The Public Works and Public Housing Ministry has reassured the country that the government-sanctioned Housing Savings Advisory Board for Civil Servants (Bapertarum-PNS) will be allowed to continue to support housing for civil servants for the next two years prior to its anticipated merger with the Public Housing Savings (Tapera) management body.
Last month, the House of Representatives passed the Tapera bill into a law despite strong opposition from employers. The new law will become the legal basis for the establishment of a housing savings program for civil servants in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.
Under the law, the operation, funding and human resources of the Bapertarum-PNS, which currently manages an annual Rp 800 billion (US$60.2 million) housing fund, will be dissolved and merged with a Tapera management body.
Public Works and Public Housing Minister Basuki Hadimuljono has promised that the board will operate normally until 2018, when the new management body fully takes over its functions, as stipulated by the law.
“In the next two years, Bapertarum will be given time to merge into Tapera,” he said on Tuesday after a meeting with the board’s executives.
To make it work, the Tapera Law establishes a Tapera committee, fund management body, and issues an additional presidential decree and ministerial regulations. Separately, Bapertarum-PNS president director Heroe Soelistiawan said that the board aimed to help build 15,000 houses this year, an almost five-fold increase compared to last year’s figure.
“But we won’t stop at 15,000. If there is more demand, we can propose more,” he said.
The board faces challenges in financing and it only placed 7,000 civil servants into housing last year, a far cry from its target of assisting 756,591 civil servants.
Of the annual housing fund it manages, the company has allocated Rp 400 billion to aid to an estimated 100,000 civil servants to help with down-payments. “We just support their down-payment, so we try to act as the organizers. The rest is beyond our control,” Heroe said.
The board plans to transfer Rp 10.4 trillion, collected from the monthly wage of civil servants, to Tapera over next two years.
Tapera itself is the ministry’s latest attempt to provide more financing as it strives to tackle the country’s housing backlog, which presently stands at around 13.5 million houses.
The program is expected to gather Rp 50 trillion to Rp 60 trillion in five years after it takes effect.
The fund will be collected from a monthly wage cut from formal workers in the country and foreign workers who possess visas and have worked for more than six months in Indonesia.
Paper Edition | Page: 13
No comments:
Post a Comment