NO SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT of properties has been conveyed to those 20-year-plus residents whom Government has been boasting about, charges Opposition Senator Liz Thompson.

She said yesterday that despite all of the "hurrah and back-patting" by the Government, the vast majority of people who had indicated interest in owning properties were yet to get conveyances.

"Under the Barbados Property Act you cannot own property by way of a letter. All those persons have received is a letter evincing an intention to transfer the property, but the letter indicating an intention to transfer does not itself constitute a legal transfer of that property," Thompson told the Upper Chamber during debate on a resolution to vest parcels of Crown land at The Ivy, St Michael, in the National Housing Corporation (NHC).

Stressing that "no significant number of conveyances" had been executed, she said the publicity given to the rent-to-own policy started by the current administration was merely a wonderful public relations ploy that still left longstanding residents wondering what would happen to them "in the context of non-execution of the alleged policy".

She said the Government needed to "put signed conveyances in people's hands" or the whole issue would only benefit "the PR posers".

She also called on Government to do something about the houses at Barbarees Hill which had been allocated by the last Government to people relocated from Emmerton Lane and its environs.

Thompson, a former housing minister, said the present Government had completed the process of housing for those who had lived near to the Sewage Plant, but today a number of houses at Barbarees Hill remained empty, overgrown with bush, unsightly, and a veritable waste of taxpayers' resources.

Thompson also asked about a $23 million overdraft this year for the NHC, noting the overdraft limit had been exceeded by three times as much.

Referring to a special audit of the NHC, Thompson said the Auditor General had observed at Page 33 that the overdraft limit of the NHC was $4 million in 2003, and the former administration had sustained an overdraft of $8.9 million; but with the 2008 limit now being $7 million, the overdraft was $23 million.

"It speaks to really bad management. I want to know how this will be addressed," she stated, despite several points of order charging that she was misleading the chamber. (RJ)