Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Ryan Straughn, with ICAB President, Lydia McCollin and ICAB Executive Director, Kathy-Ann Hewitt.
MINISTER in the Ministry of Finance, Ryan Straughn, acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting many households hard, eating away at already low savings.
His comments came on Thursday after receiving a cheque from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados to go to Government’s Adopt A Family programme, which he noted has reached over 3,400 households as of the end of September of this year. He said this and other donations are timely and helpful because it ensures that no one falls below the “very minimum”.
Giving his assessment of how dire the situation is in Barbados, he said: “We were coming out of a scenario where there were very little amounts of household savings when we took Office, given what had taken place. However, people were able to work and get it back.”
He lamented however that COVID has meant the complete disruption in terms of not just the employment, but the running down on whatever savings that people had previously. “This has meant that those persons whose incomes were at a level that, while they were getting by, you still have your commitments – your mortgage, your utilities to pay. The challenge is that we keep households as solvent as possible.”
He said Government is also conscious that in trying to respond to the social protection needs, that it is important that the mental well-being of persons is also looked after. “...Because you know when you get 18-20 you want to leave home, establish your own manhood or womanhood and people have a sense of pride of being able to pay their bills and do things that make them independent of their parents. So you have a number of families now who, for perhaps the first time, are faced with the prospect of having to move back in with their parents; they literally can’t pay their bills. It is an extraordinary circumstance given the disruption that has been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is not an easy road to face financially, but I believe once we are able to see that there is hope in terms of what we are doing to bring back the economy and to get as much economy, then once people have that hope that there will be a brighter future, I know we will get through. We know as Barbadians we are quite resilient. The key thing is that we hold each other’s hand.”
He added, “We want to ensure that people can survive... The challenge now is that we create the space that the legal obligations that people would normally have, that we create enough space in a structure that their financial obligations are managed properly so that people are not placed under further stress.”
“Whether mortgage, rent, as a business or individuals that we will be working with the financial institutions to craft that specific intervention to ensure that we can give some order with respect to how those kinds of financial obligations are treated, because that is the one thing that plays on people’s minds when you speak to Barbadians. The one thing that is a recurrent theme is that people want to be able to pay their bills, they want to work and get on with their lives. So we have to ensure that the mental state remains intact, so that people do not give up. Once people do not give up, I know we will get through this pandemic much stronger at the back end of it,” he reiterated. (JH)
