Human settlement

Human settlement plans for this year

The Department of Human Settlements presented its annual plan for 2016/17 to Parliament. It aims to finalise the Human Settlements White Paper, leading to the revision of the Housing Code and amendment of the Housing Act. Other targets are: upgrading 2 200 informal settlements, creating 35 000 affordable rental housing opportunities, providing technical support to municipalities for upgrading informal settlements and eradicating the backlog on title deeds. Its budget has been reduced for 2016/17. The largest cut of R1.6 billion is to the Urban Settlements Development Grant. MPs pointed out that the reason for the budget reduction is due to under-spending by DHS in previous years, especially in boosting municipal housing capacity and filling staff vacancies. It therefore should not blame the economic situation or Treasury, because it had failed to spend funds allocated to it in the past. MPs asked why DHS had not reduced its targets in line with the reduced budget, especially for subsidised housing. They did not want DHS appearing before the Human Settlements parliamentary committee next year claiming that it had failed to achieve its targets because of the reduced budget.

The Housing Act allows provincial housing departments to accredit municipalities to perform the housing function. When accredited, municipalities can administer any national housing programme in their area of jurisdiction. Provincial governments are responsible for monitoring the performance of the accredited municipalities. Accreditation empowers a municipality to undertake any housing function in that it receives, evaluates and approves or denies applications for subsidies in line with the local housing strategy and housing delivery goals. The process for accrediting municipalities for housing delivery has been slow. According to DHS, this is a priority, but there has been a substantial amount of non-performance by some municipalities. Even the Department of Cooperative Governance has stopped allocating certain funds to some municipalities as they had mismanaged funds. DHS is committed to accreditation and to capacitation of municipalities despite the challenges around this.

South Africa is among the fastest urbanising countries, with about 63.6% of its population in urban areas. Cabinet has approved the Final Integrated Urban Development Framework and 2016-19 Implementation Plan. This is in response to the National Development Plan directive to develop an urban development policy to ensure proper planning, infrastructure investments and management to support growth and unlock city/town economic potential.

DHS is assessing the lending patterns of private institutions for housing funding, particularly to the poor. It is interested in the reasons for these institutions denying applications for funding, and has communicated with the institutions to provide reasons. It is not only monitoring lending patterns, but also analysing the patterns as they related to race and gender, and other factors.