The announcement by the Ministry of Finance about reducing staff numbers should not be a surprise to anyone, especially the members of the unions and civil service. The unions worked hard for the small predetermined wage increase, where I hope they had started the process of preparing their membership for the inevitable re-training.

Maybe this was included in their negotiations with the Government; we don’t know. It would have been good to hear from the Government some indication of what they had in mind for the thousands of people who will be leaving their employment, who will continue to need a pay cheque, having not yet reached retirement age.

The strategy of government is always predictable: To pick the lowest-hanging fruit, namely early retirement, and not renewing contracts of others is not always good, because these include people with the most expertise. Younger personnel will end up doing more without the benefit of mentors.

Rationalisation and risk assessment will have to be done by the Government, which may include bringing us back to unions and re-training. Not everyone released will be able to be absorbed in the system. The hope of the redundancy exercise is for the Government to become more efficient in its operations and actually do more with less.

The result: Thousands of civil servants will be entering a chaotic and anaemic job market, a jungle where the existing unemployed find the going tough. They will be competing with new and old college graduates who have not yet migrated, or got jobs in their field.

Government will have the responsibility of facilitator to create economic growth by creating an environment to nurture business opportunities. They can do this by providing accurate and timely information for the population, and these cannot be political party loyalists, but all Jamaicans.

Already we are headed into the BPO human resource glut of overqualified staff. I had the opportunity to speak with a young man at one such facility, who graduated with a degree in the building industry and was not able to find a job in his field. I thought to myself that this person was answering phones for a businessplace while we are experiencing a desperate shortage of housing which may not be satisfied for decades, a built environment lacking in civic and public architecture, and a government financing entity — the National Housing Trust — which has so much money that it can buy cheese. We need these young professionals in the construction industry, not at BPOs or as bellhops, busboys or housekeeping personnel in new hotels.

I strongly recommend the Government looks about the environment in which the public, especially those recently made redundant, will have to operate. The people need a level playing field so they can look about their affairs without the dead weight of the Government around their necks. It is of note that there are several areas in dire need of personnel and systems to create an growing economic environment, such as housing and the built environment. These require a framework in which all professionals can operate.

A national spatial plan generated by a government town planner is now a critical element of the environment needed to restart the Jamaican economic environment. Ad hoc and random implementation of various aspects of the built environment will lead to anaemic growth and will not fix the current bad economic situation. It is time we sit down to plan with a view to execute. Unfortunately a lot of politicians think things happen because they say so. They are wrong. Things happen when they have been properly planned, and things are in place for them to happen.

Many have embarked on building expeditions without the requisite planning, approval, or infrastructure in place to make their venture successful. They wonder why these things are failures; they fail because they were built with no support in place, ie inadequate planning.

I hope we will see an increase in inclusion and intelligence in the political sphere going forward, and a dedicated government town planner to make this critical part of our economic recovery work.

Hugh M Dunbar is an architect. Send comments to the Observer or to hmdenergy@gmail.com.