JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor and for­mer so­cial de­vel­op­ment min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne and In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Dr Mar­lene Attzs are both ques­tion­ing the true ben­e­fits of the pro­posed in­creas­es in grants un­der the Min­istry of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices.

Dur­ing his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo an­nounced a $250 per month in­crease in the Se­nior Cit­i­zens’ Grant, Pub­lic As­sis­tance Grant and Dis­abil­i­ty As­sis­tance Grant, at an ad­di­tion­al an­nu­al cost of $555 mil­lion.

How­ev­er, the min­istry re­ceived ap­prox­i­mate­ly $812 mil­lion less for so­cial as­sis­tance pro­grammes over­all.

The largest de­crease was in the Se­nior Cit­i­zens’ Grant, whose al­lo­ca­tion fell from ap­prox­i­mate­ly $4.59 bil­lion to $3.87 bil­lion for fis­cal 2027, a re­duc­tion of about $720.2 mil­lion.

The Pub­lic As­sis­tance al­lo­ca­tion fell from $251 mil­lion to $232.4 mil­lion, a de­crease of $18.6 mil­lion, while the Dis­abil­i­ty As­sis­tance Grant dropped from $620.7 mil­lion to $547.6 mil­lion, a re­duc­tion of $73.2 mil­lion.

Dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion, Tan­coo said it was the first in­crease in 12 years.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia out­side Sen­ate yes­ter­day, Browne said while the in­crease in grants are com­mend­able, the re­al is­sue was the pur­chas­ing pow­er of ben­e­fi­cia­ries.

“It’s re­al­ly a case of giv­ing on one hand, giv­ing a morsel on one hand, and then tak­ing away a bas­ket­ful on the oth­er.”

Attzs al­so ar­gued that the in­crease needs to trans­late in­to a mean­ing­ful im­prove­ment in re­cip­i­ents’ abil­i­ty to meet their fi­nan­cial oblig­a­tions.

“The nom­i­nal $250, what does that trans­late to in pur­chas­ing pow­er? You have con­ver­sa­tions around per­sons not be­ing able to get med­ica­tion, and I don’t want to iden­ti­fy a par­tic­u­lar med­ica­tion, but it is in the pub­lic space that a very pop­u­lar med­ica­tion for non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases is not avail­able. So you have $250, but then you al­so have to ques­tion the pur­chas­ing pow­er of that $250 and how far it is go­ing to stretch.”

Attzs added that the over­all bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion fell short of ex­plain­ing how the mea­sures formed part of a co­he­sive strat­e­gy for eco­nom­ic trans­for­ma­tion.

While there were some in­di­ca­tions of how that trans­for­ma­tion would be achieved, she said the pre­sen­ta­tion lacked the con­nec­tive tis­sue need­ed to de­liv­er the de­sired out­comes.

She added that while re­ports from in­ter­na­tion­al agen­cies such as Moody’s and the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund had been pos­i­tive, Tan­coo should have more clear­ly iden­ti­fied the struc­tur­al chal­lenges those agen­cies have re­peat­ed­ly cau­tioned the coun­try about.