The Minister of Labour and Immigration Honourable Vincent Wheatley is expected to update the territory this week on the new measures that will be implemented in the Department of Labour and Workforce Development following the recent deliberations to address the work permit issues.
This is according to the Premier Honourable Andrew Fahie who made the comments during a recent press conference.
While expressing that he did not want to steal the spotlight from the Labour minister, Premier Fahie assured residents that the existing backlog of work permit renewals should be fully cleared by mid-April 2022.
He said, “The minister of labour I know for sure between the middle of next week I think it is, will be giving an update. One thing I know that I can say to the public that he has discussed with us as a government and we put in place is to make sure that all the backlog of renewals is cleared up in a months’ time.”
“But there are many other measures that he will be mentioning,” he added.
Following a stakeholders meeting which was held in February to discuss the work permit issue in the BVI, a decision was made to revert back to manually processing work permit applications.
At the time of the meeting, Labour Commissioner Ms. Michelle Mclean revealed that there was a backlog of some 2,064 work permit applications that needed to be processed.
She said since the new Online Work Permit system was implemented, it received a total of 5,466 applications, with 3546 renewals and 1573 new applications.
Of the renewals, she said 2005 were processed while 1050 of the new applications were also processed.
Also to note, there were 347 temporary/entertainment/emergency work permits which McLean said had all been processed.