Scores of soldiers enrolled for the Ministry of Communities duplex housing unit programme when Minister within the Ministry of Communities, Valarie Adams-Patterson, and team visited Base Camp Stephenson Wednesday.

Speaking at the Colonel Ulric Pilgrim Lecture Hall at the Timehri, East Bank Demerara base, Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) Chief Executive Officer, Leon Saul, said the authority is working to provide housing for the working class citizens, including soldiers.

He said the CH&PA has about 20,000 applications in its system and the drive is not to distribute house lots but to provide housing units.

Duplexes, town houses and condominiums, will be built for the soldiers to promote family-oriented life.

Minister Adams-Patterson said state employees, low and middle income earners and youths will be captured in the Government’s housing programme.

And soldiers will get an opportunity to own their own home, she said.

Some 28,000 house lots across the country are unoccupied and the Government has made it clear that it would not be allocating lots to persons without putting down proper infrastructures such as water, light and roads.

The lack of these, Minister Adams-Patterson said, is one of the primary causes for persons not building on the lots allocated to them.

This, she said has caused the Government to revise the housing programme so that beneficiaries will gain in a more practical way, and on that note, urged the soldiers to “come on board” to get their “portion of the pie”.

Once the application form is filled, the soldiers will have to visit the Ministry’s Brickdam, Georgetown head office with relevant documents. There, they will be interviewed, issued a letter and placed on the priority list to benefit from the housing unit programme.