PRESIDENT of the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI), Andy Armstrong, has suggested that Government utilize sub-contracting as a way to cut costs and create opportunities for small business.
His comments came yesterday just before Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler said Government had become “too large, too inflexible, too slow and too costly to carry”.
They were speaking during the BCCI’s luncheon which followed its 185th annual general meeting at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Armstrong, who was returned as president for a second term, suggested transportation, the cleaning of drains and the preparation of legislation as some areas which can go out to tender.
“Could not the Transport Board try a pilot programme where it puts some of its routes out to contract?” he asked.
He said tender winners would be required to transport pensioners and schoolchildren free of charge and maintain certain standards which could be verified by Transport Board inspectors.
The president added that the routine cleaning of drains and verges could be put out to tender with the winners being required to ensure that vegetation that is cleared from the verges is removed the same day.
Armstrong also suggested that Government subcontract “the preparation of some legislation” so it can catch up with the backlog that is frustrating both the public and the private sector.
“It is not acceptable that the country has to wait years for certain legislation to become a reality when we are one of the leading developing countries in the world,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sinckler noted that inefficiency and ineffectiveness in both central Government and para-statal bodies could not continue unaddressed.
He said successive administrations had established “a maze of statutory authorities each important in their own right, some overlapping and duplicating responsibilities but all carrying separate bureaucratic administrations which have grown exponentially on the expansion of their respective remits.”
However, he said this outgrowth in responsibility and size had not led to any discernible increase in the levels of efficiency or quality of services.
He stressed that each of these agencies was necessary at the time of its creation and had filled the void left by the weaknesses in central Government’s ability to be effective at the community level.
Still, he noted that “many of these organizations have in fact become too much like the very central government administration they were created to assist.”
“They have become wholly inefficient in service delivery, extremely costly to maintain and weak in managerial and operational systems.
“That is not to say they have bad managers . . . but at a systemic and structural level several can no longer effectively and efficiently deliver to the public they serve,” the minister said.
Sinckler added that while central administration was far more efficient, it continues to be slowed by a bureaucratic system fashioned in the 1950s and 1960s.
