The chain of events that led to the embarrassing situation on Thursday last week outside the South Quay offices of the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) created an almost perfect no-win situation for everyone involved. The HDC was put in the position of having to manage a sit-in protest action by three desperate mothers accompanied by their six children. The three families were, in their desperation, the subject of needless embarrassment and ultimately, nothing could be done to alleviate the situation.
One mother, Candace Patterson, produced a letter from the National Family Services Division at the Ministry of Gender, Youth and Child Development addressed to the HDC’s managing director, Jearlean John. The document called on the HDC to address the “emergency” needs of the family. Is this really how a social services catchment system should work?
Should ministries be calling on State agencies to provide housing on such an ad hoc basis, shunting needy families from one public sector door to another? It’s far too easy for one bureaucrat to decide that they have reached the limits of their authority before pushing a thorny social services problem along to another official to wrestle with. That’s not a system that offers a humane solution to real world problems that affect the needy citizens of T&T that every government professes to care so much about.