The Tribune

By KEILE CAMPBELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kcampbell@tribunemedia.net

THE Davis administration expects to move quickly on rent-control legislation when Parliament reopens next month, with Housing and Land Reform Minister Keith Bell saying the reforms are intended to rein in rental prices and strengthen protections for tenants.

Mr Bell said the legislation would have to balance those protections against the financial obligations of landlords, including mortgage payments.

He was speaking to reporters in San Salvador after 11 families received keys to homes in the new Cockburn Town Subdivision.

The proposed reforms come as Bell raised concerns about the conditions in which some tenants are living, alleging that some landlords have disconnected electricity and water and that some rental properties are unfit for occupation.

“You have a lot of places which are untenantable,” Mr Bell said. “They are on generators. The landlord turn off the light. They turn off the water. They do all kind of things.”

Mr Bell said the administration wanted to restore a balance between landlords and tenants while keeping rental prices down.

“Again, we have to strike this delicate balance between the rights of the landlord,” Mr Bell said. “They do have mortgages to pay, but also striking the balance where persons are in an inferior bargaining position, that is the tenants.”

He said the reforms were aimed at “competing interests” in the rental market.

Mr Bell also addressed the development of the country’s new land-registration system, months after Petrocelli Edwards was appointed the first Registrar of Lands.

Ms Edwards was appointed with effect from January 19 following the passage of the Registered Land Act, 2025, and the Land Adjudication Act, 2025.

Mr Bell described putting the new registration and adjudication system into operation as a major undertaking in which mistakes could not be afforded.

He said the administration was meanwhile pressing ahead with efforts to regularise land titles rather than waiting for the wider registration and adjudication exercise to be completed.

“What this honourable Prime Minister has done is that he is not just waiting on the land registration and adjudication to take place,” Mr Bell said. “He has actually started with land regularisation.”

He said people in New Providence and the Family Islands had approached the Ministry of Housing and Land Reform for help regularising land titles.