Young Professionals Housing Project: Govt terminates services of 15 contractors for delays, substandard works

– over 550 homes constructed, more than 10,000 house lots allocated in 2024

The Government has terminated the contract of at least 15 contractors who continue to provide substandard and delayed works on the Young Professional Housing Project, the Housing and Water Minster, Collin Croal revealed on Friday.
The Minister was at the time addressing media operatives at the Ministry’s end-of-year press conference at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC), Liliendaal, Greater Georgetown.
According to Minister Croal, they have been regularly engaging the contractors to ensure that they deliver the homes on time and in quality condition.
“I think sometime late December, we would’ve brought in all the contractors and one-on-one, engaging [them] to address [those legitimate complaints] …and where we require termination, we have been doing,” he stated.
The Minister further indicated to the Guyana Times, “I’m being advised that at least about 15 contractors we’ve terminated… In fact, I’ve seen on my desk, a number of termination letters over the last couple of weeks for some contractors.”
Among those 15 terminations, the contractors were executing works on young professional homes at La Bonne Intention (LBI), East Coast Demerara (ECD), and along the East Bank Demerara (EBD) corridor at Little Diamond, Prospect and Perseverance.

In addition to the terminations, Minister Croal explained that the Housing Ministry has also strengthened its monitoring unit to ensure that the homes are being built at a high standard.
In the same breath, however, the Housing Minister highlighted the challenges faced by contractors including the rising cost of building materials. He pointed out that the new young professional houses are currently being built at $24 million and if persons were to use the same design and build on their own, then the cost would be way higher.
“So, it’s being done by the contractors for not a great profit margin and that’s why sometimes, we struggle with contractors. From a Government level, we want to keep the cost of the houses at a minimum and to achieve that, obviously, the profit margin would not be [high]… But they have committed to building that, and so where we’ve had to terminate, we [have done so],” he asserted.

Home construction
Nevertheless, despite these issues, Minister Croal highlighted the success of the Home Construction Programme, which has seen an investment of over $12.5 billion by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government for the construction of some 1,865 houses on the coastland.
These include 867 low-income homes, 398 moderate-income homes, 138 middle-income homes, 330 young professional homes and 82 Core homes under the Adequate Housing and Urban Accessibility Programme – all of which have been completed and handed over.
In 2024 alone, $4.3 billion of the $12.5 billion was invested in the construction of homes and resulted in over 550 houses being completed and handed over.
“That’s 550 families who have been able to occupy a new area, their new home, their new space and to have that level of comfort [of home ownership] … [So, yes, we’ve] seen some criticism on the quality of work done but it does not take away the impact from the construction of those houses,” the Housing Minister expressed.
In fact, he added that there are another 1,724 houses are currently in progress and are slated to be completed by mid-2025. This is in addition to the new batches of homes that are scheduled to be constructed this year. Only Thursday, contracts were allocated for the construction of another 20 young professional homes.

House lot allocations
When it comes to house lot allocations, Minister Croal stated that the Government is on track to deliver on its 2020 Manifesto promise of 50,000 house lots by 2025. In 2024, some 10,791 lots were allocated thus taking total allocations by the current administration to 40,290 – all for residential use.
“So, it does not take into consideration our other aspect in terms of commercial allocations. Even if you take that into consideration, you’ll realise we’ve actually allocated about 11,000 in total,” the Minister stated. “We will be surpassing 50,000 in the year 2025. In fact, in the year 2025, we will be allocating far more than 10,000 – that is our target for the annual figure.”
According to Croal, 2024 was the most successful year, accounting for 27 per cent of the overall house lot allocations done to date. The majority of these allocations were done in Regions Four (Demerara-Mahaica) – 61 per cent and Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara) – 22 per cent. Regions Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam) and Nine (Upper Takutu-Upper Essequibo) received two per cent of the allocations each, while Regions Five (Mahaica-Berbice) and Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) both got five per cent and four per cent of the allocations last year going to Region 10 (Upper Demerara-Upper Berbice).
Moreover, 46 per cent of these allocations went to female applicants, joint applicants were 26 per cent and male allocations were 28 per cent of the applicants.
“And that speaks a lot in terms of equality and independence [of women],” the Minister posited.
In addition, the Housing Ministry also processed some 7,118 land titles in the past year – a whopping 113 per cent increase from 2023. Minister Croal noted that “to date, we have processed over 14,710 titles and that does not include the close to 2,500 certificates of titles to process at the land registrar waiting to be signed off.” (G-8)