The Gov­ern­ment is not in any lit­er­al war with any group or per­son in T&T, ac­cord­ing to a state­ment yes­ter­day from the Prime Min­is­ter's of­fice. The state­ment fol­lowed com­ments by the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil on Mon­day that the JCC would "fight to the bit­ter end" to en­sure a new sys­tem of pro­cure­ment was im­ple­ment­ed in T&T. The JCC was re­spond­ing to com­ments made by Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning at a St Joseph meet­ing on Mon­day. Yes­ter­day, the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter is­sued a state­ment that one of the mat­ters ad­dressed by Man­ning dur­ing the meet­ing was that of set­backs be­ing faced in the na­tion­al in­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment dri­ve.

Those, Man­ning said, were large­ly due to un­sat­is­fac­to­ry work be­ing done by the lo­cal con­struc­tion sec­tor, the re­lease stat­ed. It added: "The state­ment was in no way in­tend­ed to ex­ac­er­bate a con­flict but to draw at­ten­tion to se­ri­ous de­fi­cien­cies in one of the most im­por­tant ar­eas of the lo­cal econ­o­my and to in­di­cate that ap­pro­pri­ate re­me­di­al steps were un­der­way. "Prime Min­is­ter Man­ning sought to ad­dress, specif­i­cal­ly the most re­cent in­stances where the lo­cal con­struc­tion sec­tor has not de­liv­ered promis­es in Gov­ern­ment's na­tion-wide hous­ing pro­gramme." The re­lease added: "He not­ed that cost over­runs, shod­dy work­man­ship and se­ri­ous de­lays had plagued sev­er­al of the hous­ing de­vel­op­ments.

"Many of these projects had to be stopped or are be­ing re­con­di­tioned post-com­ple­tion and this has clear­ly caused se­vere hard­ship for many of the peo­ple of T&T who would seek to oc­cu­py those homes." The re­lease stat­ed: "It is in this con­text the Prime Min­is­ter stat­ed that there would be a fight to en­sure that the pub­lic gets val­ue for mon­ey, that cost over­runs and de­lays are elim­i­nat­ed. That projects are ex­e­cut­ed in the most ef­fi­cient man­ner pos­si­ble and that in the con­duct of its busi­ness the Gov­ern­ment is re­solved to en­sure that the peo­ple of T&T are giv­en on­ly the best by their Gov­ern­ment."