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Boss, where’s my house? Govt wants companies to provide housing subsidies

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Lindiwe Sisulu
Lindiwe Sisulu

Government wants to force all private companies to provide housing subsidies for their employees.

In South Africa, it is not yet compulsory for companies to provide housing for those employees who do not qualify for bank loans.

But changing this is part of Human Settlements Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s drive for better housing for South Africans.

The minister also wants to force construction companies that get contracts to build low-cost housing but do shoddy work, to rectify any defects at their cost.

“We want to make it ‘almost compulsory’ for big employers to provide housing for their employees,” she said in an interview with City Press.

Sisulu said the state was currently providing a service that employers should be providing for their employees.

“We would like them to be sensitive to that,” she said.

The state is working out how to approach this proposed policy and is planning a conference to which large-scale, private employers would be invited.

“We now want to reach out to the greater society to say it is in our interests – all of us, private sector, banking sector, ordinary people, NGOs – to partner in making sure South Africa is housed decently,” she said.

Sisulu also wants those who qualify for government-sponsored housing to get decent-quality homes, while those who fall between the cracks – the ones who do not qualify for an RDP house, a bond, or are heavily indebted – to get subsidised by their employers.

Sisulu spoke about how, in her first stint as housing minister, she began talks with mining companies about the same proposal, saying government could help them provide proper housing for miners.

She said that, at the time, mining houses and unions had told government not to “go there” because mine workers preferred to take home the housing allowances they received to supplement their incomes.

“Now we have learnt, history has shown us, that maybe we should have insisted on it being policy then. We might have avoided further disaster,” she said.

Lack of housing has caused widespread disruptions on the mines and was central to the grievances raised by striking workers at platinum miner Lonmin just before the Marikana massacre.

Churches and individual employers will also not be spared if Sisulu has her way.

She said that in the past churches had played an active role in providing houses for the poor, especially the homeless, but now were sitting back, expecting government to fulfil this role.

“Churches preach conscience and all of these good things every Sunday … We would like to say to the churches: ‘These are your people. Every Sunday when you preach to them, you must preach to somebody who comes from a decent home, otherwise the word of God falls on inequality.’”

Sisulu is hoping for a partnership with churches to provide single-dwelling units for the homeless. And homeowners who employ domestic workers could also be compelled to provide accommodation for them.

She said government had stopped rectifying shoddily built low-cost houses and was passing this cost back to the construction companies that had been awarded RDP contracts.

“We believe we have reached a point now where we are using more money on rectification than we are on building houses.”

She said construction companies would be held responsible for rectifying shoddily built homes.

This would be supervised by the National Home Builders’ Registration Council, an institution whose job it is to make sure houses are built properly.

“These construction companies that build shoddy houses should be dragged by their ears back to the site to rectify those houses.

“We mustn’t use taxpayers’ money on something we shouldn’t,” added Sisulu.

Parliament was told in March this year that government had spent about R480 million rectifying shoddily built homes in the first three quarters of the past financial year.



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