EDITORIAL - Get on with it, Mr Golding

We had feared that Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his administration might have gone cold on, if not totally abandoned, the idea of reforming the public sector. It is difficult business.

Thankfully, Dr Wykeham McNeill's Public Administration and Appropriations Committee has been keeping the issue alive with its public hearings on the issue.

Hopefully, therefore, Prime Minister Golding did not ignore an earlier intervention by the former Cabinet secretary, Dr Carlton Davis. Perchance Dr Davis' suggestion missed the PM, the one last week by Patricia Sinclair McCalla, head of the Public Sector Transformation Unit, should not have.

She, like Dr Davis, wants a reform of the civil service pension arrangements, as well as leave entitlement, as part of the effort to bring control to government spending and rein in the fiscal deficit.

In the budget for the current fiscal year, the Golding administration earmarked $127 billion to pay the wages and salaries of public-sector employees, such as civil servants, teachers and nurses. That sum does not cover the 7.5 per cent in wage hikes owed to public government employees.

Pension bill

But more significantly, the declared wage bill does not include the extra $15 billion in annual pension payments to retired public sector employees, to which these state-paid workers do not contribute. It is a straight annual budgetary allocation.

Unfortunately, the administration has not, in recent times, issued a medium- to long-term projection of its pension bill, but it has increasingly become clear that, like that for current wages and salaries, it is unsustainable.

The current pressures on the National Insurance Scheme ought to be a guide. And the situation will only get worse. Life expectancy in Jamaica is already at developed world levels and we are expected to continue.

One lucid proposal for addressing the Government's pension problem is to ask public-sector employees to contribute to their retirement incomes, the way people in the private sector have to do. At the same time, the generous leave entitlements enjoyed by civil servants should be cut.

Mrs Sinclair McCalla apparently does not believe that these are difficult fixes, except that Jamaican governments have not been able to muster the will to do anything about them. Indeed, the matter of public pension reform has been on the agenda for years.

Policy decision needed

"What it needs is a policy decision by the Cabinet to move the process forward in terms of these critical issues," Mrs Sinclair McCalla told Dr McNeill's committee.

If Prime Minister Golding feels disinclined to respond to the prodding of a former Cabinet secretary and the current head of his transformations, we propose to him the efforts of the Tory-Liberal-Democrats coalition government in Britain.

Hard on the heels of the report by Lord Hutton urging pension reform, George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, outlined a medium-term spending plan that will likely see public-sector workers contribute up to three per cent on pension payment - from around six per cent at present. The plan is to also equalise the pensionable age for men and women to 65 and then lift it to 66. If that wasn't enough, Britain expects to cut 490,000 public-sector jobs over four years.

Whatever you think about Mr Osborne and his boss, Mr David Cameron, they are showing bottle. We could use some here.

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