Jamaica
News - Real Estate - Finance (February
3, 2005)
Tax relief on land title processing under consideration
LANDowners can expect some relief from the cost
of registering and transferring titles under a provisional act soon to be tabled
in Parliament.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Land
and the Environment Donovan Stanberry made the disclosure Tuesday while facing
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The proposed legislation will offer exemptions
from transfer tax, registration fees, and legal costs for some persons.
For example, while the ordinary legal costs
for transferring two acres of land is currently about $45,000, the act would
reduce it to about $22,000, the PAC was told.
The revelation followed concerns expressed by the
PAC that the Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP), started in
2000 to regularise the titling of some 30,000 lots in St Catherine, has made
slow progress in completing the task, although the programme is expected to end
in April 2006.
Stanberry claimed that the project was making
"good progress" but he was unable to answer PAC chairman Audley Shaw's
question on how many of the 30,000 lots had been titled.
"It is not just the issue of producing a
title. There is the issue of the boundaries of each property which require quite
a bit of surveying work over difficult terrain and a substantial amount of that
work has gone on," Stanberry told the committee.
"There is also the issue of tenure
regularisation. The latest figures, from memory, is that we have probably nearly
18,000 parcels identified." The permanent secretary admitted however that
while the parcels were identified, they were not yet titled.
Opposition member Mike Henry remarked that the
permanent secretary did not sound very convincing in answering the questions.
Government member Dr Patrick Harris pointed
out that titling was a very sensitive issue, as the failure to provide titles
stalls all forms of developments.
He suggested that it was time that the entire
island benefit from LAMP.
Stanberry said that to speed up the work, the
ministry was putting in technological infrastructure, including a global
positioning system (GPS), which makes surveying easier.
The current GPS network comprises three stations,
said Stanberry, adding that the ministry intended to put up seven more this
year.
LAMP, which is financed jointly by the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Government of Jamaica, was started
in 2000 to implement critical aspects of the national land policy.
It was last extended from March 2003 to March
2005 and has received over $100 million in external assistance since.
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