As the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) continues recruitment to build a permanent team, the Government will next week sign a co-funding agreement with the United Kingdom to source technical experts to beef up the authority’s delivery capacity, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness disclosed on Tuesday.

Speaking at a special press briefing at Jamaica House in St Andrew on the eve of Hurricane Melissa’s anniversary, Holness said the contract will be signed at next week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua.

“Under this arrangement Jamaica and the United Kingdom will co-fund, on a 50/50 basis, the cost of deploying technical expertise from three firms
— Arup Limited, Mace Limited, and Gleeds International Limited which formed the UK delivery team supporting Peru’s highly successful reconstruction programme following the devastating 2017 El Nino floods that affected that country,” Holness told the briefing.

He said earlier this year, a delegation of Government officials, led by Works Minister Robert Morgan, visited Peru to see first hand the infrastructure delivered by the UK team and examine the methods used to accelerate reconstruction.

Holness said drawing on specialists with directly relevant reconstruction experience is the fastest way to strengthen NaRRA’s delivery capacity while the permanent team is being built.

“They will work alongside Jamaican professionals with capacity building and knowledge transfer built into the arrangement. Our objective is to get projects moving faster now while equipping Jamaicans with the skills and systems to lead delivery over the long term,” the prime minister said, noting that NaRRA’s principal focus is reconstruction and resilience while other responsible ministries, departments and agencies continue to deliver immediate relief and household recovery assistance.

“So, matters like repair of roofs, etcetera, are not under the remit of NaRRA. There has been a false narrative suggesting that NaRRA will undertake recovery efforts. NaRRA was never designed to do that. NaRRA is designed to reconstruct better infrastructure and systems that will allow us to withstand the next disaster that may come so that another generation doesn’t have to go back and start again, that is not a simple effort,” the prime minister stated.

He emphasised that NaRRA’s mandate necessitates speed which, he stressed, is not an attempt to flout fiscal rules.

“It is also designed not to burden an already dense and slow moving bureaucracy which still has work to do, still has projects to deliver, and that is why it is given a separate legislation with separate authority that is not cluttered so that it can deliver these things very quickly. It is also designed to spend quickly, because in the discussions there is a view that we only want to move fast and that we only want to break the rules and do things without proper oversight. If we had built 10 per cent of what we are building today in terms of road infrastructure, water infrastructure, if we had built it five years ago it would cost us, in some instances, 50 per cent less,” Holness argued.

The prime minister
— who said he has appraised several projects from development to implementation which have taken years to complete because they have been “trapped in permitting, investment appraisals, contracting” resulting in costs being doubled by implementation
— was at pains to point out that decisive action is needed to prevent this.

“It is highly frustrating and I am telling you we are going to change it, and so NaRRA is designed to move at pace; get these things built quickly. It saves us more than any savings that we get from the bureaucracy we put in place but we also have a limited window in which we can change our fiscal rules to accommodate extra expenditure. So within that envelope of the change in our fiscal rules to allow for greater expenditure we want to actually get the expenditure done within the time we say we are suspending the fiscal rules. So we have to move fast, we cannot tolerate delay. So we want the best people, the most capable people in NaRRA to deliver these projects,” he stated.