Senator Sam Mézec made the comments after 25-year-old Amy Boyce wrote a post on Facebook saying that she wanted to move out of the two-bedroom flat she shared with her mother but was unable to do so because of the high rental costs.
Senator Mézec recently lodged a proposition calling for a ‘housing affordability crisis’ to be declared.
The proposal included calls to make tenancies open-ended and introduce rent-stabilisation legislation. He also criticised Chief Minister John Le Fondré for failing to publish a report by the Housing Policy Development Board examining the condition of Jersey’s housing market.
When asked what he thought about Ms Boyce’s predicament, he said: ‘I think it’s situations like that which highlight why it’s so unacceptable to hide this report from the public for half a year.’
He added: ‘We undertook the most comprehensive review into affordable housing in Jersey that there’s ever been and produced a report that examines the evidence, looks at what the potential solutions could be and provides a blueprint for the way forward.
‘The Chief Minister has sat on it for almost six months. People are desperate and it’s not good enough to treat this issue with such complacency. People need action and they need it quickly.’
Speaking to the JEP, Ms Boyce said she had lived with her 59-year-old mother in a two-bedroom flat in St Brelade for about ten years, and that they were paying £1,300 a month in rent.
‘I’ve been trying to move out since my early 20s but we are always faced with some kind of wall that gets put up in our way,’ she said.
She added that they had contacted affordable-housing provider Andium Homes and other organisations to try to find a place for her mother, but had been told that they could face a wait of up to five years before an affordable flat became available. She said this had left her in a ‘stressful’ position as she could not move out without risking her mother’s financial stability.
‘There’s a proportion of this population that’s being missed and it’s a concern for people like me,’ she said. ‘We are at a point now were we are finding it hard to live in general, rent is so expensive, [we] can’t find a place of our own. It is hard to keep living in Jersey when you are in this situation.
‘I think ultimately, from what I understood from all the comments [on the Facebook post], the only way to go about it is for me to just move out.’
In a statement, Senator Le Fondré said that the Housing Policy Development Board report was ‘due to be published shortly’.
‘Last month the Council of Ministers and the Housing and Infrastructure Scrutiny Panel were each briefed on the findings of the Housing Policy Development Board report by the chair of the board,’ he said.
‘A ministerial political oversight group is being established to agree the government’s official response to the recommendations in the report.’
