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Government aims to speed up delivery of housing for the poor and have all persons accommodated in formally planned settlements by 2014, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Thursday.
"To achieve this objective, government and its partners seek to increase the current delivery rate of 300,000 [houses a year]. Our target is the delivery of 500,000 housing units [a year]," she told a social cluster media briefing at Parliament.
The housing department was looking forward to the Social Housing Act (SHA) becoming law later this year. "With the implementation of the SHA, we will be subsidising the creation of various forms of rental accommodation and thus contribute to our goal of the elimination of slums by 2014."
This year would also see the introduction of the Housing Development Agency Bill. Establishing such an agency would enable government to "finally redress apartheid spatial planning".
A key instrument of the agency would be the "release of well-located land and serviced sites for human settlement programmes", she said.
Speaking to Sapa after the briefing, Water Affairs Minister Lindiwe Hendricks said her department was on track to eradicate the bucket sanitation system from all established settlements around the country by the end of March.
Asked how many people continued to use the bucket system in South Africa's thousands of so-called informal settlements, she said establishing such a figure was difficult. Reports suggest many millions of people continue to live in informal settlements.
Earlier, responding to questions, Hendricks told journalists South Africa was not facing a water crisis, although there were concerns about water quality in some areas of the country. South African tap water was among the best in the world, with the department "continuously monitoring" water quality.
By the end of this year, about one million households would remain without a basic water supply. "By the end of the current MTEF period (2009/10), this backlog will be reduced to about 870,000 households. "It will be possible to supply all people living in existing houses with a basic water supply by 2012," she said.
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