Opposition Leader Mark Golding has described Finance Minister Fayval Williams’ claim that the People’s National Party’s (PNP) 2025/2026 budget proposal would be a FINSAC 2.0 as political gimmickry designed to undermine the credibility of his presentation.

Golding explained that his team took the opportunity to present proposals aimed at making Jamaica a better place for all. “[Our proposal aimed] to encourage economic growth, moving from the stagnation which has been a feature of this government’s management of the economy—moving to higher levels of growth that can create more wealth for our people and create more fiscal space for social investments and for infrastructure investments,” he said.

Golding added: “We have gone through our proposals with care and attention and diligence. We’ve used the available data from the sources that are publicly known, the budget books and the fiscal policy paper and other instruments that have been tabled through the budget and other available information to analyse the costing of our proposals and how we would be able to pay for them.

“The minister tried to make out that what we were proposing in our presentations was an implied budget. That is not what we were doing, and we never said that we were doing that. We were putting forward our policy commitment for the first term, and a term of office is up to five years while we are in government.”

How the PNP budget proposal 2025/26 will be funded

Golding outlined that the PNP has a series of ideas, some of which will be paid for out of the budget each year, and others will be paid for by the agencies which have the responsibility for those particular items. 

“The totality of the budget cost of our proposals based on our estimates is $23 billion annually, assuming that everything was rolled out from day one. That does not include the $11.4 billion, which the law has as ending the extraction of $11.4 billion from the National Housing Trust (NHT)—this coming fiscal year,” he said.

The year ending March 2026 is by law currently the last year that these annual extractions of resources from NHT are allowed and authorised, Golding expressed.

He underscored that his party assumed that the $11.4 billion from the NHT would not be extended. “In the event we do not intend to extend it. The government hasn’t said what their position on that is, but the society as a whole, I believe, is not in favour of any further extraction of resources from the NHT to fund a budget, so we will be putting an end to that.”

Golding further outlined how the PNP plans to fund the $23 billion in expenditures from their programmes.

“We have to comply with the fiscal rules, and the phasing and timing of the implementation of our proposals will be subject to compliance with those things. The $360 billion budget tabled by the Andrew Holness government will be reconfigured, and we will go through it very carefully line by line to decide what programmes we will keep, what programmes we will scale down, what programmes we might discontinue altogether and what programmes we might defer so as to create room for the $23 billion that we want to roll out of that $360 billion,” he added.

He expressed that the finance minister’s statement was nothing but a ploy to distract citizens from the PNP’s policies. “This whole nonsense that our proposals are not credible, that our proposals cannot be financed; this idea of FINSAC, which is just a bogeyman being raised by the minister of finance for political purposes; that is all nonsense, nth nuh go so. Our plans are credible, and we will ensure that the fiscal rules are complied with,” Golding said.

The PNP has been haunted by the FINSAC debacle that spawned from the economic meltdown of the mid-1990s as its policies are believed to have led to the disastrous occurrence that saw many companies folding and Jamaicans ending up in dire financial straits.