It seems as though good sense has pre­vailed and Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has cho­sen to amend the pen­sion promis­es that the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship made on the elec­tion plat­form. This is an ac­cep­tance of the point that I made in the two pre­vi­ous com­men­taries in this space that T&T could not af­ford to im­ple­ment the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship's full pen­sion promis­es at this time. Speak­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter on Tues­day, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar stressed that the Gov­ern­ment would in­crease the old age pen­sion/se­nior cit­i­zens grant from $2,500 to $3,000 ON­LY for those who re­ceive it at this point.

I in­ter­pret that to mean that this Gov­ern­ment will use the ex­ist­ing in­come qual­i­fi­ca­tion to de­ter­mine those who re­ceive the pen­sion or grant. Just to re­it­er­ate, the promis­es as made by the par­ties that now form the ad­min­is­tra­tion com­prised the fol­low­ing:

�2 1) Re­in­state­ment of the Old Age Pen­sion Act. Pen­sions must be an en­ti­tle­ment and not a grant. (Man­i­festo promise)

�2 2) Pen­sion laws must be amend­ed to pro­vide for the na­tion­al and re­gion­al porta­bil­i­ty of pen­sion ben­e­fits and for im­proved pen­sion ben­e­fits. (Man­i­festo promise)

�2 3) Re­move all re­stric­tions and qual­i­fi­ca­tions for peo­ple to re­ceive an Old Age Pen­sion and thus every cit­i­zen will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly re­ceive a State-fund­ed Old Age Pen­sion up­on the at­tain­ment of pen­sion­able age. (Man­i­festo promise)

�2 4) In­crease the val­ue of the month­ly old aged pen­sion en­ti­tle­ment to $3,000. (Man­i­festo promise)

�2 5) Low­er the pen­sion­able age from 65 to 60 (Promise in news­pa­per ad­ver­tise­ments

It seems, there­fore, that the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion will im­ple­ment promis­es 1, 2 and 4 but de­fer (or re­pu­di­ate) the third and fifth promis­es. It's in­ter­est­ing that the Prime Min­is­ter is re­port­ed to have de­nied ever mak­ing the promise to low­er the qual­i­fy­ing age to re­ceive a pen­sion from 65 years to 60, as it is there in news­pa­per ad­ver­tise­ments car­ried in the Guardian and the News­day. One sus­pects, though, that the Prime Min­is­ter would be right in say­ing that she per­son­al­ly nev­er promised to low­er the age from 65 to 60.

One won­ders whether she would de­ny the news­pa­pers ad­ver­tise­ments or claim that they were is­sued in er­ror. The Prime Min­is­ter's de­ci­sion to lim­it the pen­sion promis­es to those that the Gov­ern­ment can af­ford to fund at this time must be seen in the con­text of the cur­rent fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion that the coun­try faces. This in­cludes the fact that the coun­try is pro­ject­ed to record a fis­cal deficit of $7.7 bil­lion in the cur­rent fi­nan­cial year.

But it should al­so be seen in the con­text of the fact that not even the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) knows for sure how many peo­ple over 60 there are in this coun­try. On June 7, the CSO is­sued the Labour Force Bul­letin for the fourth quar­ter of 2009. That doc­u­ment in­di­cat­ed that there are 169,000 peo­ple 60 and over in this coun­try. The bul­letin is based on a sci­en­tif­ic sam­ple sur­vey con­duct­ed by the CSO.

How­ev­er, the mid-year es­ti­mate of the pop­u­la­tion, pub­lished in the Re­view of the Econ­o­my doc­u­ment (ap­pen­dix 11) which ac­com­pa­nied the 2010 bud­get doc­u­ments es­ti­mat­ed that there were 131,269 peo­ple 60 and over in this coun­try as at the mid­dle of last year. The mid-year pop­u­la­tion re­view is based on re­ports of births, deaths and net mi­gra­tion (both in­ward and out­ward mi­gra­tion) as re­ceived by the reg­is­trars of births and deaths and the Im­mi­gra­tion de­part­ment.

The on­ly way to know the size of the over-60 pop­u­la­tion for sure is by con­duct­ing a cen­sus and count­ing every­body. The last pop­u­la­tion cen­sus was con­duct­ed in 2000 and one was due to start on May 17. This was post­poned be­cause of the gen­er­al elec­tion. Cen­sus­es in this coun­try are gen­er­al­ly not held dur­ing the rainy sea­son (for ob­vi­ous rea­sons) so it is quite like­ly that the of­fi­cial 2010 cen­sus will be de­layed un­til ear­ly next year.

An­tho­ny Wil­son