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Housing delivery in the Western Cape has clearly collapsed under the DA-led provincial government, with a declining number of units delivered every year over the past five years.
Replying to GOOD party’s parliamentary questions MEC for Infrastructure, Tertuis Simmers, exposed the Western Cape Government’s monumental failures to deliver housing, at any meaningful scale, whilst access to housing remains an existential crisis.
Since Alan Winde was elected Premier, in 2019, the number of formal houses delivered across the entire province, has gone down from an already low base of 8038 houses in 2019/20 to 4998 in 2023/24.
In fact, the number of houses delivered across the province has been collapsing on an annual basis and the province has never reached its targets:
| Financial Year | Target for houses or units | Number of houses or units delivered |
| 2019/20 | 9,723 | 8,038 |
| 2020/21 | 8,506 | 6,247 |
| 2021/22 | 8,272 | 6,191 |
| 2022/23 | 8,463 | 5,380 |
| 2023/24 | 5,833 |
4,998 |
The dismal performance is replicated in the Province’s poor performance in upgrading informal settlements.
Whilst families live in shocking conditions and suffer abnormal hardship, especially during this extremely wet winter, the Province failed to spend its national grant allocation for the upgrade of informal settlements.
The earmarked Informal Settlement Upgrade Grant was introduced in 2021/22.
Yet, over the past two financial years, the Western Cape Government has underspent this grant to the tune of R335 million – nearly one-third of the allocated grant.
As a consequence of this poor performance, the people who are waiting on their housing opportunity, have lost over half-a-billion Rand (R505 million) of housing funding.
Simmers revealed that, in 2023/24, R250 million allocated for building houses has been reallocated to other provinces who are capable of spending this funding on housing. He also revealed that R255 million allocated for upgrading informal settlements was forfeited by the Province over the past three years.
The province is once again exposed for being well-run - only for some.
The Premier’s obsession with gimmicks and gadgets has come at the expense of delivering on a core provincial mandate – incrementally providing adequate housing – and his government has relegated poor residents, entitled to housing support, to a living hell.
Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
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