Watts gets more responsibilities in latest ministerial adjustment

Akash Sama­roo

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has made an­oth­er ad­just­ment to min­is­te­r­i­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, trans­fer­ring four ma­jor skills and vo­ca­tion­al train­ing agen­cies from Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing Min­is­ter Prakash Per­sad to Sport and Youth Af­fairs Min­is­ter Phillip Watts.

In a let­ter dat­ed Oc­to­ber 6 to Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo, Per­sad-Bisses­sar ad­vised that the changes are to take ef­fect retroac­tive­ly from Oc­to­ber 1.

Watts will now have re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC), the Trinidad and To­ba­go Hos­pi­tal­i­ty and Tourism In­sti­tute (TTHTI), Met­al In­dus­tries Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (MIC) Gov­ern­ment Vo­ca­tion­al Cen­tre, and the Youth Train­ing and Em­ploy­ment Part­ner­ship Pro­gramme Lim­it­ed (YTEPP).

Those agen­cies will con­se­quent­ly be re­moved from Per­sad's port­fo­lio.

The move comes just days af­ter the Prime Min­is­ter car­ried out a broad­er re­align­ment of re­spon­si­bil­i­ties across her Cab­i­net, which took ef­fect on Sep­tem­ber 30. That ex­er­cise shift­ed sev­er­al gov­ern­ment pro­grammes, state en­ter­pris­es and func­tions among min­is­ters.

As part of that ear­li­er shake up, Per­sad al­so lost re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the On-the-Job Train­ing Pro­gramme, which was trans­ferred to Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath.

Per­sad sub­se­quent­ly said he was un­both­ered by that change, stress­ing that Cab­i­net op­er­ates as a team and that work on OJT would be passed on to Padarath.

The lat­est ad­just­ment means sev­er­al in­sti­tu­tions di­rect­ly in­volved in tech­ni­cal and vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion and skills de­vel­op­ment will now fall un­der Watts, whose sub­stan­tive port­fo­lio re­mains Sport and Youth Af­fairs.

NESC, for ex­am­ple, pro­vides tech­ni­cal train­ing in ar­eas in­clud­ing en­er­gy, con­struc­tion, au­to­mo­tive, plant op­er­a­tions and main­te­nance and oth­er skilled trades.