SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is ex­pect­ed to re­ceive his first re­port from T&T’s Road Map Com­mit­tee on how to deal with the fall­out of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic on May 8.

The 20-mem­ber com­mit­tee al­so hopes to sub­mit the fi­nal re­port to Row­ley by June 2, the com­mit­tee’s chair­man, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte said yes­ter­day.

Le Hunte is one of two vice-chair­men ap­point­ed to the com­mit­tee. The oth­er is for­mer Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny chair­man Ger­ry Brooks.

Le Hunte ad­mit­ted May 8 was the dead­line giv­en by Row­ley for the com­mit­tee to come up with a short term plan to ad­dress is­sues af­fect­ing cit­i­zens and the busi­ness sec­tor dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“So the groups have been out hav­ing meet­ings with rel­e­vant or­gan­i­sa­tions and stake­hold­ers. They are get­ting sub­mis­sions from peo­ple. We are tak­ing a con­sul­ta­tive ap­proach on a dai­ly ba­sis,” Le Hunte told Guardian Me­dia

He said while a lot of peo­ple have been giv­ing sug­ges­tions, they have to work with speed giv­en the short time they have to de­liv­er the first re­port.

The com­mit­tee has been di­vid­ed in­to 15 sub-sec­tors to ex­am­ine con­struc­tion, agri­cul­ture, en­er­gy, man­u­fac­tur­ing, re­tail and dis­tri­b­u­tion and bank­ing and in­sur­ance. Oth­ers will fo­cus on cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture, rev­enue en­hance­ment and cash flow man­age­ment.

Le Hunte said he had a fruit­ful meet­ing with the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce and the labour move­ment yes­ter­day. Meet­ings were al­so held with the en­er­gy and con­struc­tion sec­tors to as­cer­tain where they are, how they could as­sist and what help they need­ed. (See page 7)

Since Row­ley’s an­nounce­ment of the road map com­mit­tee two weeks ago, Le Hunte said they had been work­ing fever­ish­ly to chart a new way for­ward.

“The two vice-chairs are fo­cused on a short term agen­da, which is jump-start­ing the econ­o­my un­der the sub-head­ings of em­ploy­ment, cre­at­ing em­ploy­ment, main­tain­ing em­ploy­ment lev­els, in­creas­ing ag­gre­gate de­mand and sup­ply and leav­ing no one be­hind,” he said.

“The mem­bers have recog­nised how much work it has been. But most of the mem­bers see it as a labour of love be­cause they are try­ing to jump-start the econ­o­my, which is crit­i­cal. That has been the fo­cus of our short term re­port.”

Fol­low­ing these meet­ings, Le Hunte said the head of each sub-sec­tor com­mit­tee will meet with the PM to­day to give him a progress re­port.

He said on May 8 the com­mit­tee will sub­mit its first short term road map plan to Row­ley and on June 2 the fi­nal re­port.

“What we are try­ing to do is re­mod­el, re­tool and trans­form the econ­o­my, which is an­oth­er as­pect of the work but we have been try­ing to be very fo­cused in this first re­port. When this re­port comes it will be about ex­e­cut­ing the rec­om­men­da­tions put for­ward.”

Le Hunte as­sured the re­port will not be the­o­ret­i­cal but prac­ti­cal.

“It’s not go­ing to be about analy­sis as to why we got here. It is about projects...it is about what we need to do and do it swift­ly.”

In go­ing for­ward, he said tough de­ci­sions will have to be made.

“We have to fash­ion what we could do in the con­fines of our ex­ist­ing en­vi­ron­ment.”

He said he was very proud of the com­mit­tee’s ded­i­ca­tion and com­mit­ment.

Ques­tioned about the Ox­ford Uni­ver­si­ty rank­ing T&T as the sec­ond most pre­pared coun­try to roll back COVID-19 re­stric­tions, Le Hunte said the rat­ing was an en­dorse­ment of Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sive­ness ac­tions, adding the rat­ing was a col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­fort by the ma­jor­i­ty of cit­i­zens. (See page 6)

The sur­vey was un­der­tak­en to pro­vide a cross-na­tion­al overview of which coun­tries met four out of six rec­om­men­da­tions for re­lax­ing phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing. The uni­ver­si­ty as­sessed four ar­eas - cas­es con­trol, test, trace and iso­late, man­age im­port cas­es and com­mu­ni­ty un­der­stand­ing. But there was no da­ta on vul­ner­a­ble set­tings and pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sure in work­places. Out of 145 coun­tries as­sessed, T&T placed sec­ond be­hind Viet­nam.