Payne won’t stand for it

Stop the blame game! That was the appeal from Minister of Housing, Lands and Rural Development, George Payne, as he spoke publicly for the first time about last week’s tragic death of 18-year-old Kyriq Boyce, who fell into a 100-foot well at the Pine, St Michael housing estate.

Payne told Tuesday’s sitting of Parliament that he would not condone any attack on the National Housing Corporation (NHC) about the deteriorating state of Government housing estates charging that the last Government should be blamed for the neglect.

“Some of us seem to have forgotten that we have only been here for a few months and problems we have encountered are beyond one’s imagination,” he stated.

“Certainly in the Ministry of Housing the types of problems that we have seen in terms of the inefficiency, the incompetence, the type of directive that have been given to officers . . . This is why I stopped short of actually blaming directly any particular government agency. And I think it is wrong when officers work tirelessly and are then requested to make certain decisions against their own professional competence and they could sit down and listen to people being critical of them and their institution. As Minister of Housing I certainly would not condone any attack on the institution,” he reiterated. (MB)

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