Issued by Ministry of Housing
10 September 2001
The government declared this term of office as the phase in which to look into and improve on the quality aspect of housing. This implied that we set up mechanisms of improving the quality of the houses to be built and also assess the impact of our already existing rules and regulations governing quality of the housing stock delivered during the last term of office.
Our success in quality control has enabled us to gain confidence in terms of improving our stock. I want to mention that we have successfully implemented the Housing Consumers Protection Measures Act aimed at maintaining the norms and standards and therefore protecting the housing consumers through the National Home Builders Registration Council.
Our Housing Act makes provision for the establishment of this body as a consumer protection body to maintain and to improve quality in home building. The NHBRC has been specifically tasked with improving quality and consumer protection in the subsidy housing market as well as in the mortgage bonded market.
Our quality assurance in this regard is designed to provide a quality assurance system on the basis that a good, well-built home is the best form of consumer protection - prevention is better and cheaper than cure.
Our homeowner protection strategy provides for the Council to enrol the home builder; to direct the home builder to building quality standards as prescribed in the Red Book; the home builder, on the other hand, enrols each house built with the NHBRC, supplying the soil classification and any relevant engineering certificates relating to foundation or other structural design; the NHBRC then carries out spot check inspections to assist the home builder to comply with the norms and standards.
If there is a dispute between the developer and the housing consumer, that dispute is referred to the NHBRC who in turn intervenes and assists in making the developer accept responsibilities. The final step in the circle is a fund for the rectifying of major structural defects which is a safety net coming into effect where a home builder is unable to meet his structural warranty obligations to the housing consumer.
Since the inception of the NHBRC in 1996, the council has registered 9 465 builders and enrolled more than 120 000 houses. The Council has enrolled only 5045 complaints and a majority of them have been solved amicably with the affected developers. The Council has deregistered only 365 (or 3,9 %) of the developers due to their failure to meet their obligations. This small percentage of defaulters is an indication that a lot of developers fully subscribe to the prescribed building norms and standards and according to our observation; most sub-standards are as a result of lack of proper supervision by the developers and the relevant government officials.
In order to enhance the idea of adding quality to our housing products the Department has designed the following strategies, which will be implemented as a matter of urgency:
Savings-linked subsidy scheme
The Department is going to introduce a new category in the housing subsidy scheme, which will target those people who have already saved sufficient money through our recently-launched National Savings Scheme in order to ensure that people are able to complement the housing subsidy to make their structures bigger and better. The Savings Scheme is also expected to unlock financial assistance from the banks for the people who are currently being denied access to additional housing finance by the banks.
Regulation of mud-houses
Our study into the housing structures of the rural areas has revealed that a majority of mud houses in the rural areas need to be reinforced and consolidated to make them more resistant to natural disasters. The Department therefore aims to regulate the building of these so that they comply with certain norms and standards that we deem suitable for a proper living structure. Over and above, this will also assist us in extending our housing subsidy to cover this category of housing in the near future.
The proposed norms and standards include the following:
This is one strategy of tackling the housing backlog, which includes some of the poorly built rural mud houses we are trying to improve. We believe that the backlog has been put under control because of the innovative ways that we have initiated in the past and for us to totally overcome it, we have to continue exploring new ways and approaches to housing delivery.
Medium density housing
The Department has identified medium density housing as one aspect of adding quality to our housing products. This will call for the implementation of the multiple units per site development approach which will not only solve the problem of land for housing, but will also change the landscape altogether. Within the 1,194 million houses that we have built to date, only 33 000 units were medium density. 100 % of this stock has proved to be of better quality and the maintenance thereof has not proved to be difficult as the beneficiaries are also involved in the management of their structures.
Social housing has proved to be one of the most effective strategies of implementing medium density in that the beneficiaries are also involved in the management of the houses and therefore help in keeping them in good condition. We recently held a social Housing Conference aimed at exploring the possibility of using the medium density housing to accelerate housing delivery in general. The conference resolved, among others, the following:
Self-building has proved to be one of the most effective strategies in producing quality housing. The majority of the 22 849 houses that have been built by the Department and the Homeless Federation of South Africa through the People's Housing Process are of good quality and most of them are bigger than those delivered through pure subsidy grants.
The Department has been striving to speed up the process of releasing the 100 000 subsidies committed to this programme and to date we have managed to allocate 59 144 of these to the qualifying beneficiaries.