Symmonds: Poor business standards threaten competitiveness

P oor business standards risk damaging Barbados’ reputation and limiting its ability to compete internationally, Business Development Minister Kerrie Symmonds has warned, calling for stronger regulation and greater attention to safety and service quality. At the launch of a Standards Sector Project workshop at UWI on Thursday, Symmonds said the country would have no footing to compete with larger economies unless businesses improved their operating standards. “I hate to have to keep saying this publicly, but in many things that we do our standards are unsatisfactory,” he told representatives from the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries, the Barbados Employers’ Confederation, the Technical and Vocational Training (TVET) Council and other organisations. Participants in the Standards Sector Project workshop.

(Photo Credit: Lourianne Graham/Barbados TODAY) Symmonds said Barbados, as a small island developing state, could not compete with larger economies on scale. He said, “Our competition, such as it is, has to be along the basis of credibility or efficiency and quality with which we do things, and that quality, efficiency, and credibility combination really and truly is the bedrock of that upon which we compete with the rest of the world. ” Standards were particularly important because Barbados and much of the Caribbean had long relied on services as a major part of their economies, he said. Symmonds argued that service providers needed to meet an acceptable minimum standard to ensure consumers received value for money. “When we’re talking about services, then we expect that the quality of that which we are offering to people who are our consumers must be aligned with a certain best practice, a certain acceptable bar beneath which nobody should operate. “And if we…