KE­JAN HAYNES

Lead Ed­i­tor – News­gath­er­ing

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour says he will with­draw the Mis­cel­la­neous Pro­vi­sions (Se­nior Cit­i­zens’ Pen­sion and Pub­lic As­sis­tance) Bill, 2024.

The con­tro­ver­sial bill would have dis­qual­i­fied per­sons with sav­ings in the bank ex­ceed­ing $25,000 from ac­cess­ing the old age pen­sion.

Speak­ing in a me­dia con­fer­ence a short while ago, AG Ar­mour said the is­sue of sav­ings was nev­er sup­posed to be part of the Bill.

"It turns out, some­one in the Pub­lic Ser­vice, dur­ing the pro­ceed­ings of the leg­isla­tive re­view com­mit­tee, had in­tro­duced an is­sue to do with sav­ings. It ap­pears that pro­vi­sion was in­sert­ed in­to the Bill," the AG ex­plained.  "I will be with­draw­ing the bill and bring­ing back a re­place­ment bill to ex­clude the part about sav­ings."

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Don­na Cox said qual­i­fi­ca­tion has al­ways been in­come based.

The Cab­i­net note from March 2023 ad­dressed in­come cri­te­ria, age and res­i­den­cy, not a sav­ings re­quire­ment.

"It is not, and it nev­er was Cab­i­net's in­ten­tion to af­fect the sav­ings of the el­der­ly, so we will not be purs­ing that part of the Bill," Cox said.

When asked if pub­lic re­ac­tion had any­thing to do with the de­ci­sion to with­draw, the AG said no, be­cause he was sat­is­fied there was an er­ror in the Bill.

Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley, speak­ing at the same time at a dif­fer­ent event, said the news came as a sur­prise to him too. He said no one will be look­ing at sav­ings, and in fact en­cour­aged every­one to save mon­ey.

He said in­stead, the cri­te­ria will look at in­come.

"The whole is­sue of get­ting old age pen­sion is a qual­i­fi­ca­tion. One of the many things is your in­come, not your sav­ings. If your in­come is be­low a cer­tain lev­el, not your sav­ings,” the PM said. “Some­where along the line, some­body didn't un­der­stand that af­ter the Cab­i­net took a de­ci­sion to rec­ti­fy one or two steps in the Bill."

His mes­sage to pen­sion­ers:

"There's noth­ing to be wor­ried about. We stand with what is the law. What was in that law was meant to be di­rect­ed at some­thing else. Once you've qual­i­fied, there's no ques­tion of not be­ing qual­i­fied af­ter you've al­ready qual­i­fied."