A pledge to help Bahrain parliament secure BD600 million ($1.59 billion) for housing projects in the two-year national budget has gone out from Housing Minister Shaikh Ibrahim bin Khalifa Al Khalifa.

He agreed to back MPs demands for an increase in its annual budget from BD120 million to BD300 million, saying it would help speed up several long-awaited services in the pipeline.

The minister told MPs the BD600 million would help increase the number of new houses to 8,400, which will clear at least a fifth of families on the ministry's waiting list.

MPs earlier threatened to delay a vote on the national budget for this year and the next on Thursday, threatening government spending plans, if the money was not forthcoming.

Their demands include an additional BD600 million for housing projects, BD84 million to knock down and rebuild 2,000 dilapidated homes and BD10 million to renovate and waterproof damaged homes.

Negotiations also included more financial support for government and private sector employees as well as pensioners.

MPs gave the government a week to respond to their demands for hundreds of millions of dinars to be injected into the national budget.

Finance Minister Shaikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa has until February 24 to reply to the request.

Parliament financial and economic affairs committee member Ali Al Aswad, who is in charge of negotiating housing demands, said the government had a five-year housing plan to clear the 54,000 applications on the Housing Ministry's waiting list that could not be matched with the allocated budget.

'The mechanism of building homes should be divided equally amongst Bahrain's five governorates and houses should be given to the oldest in the list and up to new applicants, which the minister has agreed would be the system, but said that work had to be done first to get the BD600 million,' said Al Aswad during a Press conference yesterday.

'The minister has pledged to back us all the way to get that BD600 million, but he said everyone had to work to get allocated by the government, which has recently announced many housing projects that it wants to achieve.'

His Majesty King Hamad last week ordered two new towns be built in Hidd and Sitra.

'Those directives are orders as Shaikh Ibrahim has told us and whenever the budget is out, they will need just three months to tender both projects and begin work on 12,000 homes (6,000 each), with dredging and reclamation work beginning immediately,' said Al Aswad.

He said Shaikh Ibrahim had agreed to present the committee with the new housing schedule within a week if the BD600 million was approved.

Meanwhile, Al Aswad said the Municipalities and Urban Planning Ministry did not attend yesterday's meeting with no apology.

'This delays discussions on the municipalities' budget and our aim to increase the dilapidated and damaged homes budget, which ultimately delays the whole budget,' he said.-TradeArabia News Service