are transferred to long-standing tenants free.

She said the Government should return the money advanced by people who sought to buy the units before it announced the homes would be given free to long-standing tenants.

Mottley indicated that she was not impressed with the zero lot line programme which Lashley said made the most efficient use of scarce land resources, but did not provide for traditional "palings" and other individual spaces.

"I am not sure and I am willing to wait the results of the success of this programme called the zero lot line programme," she stated.

"But I know the cultural realities of Barbadians and I also know . . . that other than drug cases one of the major reasons for a lot of the wounding and assault cases in Barbados over the last 20-30 years comes as a result of boundary disputes of one sort or another . . .". (TY)