LAMP Assisting Thousands of Land Owners in St. Catherine to Obtain Titles

Under the Land Administration Management Programme (LAMP), some 7,450 landowners in St. Catherine who do not have registered land titles, are embracing the prospect of acquiring their titles with government assistance.
Lisa Campbell, Legal Officer of LAMP, which falls under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, says 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 tells 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 details.
“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 adds.
Ordinarily, persons purchasing or selling land in the island, regardless of possessing a title or not, are subject to paying transfer tax and stamp duty. Transfer tax, she says, amounts to 7.5 per 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 $1 million, Miss Campbell explains 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.
Mrs. Campbell says 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 stresses 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 says, “is to have an ideal situation where persons 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 Miss 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 about over 7,000 legal files where persons have come in to us, and say we want you to assist us in applying for a title,” she tells JIS News.
The mapping mechanism that was utilised employed the usage of both Geography Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS).
In carrying out the necessary preparatory work to get the process rolling for land title applicants, the legal officers and surveyors working with LAMP had to work in tandem with the St. Catherine Parish Council and the NLA.
Even as she emphasises that possession of a registered land title should be an important prerogative for landowners, the Legal Officer bemoans that the process being undertaken “is still a hard sell”.
“Where persons are in possession of family land that is passed down, they are quite comfortable as they have no intention of mortgaging their property, and to them, that is one of the main reasons to get a title,” the Legal Officer notes.
“They have to be convinced that this is the proper thing to do, because as society becomes more global, you realise that we have assets here but we are not utilising them because they are not in proper form, and not recorded in such a way that we can protect each other’s assets,” she says.
With the pilot project heading towards its conclusion in December, at which time more than 65 per cent of the over 7,000 land applications would have been processed, and the remaining applications anticipated for completion by the end of 2007, Miss Campbell says that, “we think we have met upon a formula that could solve some of the major issues that we are encountering in terms of the methodology of how we do the work”.
“The intention is that the project should be expanded. Early next year, I suspect, the first few months, we will spend time doing evaluations in terms of, have we met our targets, our objectives, problems we have encountered and the way forward,” she explains.
Given the success that the Programme has realised over the course of its test phase, Miss Campbell says the definitive plan of action is for LAMP to become an institutionalised component of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.
The LAMP Unit, which operates out of the Old Hope Road offices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, has a staff complement of 16 persons, which include attorneys, surveyors, a land tenure specialist and administrative support staff.