Gov’t to Ensure Greater Spend of Capital Expenditure

Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke, says the Government will be implementing measures to ensure greater spend of Capital Expenditure (CapEx) in the upcoming fiscal year.

Dr. Clarke, who was addressing the sitting of the Standing Finance Committee of the House of Representatives on Tuesday (March 5), said that the projects that fell behind in the 2023/24 fiscal year were primarily due to private-sector entities that were selected through the procurement process being unable to fulfil their obligations.

Dr. Clarke noted that in “a couple of cases” entities were not able to post the bonds required “which means that we have to do the procurement all over”.

“In other cases, there was failure in terms of response to the procurement, that is, the responses don’t meet the criteria and the procurement, therefore, fails and has to be redone,” he added.

He said that in addition to making some changes to the procurement processes, the primary measure that the Government will take is to “try to be in a position where we have more projects available than budgeted capacity “so that if something is falling behind, we can rotate to something else”.

He noted that capital expenditure and public investment have the capacity to improve the quality of life of Jamaicans.

“The country runs the risk of falling behind if we cannot grow and execute on our CapEx at a required rate,” he emphasised.