JAMAICA | PNP Demands NHT Return to Manley's Vision as Trust Turns 50

Opposition charges Holness administration has betrayed workers by draining $136.8 billion from housing fund while prices soar beyond reach

Kingston, Jamaica — January 28, 2026 - As the National Housing Trust celebrates its golden jubilee, the People's National Party has delivered a blistering indictment of what it calls the systematic gutting of Michael Manley's crowning achievement for Jamaica's working class — demanding the institution be restored to its founding mission of putting roofs over the heads of ordinary Jamaicans rather than serving as a government piggy bank.

In a statement issued today by its National Executive Council, the PNP laid the crisis squarely at the feet of the Andrew Holness administration, accusing it of building houses that exist only in the dreams of average workers while twice extending legislation that bleeds the Trust of $11.4 billion annually for general budgetary support.

The arithmetic is damning. Over twelve years, successive governments have extracted a staggering $136.8 billion from the NHT — money contributed by nurses, teachers, police officers, and factory workers who were promised that their mandatory payroll deductions would one day translate into homes they could call their own.

Instead, those billions have vanished into the Consolidated Fund while contributors watch helplessly as housing prices rocket beyond their reach.

When the PNP left office in 2016, a one-bedroom NHT unit could be purchased for under $7 million, with two-bedroom homes averaging around $12 million.

Today, those same units command prices exceeding $12 million and $18 million respectively — increases that have far outstripped wage growth and transformed homeownership from an achievable goal into a cruel mirage for the very workers the Trust was created to serve.

The irony cuts deep. Michael Manley established the NHT in 1976 with a crystalline mandate: mobilize funds from the employed to provide affordable housing for those who could never otherwise afford it.

The trade unions who supported its creation insisted on one non-negotiable condition — that the money be used for nothing other than housing Jamaica's workers. Fifty years later, that promise lies in tatters.

“The institution has lost its way under the current Holness administration,” the PNP declared, accusing the government of “stymying the vision and mission of the NHT as delineated by the Most Hon. Michael Manley.”

The Opposition has outlined a comprehensive plan to restore the Trust to its founding purpose. Central to their platform is an immediate end to the annual $11.4 billion extraction, which they characterize not as fiscal necessity but as an addiction the Holness government refuses to break despite years of touted economic gains.

The PNP is also proposing to remove land costs from final housing prices — a move they argue would make homes significantly more affordable by recapitalizing the NHT with government lands rather than charging contributors twice.

Additional commitments include establishing a rent-to-own initiative for Jamaicans locked out of traditional mortgage qualification, creating greater housing opportunities specifically targeting young people, and restoring preferential terms for public sector workers — benefits the PNP claims the current administration stripped away.

The timing of this intervention is politically calculated but substantively urgent. Jamaica faces a housing deficit requiring 15,000 new units annually while actual completions hover around 2,300 — a gap that condemns thousands of families to overcrowded living conditions, generational poverty, and the crushing weight of rent payments that build nothing toward their future.

At fifty years old, the National Housing Trust stands at a crossroads. It can continue as a convenient source of budgetary relief for governments unwilling to make hard fiscal choices, or it can return to Manley's revolutionary vision: that every Jamaican worker who contributes faithfully deserves a realistic path to owning a home.

The workers whose contributions built this institution are watching. The question now is whether anyone in Gordon House is listening.

-30-