Renu­ka Singh

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has promised there will be no job cuts de­spite his small­er Cab­i­net.

Speak­ing to the me­dia at the first Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) meet­ing since its tri­umph at the polls last Mon­day, Row­ley dis­missed ru­mours that his con­tract­ed Gov­ern­ment meant that staff at some min­istries would be job­less. The Cab­i­net held a re­treat at the Hy­att, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

Dur­ing the min­is­te­r­i­al swear­ing-in cer­e­mo­ny on Fri­day, it was re­vealed that Row­ley had de­lin­eat­ed his Gov­ern­ment among 23 min­istries as op­posed to the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship which end­ed its tenure with 33 min­istries.

"The min­istries which have not been named as sep­a­rate en­ti­ties, that block of of­fi­cers, pub­lic ser­vants, what­ev­er they are, they now fall un­der one of the ex­ist­ing min­istries," he said.

Row­ley said that in his new tem­plate, sev­er­al per­ma­nent sec­re­taries would now li­aise with a sin­gle min­is­ter as op­posed to the pre­vi­ous mod­el which saw one PS per min­is­ter.

"For ex­am­ple, there was a min­is­ter of wa­ter re­sources. That whole block of who­ev­er, what­ev­er was there is now un­der the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties and there is a Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties," he said.

He said the same con­cept al­so ap­plied for oth­er min­istries.

"So every sin­gle area of gov­ern­men­tal ac­tiv­i­ty sits with­in a min­istry some­where and there is a min­is­ter re­spon­si­ble," he said.

He de­scribed the shift as a mere "re­lo­ca­tion" of man­pow­er.

"So this ru­mour of job loss­es is just not true," he said, adding that the min­is­te­r­i­al chop just meant that there were ten few­er ad­min­is­tra­tive heads.

Dur­ing the three-month cam­paign, Row­ley had re­it­er­at­ed a plan to de­volve the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­istry and the work un­der that min­istry to the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions.

In ad­dress­ing that is­sue yes­ter­day, Row­ley said it would be done on a phased ba­sis.

"That com­mit­ment still stands but it will be phased. We set out to do that but we have to cre­ate the ar­chi­tec­ture of the new arrange­ment be­fore we re­place what is there now," he said.

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment is cur­rent­ly linked to Rur­al De­vel­op­ment un­der par­ty chair­man Franklin Khan.

He said that the planned ab­sorp­tion would not take place just yet and the new tem­plate had to be worked out be­fore Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment could be com­plete­ly de­volved.

"This is a work in progress. The process has be­gun," Row­ley said.