Ministry to beef up housing development laws - Zuraida

The Housing and Local Government Ministry will tighten housing development laws involving the quality of construction, especially affordable housing and civil servants housing projects.

Its minister, Zuraida Kamaruddin said the move was necessary following various safety issues raised over the poor conditions and quality of houses built by developers.

"The action taken by the ministry is to blacklist developers who fail to meet the specifications, but there are still gaps in the system because there were developers who got back into business by setting up another company.

"So the law needs to be tightened to ensure that they (developers) fulfil their promise to adhere to quality standards that have been set," she told a press conference after launching the Digital My First Home Scheme (Digital SRP) here, today.

She was commenting on the issue of unsatisfactory development quality involving projects under the ministry such as the Malaysian Civil Servants Housing Project (PPAM) in Bukit Jalil and PPAM Residensi Bayu Andaman in Sentul.

Zuraida said the ministry has been monitoring the situation since 2018, but there are still developers who fail to comply with the standards set by the government.

In the last audit report, the issue of poor quality development was also included, the minister added.

She said the ministry had restructured its internal organisation by placing a deputy secretary-general to monitor the development of projects.

The deputy secretary-general would be required to give a full report to the minister and the secretary-general every two weeks for each development.

On the ministry's target to build 100,000 affordable housing units every year, Zuraida said this year's target has to be deferred.

“The delay is expected to be between six and 12 months following the movement control order (MCO) which forced developers to stop work for three months,” she said.

However, almost 85 percent of developers have resumed work after the government agreed to implement the conditional MCO since May 4, said the minister.

- Bernama