Thousands of St Catherine landowners getting help with obtaining titles
UNDER the Land Administration Management Programme (LAMP), some 7,450 landowners in St Catherine who do not have registered land titles are now getting assistance with acquiring them.
Lisa Campbell, legal officer of LAMP, which falls under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, said the programme makes the process which the landowners are required to pursue less costly, as legislation was implemented to facilitate the waiver of mandatory fees that are typically associated with acquisition of a land title.
The Special Provisions Act, she told JIS News, was introduced and passed by the government to serve as a complementary component of LAMP.
“Essentially, the Act, as the heading indicates, is basically to make special provisions for the processing of LAMP work. Integral provisions under the Act include a provision that grants the waiver of transfer tax and stamp duty, as well as death duties from the Ministry of finance,” the legal officer said.
“So persons who participate under our programme do not pay transfer tax, stamp duty or death duties, which can be very onerous and burdensome under normal circumstances,” she added.
Ordinarily, people pur-chasing or selling land in Jamaica, regardless of possess-ing a title or not, are subject to paying transfer tax and stamp duty. Transfer tax, she said, amounts to 7.5 per cent of the market value of the land at the point of sale, while stamp duty is 5.5 per cent of the market value.
Where a parcel of land is valued at $1million, Campbell explained that “you are looking at $75,000 for transfer tax and that is paid by the person who is selling. As for the stamp duty, it would be $45,000 and that cost is shared between the vendor and the purchaser”.
Also under the Act, death duties, reduced to 7.5 per cent from a previous high of 15 per cent in June of last year, are currently being waived for the land title applicants participating in the programme in St Catherine.
The LAMP is a pilot programme, which is jointly funded by the Government of Jamaica and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The agreement for the loan funds totalling some US$12 million was signed in April 2000.
Campbell said the LAMP came out of the general principles from the National Land Policy, in terms of addressing land tenure issues, land security issues and other adjuncts that would flow from land tenure.
The project has four major areas: land registration, land information and land management, land use planning and development, and public land management.
Notwithstanding the specified areas, she stressed that “the major focus really has been on land registration, because of its crucial importance to the Jamaican people as a whole, and of course public land management and the issues in relation to divestment of public lands, recently”.
The primary objective of the programme, she said “is to have an ideal situation where people who have land and access to land as their own – who have no title – will be able to use that title in order to do whatever it is that they want to do, and to secure for them a benefit in society larger than they would be able to access if there was no title”.
The parish of St Catherine was selected as the pilot for LAMP on the basis that it was identified as having a mix of private holdings that are mostly unregistered. Coupled with this, is the fact that the parish’s socio-economic make-up comprises several farming communities whose residents, in all likelihood, cannot afford to secure the services of an attorney to get surveyors to pursue the necessary avenues to procure a land title.
According to Campbell, given the combination of registered and unregistered parcels in the parish as well as other parcels of land that have been fragmented over the years, it was seen as a viable starting point for LAMP. It also helps that in terms of proximity to the National Land Agency (NLA) and the Stamp Office, St Catherine is ideally situated, as “it would have been easier to manoeuvre for the undertaking of the new venture”.
“We surveyed parcels, whether persons wanted to open a file to pursue a title or not. So we basically mapped about 29,000 parcels in St Catherine. Out of that, currently we have over 7,000 legal files where persons have come in to us, and said we want you to assist us in applying for a title,” she said.