KINGSTON, Jamaica — As a new Atlantic hurricane season enters its ninth day, a Jamaican opposition lawmaker is sounding the alarm over the abysmal delivery of aid from a government-backed housing recovery program meant to support tourism workers displaced by last year’s Hurricane Melissa.
Andrea Purkiss, the opposition’s spokesperson on tourism and industry linkages and the Member of Parliament for Hanover Eastern, made the claims during her first-ever sectoral address to Jamaica’s Parliament on Tuesday. Purkiss, who brings 27 years of firsthand experience in the country’s critical hospitality sector, laid out damning figures to back up her criticism. From her own constituency office alone, 30 eligible tourism workers who lost their homes and income to the Category 5 storm were submitted to the Tourism Housing Assistance Recovery Programme (THARP). Months after the submissions, just three workers have received any form of assistance from the initiative.
The disparities stretch across other hard-hit tourism-dependent constituencies, Purkiss confirmed. The MP for St James South submitted 20 names of affected workers to the program, and only one has secured aid to date.
Highlighting the human cost of the program’s failures, Purkiss painted a stark picture of the crisis facing waiting workers. “Three out of 30. One out of 20. We are nine days into a new hurricane season, and the recovery from the last one is not complete. That is not a recovery programme. That is a press release with a name,” she told legislators. “A cost control clerk, a mother of three, is sleeping in her car waiting for a government that promised to see her. She is still waiting.”
Purkiss also outlined cascading financial pressures that have compounded the lack of housing aid. When Hurricane Melissa first hit, hotel operators across the island projected that properties would remain closed for roughly 120 days to repair damage. In response, financial institutions granted six-month mortgage moratoriums to impacted hospitality workers, who lost all income during closures. But as repair work hit delays, reopening timelines stretched first to nine months, then to 12 full months — and the mortgage relief window was never extended to match the extended loss of income.
Nine months without steady wages and no extended financial protection have left thousands of tourism workers on the brink of housing instability, Purkiss argued. She issued a formal call on Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett to deliver a full public and national accounting of the THARP program to Parliament before the 2024 hurricane season gains momentum. The accounting, she said, should include the total number of program applications received nationwide, how many applications have been processed to date, the total amount of aid funding that has been disbursed, and a legally binding timeline to deliver assistance to every eligible worker still waiting for support.