Kuwaiti housing committee plays crucial role in resolving issue

The National Assembly's Housing Committee has played a key role in amending some relevant laws thus paving way for resolving the housing issue.
The parliament, in a report released on Saturday, noted that the committee has also helped in tackling other related problems, such as long-time waiting duration for citizens eligible to possess housing units. Moreover, the Public Authority for Housing has been given substantial jurisdictions to build on state plots of lands or take possession of lands and properties for public usage, in necessary cases.
It furthermore indicated using the allotted plots, namely those located in investment and commercial zones, for sale to the private sector in auctioning.
The commission has sought to adopt a law that compels the municipality to prepare plots of lands for housing purposes and setting up a financial portfolio at the Savings and Credit Bank, the state public lender, for financing expansion and repairing private houses.
The National Assembly, in 1993, decided to form an interim committee to handle housing issues. It later embarked on diverse key issues, such as forming the housing authority and amending several relevant legislations.
It indicated at a fresh proposal essentially stating that if a married man gets a housing loan, and he later sells the house and repays the loan in full to the bank, provided that he has not obtained another loan, he is entitled to apply at the housing authority for a residence.
Committee member Faisal Al-Kanderi confirmed that the commission had tackled a pile of laws and bills, such as the law that allows the loan recipient to obtain all construction materials, valued no more than KD 30,000.
Law No. 113 (2014), for example, along with Law 27 (1995) allows the private sector to build on empty state lands for housing purposes.
Currently the committee is examining a series of bills, one allows inheritors of a demised father to get possession of a government house or a plot.
Al-Kanderi acknowledged that laws concerning Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaitis, divorcees and widows would remain intact.
Long queues of citizens awaiting their turn to get housing is, certainly, to be shortened, with plans to hike distributed units from 2,500 per year to 12,700 to those qualified for housing.