Even as un­em­ploy­ment con­tin­ues to rise due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, over 7,000 peo­ple who ap­plied for in­come sup­port grants have been blanked this year for fail­ing to meet spec­i­fied cri­te­ria.

This was re­vealed dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee meet­ing yes­ter­day on So­cial Ser­vices and Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion which ad­dressed un­em­ploy­ment dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

The pur­pose of the meet­ing was to look in­to the State’s ca­pac­i­ty to pro­vide sup­port to peo­ple who be­came un­em­ployed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary at the Min­istry of Fi­nance Yvonne Neemacha­ran said there were few­er ap­pli­cants in the sec­ond phase of the pro­gramme this year, as the min­istry had set out spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria to en­sure there was no du­pli­ca­tion and dou­ble-dip­ping of ap­pli­ca­tion forms.

Asked how many peo­ple were un­suc­cess­ful in their ap­pli­ca­tions for the salary re­lief, Neemacha­ran said 7,045 in phase two of the pro­gramme did not qual­i­fy.

Asked why by Hous­ing Min­is­ter Pene­lope Beck­les, Neemacha­ran said, “Gen­er­al­ly, they would not have met the cri­te­ria. Most times it was be­cause un­em­ploy­ment was not dur­ing the stip­u­lat­ed date. This pro­gramme start­ed in May and their last em­ploy­ment should have been the 28th April.”

She said out of over 24,000-plus ap­pli­ca­tions, over one thou­sand were du­pli­cates. 

Neemacha­ran said any­one who had ques­tions on the grant could con­tact the Salary Re­lief Grant Com­mand Cen­tre at 689-1493 or 800-6774 from Mon­day to Fri­day from 8 am to 4 pm.

Mean­while, head of the Labour Mar­ket Unit of the Min­istry of Labour, Bruce Spencer, al­so gave sta­tis­tics on un­em­ploy­ment trends.

“When we looked at the sec­ond quar­ter of 2020, the labour force in com­par­i­son to 2019, there was a fall in the labour force of 7,100 per­sons,” he said.

This could be height­ened be­cause many peo­ple had to leave their jobs to care for chil­dren dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Spencer added.

Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary at the Min­istry of Labour Na­tal­ie Willis al­so re­vealed there has been an in­crease in em­ploy­ment in three sec­tors - agri­cul­ture, pe­tro­le­um and fi­nanc­ing - over the sec­ond quar­ter of 2019 and 2020.

She said ma­jor de­creas­es in em­ploy­ment oc­curred in man­u­fac­tur­ing, con­struc­tion and the whole­sale and re­tail sec­tors.