Minister Henry Charles Usher rules out retrenchment as a solution to the wage bill

Despite concerns over the size of Government’s wage bill, Minister of the Public Service Henry Charles Usher says retrenchment is not on the table.  Usher made the declaration during today’s House of Representatives meeting, where members debated an eight-million-US-dollar loan motion for the Support to Civil Service Modernization Project. The Inter-American Development Bank will provide the loan, while the Government of Belize will contribute an additional one million US dollars in counterpart funding.  The project is intended to improve control over personnel costs and strengthen workforce planning across Central Government. During the debate, Usher acknowledged that the public-sector wage bill remains high but insisted that modernization will not involve sending public officers home.

Henry Charles Usher, Minister of Public Service: “Mr.Speaker I want to assure the Leader of the Opposition, I want to assure the nation of Belize that under this People’s United Party government there will be no retrenchment of public officers. Mr Speaker, between 2008 and 2020 the wage bill doubled. There were more and more and more persons added to the wage bill. Bad practices by past administrations have compounded what we have today and you notice I said administrations. Because Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition hit the nail on the head when she said it takes political will for changes to be made to the public service. It takes political will to say that the structures that we have in place, the guardrails that we have in place, the rules that we have in place are respected because many times the political pressures come down and those rules are maybe bent or not followed and the result is as the Prime Minister said a wage bill that in the next five years will go up by 26 percent when public investment is only projected to go up by 6 percent. So doing the math is very simple to see that we are going to get into an unsustainable position very soon when it comes to this wage bill if the work is not done today. And in reality the work should have been done years ago. But it’s good that we are starting now and we can try to make sure that we get it done.”