Member of the People’s National Party (PNP) debate team, Raymond Pryce slammed the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) on Saturday over what he described as the under-regulation of the country’s funeral home sector.

Responding to a question on how the two political parties plan to formalise the industry at Saturday night’s election debates, Pryce claimed that the issue with the the funeral sector first came to light during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was misinformation on whether the virus could be contracted during a post-mortem examination.

“That process opened the potential, (or) the possibility for any administration in office to have formalised and put in place structures and protocols that would have given ease to the professionals working in the industry, and the family members of the deceased,” Pryce argued.

“What now needs to happen is for a recognition that this is a sector that is a critical part of the Jamaican social space – an adjunct, if you will, of public health, and the utter absence of any form of regulation, despite nine years of unbroken representation by the Jamaica Labour Party as the head of government, is yet another indication of people who claim to know what they are doing but still, at the end of a ninth year going into a tenth year, are having difficulties with a manifesto, to explain not only what they have done in the past but what they intend to do in the future,” he added.

According to Pryce, the PNP guarantees that the regulations for funeral homes will be implemented should it form the next government.

But Cabinet Minister Matthew Samuda dismissed Pryce’s assertion that the issue regarding the lack of regulation for the funeral homes sector came to light under the JLP Administration.

He suggested that it came to light in 2014 “when the funeral homes with contracts with the government for paupers’ burials were not being paid”.

Samuda explained: “The reality is the sector is indeed lacking sufficient regulation; however, we (the JLP) have moved forward to bring the Ministry of National Security and the Ministry of Health to form a working group to address this very issue.”

Noting that there are many elements to the issue, Samuda said the funeral home industry was operating without a proper public autopsy suite.

“This government, under Horace Chang’s leadership at the Ministry of National Security, built the first public autopsy suite at a cost of $700 million, clearing one element that creates a significant backlog in this area,” Samuda stated.

He also issued a scathing broadside at the PNP for having no credibility in managing the island’s healthcare sector, pointing to the PNP’s mismanagement of Chikungunya virus and vector management.