GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
13 August 2026
*Note to editors: This speech was delivered during an interpellation in the Provincial Parliament on allocated housing funding
This province, like this city, is still living two realities: the well-serviced suburb, and the informal settlement on the urban edge, still waiting for water, sanitation, and a formal address decades after apartheid planning put it there.
Every rand left unspent is a household told to keep waiting in exactly the conditions these grants exist to end.
Speaker, put this year’s failure against the recent record, and this is not stagnation, it is decline.
In 2019/20, this province delivered 8038 housing units. By 2024/25, that had fallen to 3046 – a drop of well over 60% in five years, in the same province, facing the same growing waiting list.
This year’s underspend did not happen in isolation.
This is a department in retreat, and every year of decline is measured in families staying in the same shack, in the same queue, a little longer.
And if the Minister’s answer to that decline is to point at National Treasury, at shrinking allocations from above, that defence collapses on its own terms.
You cannot claim you’re underfunded by national government while simultaneously failing to spend the funding you were given.
Those two defences cancel each other out. Either the money was there and you didn’t use it, or it wasn’t there and underspending is impossible, it cannot be both.
Speaker, we have also just watched this government’s PR machine in action. A fortnight ago the Minister announced what his department called its most significant land release yet – nearly 11000 housing opportunities, close to 5000 of them for social and affordable housing.
Good headline. But I have already asked publicly, when will one of those units actually be built, and with what funding, when this Minister can’t even spend the money, he already has?
Much of that land was earmarked for housing years ago, sat unused while this department dithered, and in that vacuum was occupied by families with nowhere else to go.
Idle land invites occupation. Unspent grants guarantee it. You cannot claim credit for “releasing” land today that your own inaction let slip out of your control yesterday.
This is a governing party choosing administrative comfort and photo opportunities over the people it was elected to house.
So, I close, not with a question but with a promise: I will be tracking whether one rand of next year’s housing allocation is left unspent, and whether one hectare of “released” land is left to sit idle, while families remain without water or a title deed.
The Minister has had his say. The people on that waiting list are still waiting for his delivery.