Renu­ka Singh

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert yes­ter­day de­fend­ed his 2021/2022 Bud­get, say­ing that it was not as “dra­con­ian” as some peo­ple ex­pect­ed.

Im­bert was the guest speak­er at the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ing As­so­ci­a­tion’s (TTMA’s) post-Bud­get fo­rum and said that the Bud­get was ev­i­dence that the Gov­ern­ment was “lis­ten­ing” to all stake­hold­ers.

“It was clear­ly not what peo­ple ex­pect­ed it to be,” Im­bert said.

“If one looked at what is be­ing said in the me­dia, this sup­posed to be a dra­con­ian bud­get, but if one thinks about it very se­ri­ous­ly a dra­con­ian bud­get would not have made any sense,” he said.

“We are well aware that busi­ness­es and in­di­vid­u­als are strug­gling. We are well aware that any cut­backs by the Gov­ern­ment, any dras­tic cut back that is, would stul­ti­fy the econ­o­my and cre­ate more prob­lems than it solves,” he said.

Im­bert said the Gov­ern­ment sought to make this Bud­get “com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.”

Im­bert round­ed off last year’s ex­pen­di­ture at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $51 bil­lion and this year’s bud­get is ap­prox­i­mate­ly just over one bil­lion more.

Im­bert said those who de­mand­ed that the Gov­ern­ment cut ex­pen­di­ture to match in­come had “no idea what they were talk­ing about.”

“We are run­ning a $50 bil­lion econ­o­my with lit­tle wastage in there. There’s very lit­tle you can cut, very few ar­eas where we can re­duce ex­pen­di­ture,” he said.

Im­bert said the Gov­ern­ment has come up with a sys­tem to pro­vide sup­port in the form of cash cards for the peo­ple to use to pay for elec­tric­i­ty and wa­ter.

The cash cards and re­bate sys­tem is the ini­tial steps to of­fer­ing those ser­vices at mar­ket rates in­stead of sub­sidised rates.

“We are go­ing to en­sure that the rates are put at the cor­rect val­ues but the peo­ple who are go­ing to be hard­est hit will be sub­sidised by way of these cash cards. So that’s our so­lu­tion to this long-stand­ing prob­lem,” he said.

He said that this is a so­lu­tion to­ward the pre­vi­ous­ly ex­ist­ing and now un­ten­able sit­u­a­tion where State util­i­ties need­ed bil­lion-dol­lar bailouts.

“In one year, I think it was 2014, the fu­el sub­sidy reached $7 bil­lion. In fact over the years that the fu­el sub­sidy has been in place, it has cost the State and tax­pay­ers $30 bil­lion,” he said.

He said peo­ple liv­ing in more af­flu­ent neigh­bour­hoods should not be pay­ing sub­sidised rates.

“The Bud­get is based on the Gov­ern­ment lis­ten­ing to peo­ple. Do­ing a lot of qui­et work in the back­ground and then propos­ing and fash­ion­ing so­lu­tions that take in ac­count what we are be­ing told,” he said.

“The Bud­get is al­so ev­i­dence that this Gov­ern­ment is lis­ten­ing to every in­ter­est group, whether it is big busi­ness, small busi­ness, mid­dle-class peo­ple, trade unions, we are lis­ten­ing to every in­ter­est group and fash­ion­ing so­lu­tions where pos­si­ble and where prac­ti­cal that would push the coun­try for­ward,” he said.

He said that the Gov­ern­ment knew it had to fo­cus on the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, ex­port and em­ploy­ment gen­er­a­tion hence the align­ment with the TTMA.

Im­bert said that the Prop­er­ty Tax is on­ly now in the da­ta-gath­er­ing phase and on­ly for res­i­den­tial and agri­cul­tur­al spaces.

“It should be ob­vi­ous to those who want to hear, that this Gov­ern­ment is lis­ten­ing,” he said.

“We are not seek­ing to deal with in­dus­tri­al prop­er­ties at this time. We may do so lat­er in the year,” he said.

He did ad­mit that a mas­sive short­fall in en­er­gy rev­enue has forced Gov­ern­ment to sus­pend plans to re­move tax­es on build­ing ma­te­ri­als.

“The ques­tion of ex­empt­ing build­ing ma­te­ri­als was some­thing we had to take a good, hard look at when we re­alised we were hav­ing a sub­stan­tial re­duc­tion in rev­enue,” he said.

“We had pro­ject­ed our rev­enue col­lec­tion for 2021 to be about $42, $43 bil­lion and af­ter the first cou­ple of months and pro­duc­tion in the en­er­gy sec­tor fell away just like that, gas pro­duc­tion just dropped and at that time, oil and gas prices were not good, we were start­ing to lose a lot of rev­enue and when you’re in a sit­u­a­tion like that you have to be re­spon­si­ble,” he said.

“So we kind of had to put the brakes on that,” he said.

Im­bert said the Gov­ern­ment still in­tend­ed to pro­vide re­lief on build­ing ma­te­ri­als on ap­proved projects.

“We are com­mit­ted to boost­ing the con­struc­tion sec­tor,” he said but added that the tim­ing has to be right and there must be a resur­gence of in­come from the en­er­gy sec­tor.

Im­bert said the Gov­ern­ment re-en­gi­neered the cur­rent SME loan sys­tem and in­creased the loan guar­an­tee from 75 per cent to 100 per cent and in­creased the re­pay­ment pe­ri­od from five years to sev­en years, all in­ter­est-free. The SME loans scope has al­so been ex­pand­ed to in­clude equip­ment for the busi­ness.

Im­bert said the plan was to make it eas­i­er to qual­i­fy.

“All an SME has to do now is demon­strate that they are up to date with their NIS, with their tax re­turns and so on, up to 2018 and then you get to bring your­self up to date to 2020, 2021,” he said.