Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar believes the 2025/2026 fiscal package will be a “very good budget.”
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday evening, she said the government has been working late into the night reviewing plans and refining priorities for the upcoming 2025/2026 budget presentation.
“We’re very hard at work with that budget, and you’ll be surprised, I think we have a very good budget. We will have a very good budget. Some new innovative things to diversify the economy.”
The Prime Minister explained that the government is still fine-tuning plans.
“So we went through last night with Minister Swaratsingh, the PSIP development programme. There are several things in there we added, we took out. So we’re still working on that. With respect to recurrent expenditure, today I shared with Ministers the first draft of the recurrent expenditure for them to look to see where they want to put a priority.”
She stated that her government’s promise of creating new employment opportunities is on the agenda, along with revenue generation.
One of the standout initiatives is a new push for sports tourism, which the Prime Minister said has the potential to bring international visitors to Trinidad and Tobago, not just for sun, sea and sand, but for cricket on the beach.
“The Minister of Sports has a brilliant idea. I shared it with the Minister of Planning last night to put a line item there for sports tourism, and the Minister of Sports has shared with me that there are persons interested in coming to Trinidad and Tobago to play cricket on the beach. So in addition to enjoying the tropical climate and all the beautiful islands, sun and sand and sea, they could play cricket as well.”
Mrs. Persad-Bissessar said the government is committed to creating employment opportunities.
“In my last watch we created over 50,000 new jobs. My plan is to make sure in this budget coming that we do have some mechanisms for jobs and of course, revenue generation. We also have some innovative projects for getting more revenue streams. That has been our problem. We have relied solely on the oil and gas. Of course we will still take the goodness that God gave us out of the earth, the oil and gas but we must also have other streams of revenue. Apart from that, we have many, many proposals that we are still finalising.”
So far, no date has been given for the budget presentation but the Prime Minister has indicated that it would be in early October.