The shadow finance minister has accused the Government of putting all of its eggs in one basket and said that small business needs more help than the international sector.

“I say that as someone who works in international business, like many Bermudians,” Douglas De Couto said.

The One Bermuda Alliance MP added: “The biggest disappointment with the Government’s latest Budget is not so much what is in it but what is not in there.

“If you are a retailer, or a small-business owner, there is not much in there for you.”

He spoke to The Royal Gazette after the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce’s Budget Breakfast held at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

The annual event is a forum to discuss the Government’s latest Budget.

Dr De Couto said that local businesses had to put a lot of cash up front to pay duty on the items they imported.

“Many of these businesses would hugely benefit from duty cuts or deferments, to help them with the cashflow to keep their doors open,” he said.

Dr De Couto called Bermuda’s shrinking population size, the “elephant in the room”.

He said that many local entrepreneurs depended on the size of the population to sustain their businesses.

“They live and die on cashflow,” he said.

Bermuda’s population is declining and ageing according to Bermuda’s Population Projections 2016 to 2026, a report from the Department of Statistics, released in 2022.

Next year, people over 65 will represent nearly a quarter of the island’s population.

Dr De Couto said that while David Burt, the Premier and Minister of Finance, spoke on the topic at the Budget Breakfast, there was no meaningful reform around the issue.

“How do we get more people living and working here?” the shadow minister asked.

“Where is the vision that will get young people, who are studying overseas, to want to come back and work on the island?”

During the event, the Premier was asked what measures were being taken to increase the population.

Mr Burt said: “The issue is not the amount of people in the country. The important thing is the number of jobs in the country to support the amount of people in the country.”

He said that with the demographic shifts happening in Bermuda, there was a need for more imported labour.

“It is good to have a 1.6 per cent unemployment rate, but it scares me,” Mr Burt told Budget Breakfast attendees.

“That just portends wage inflation, which is not something good for the long-term health of an economy.

“We want to make sure we have a good supply of labour.”

Mr Burt said that to do this a significant amount of money was going into training and retraining programmes as well as apprenticeships.

He said the Budget, the Progressive Labour Party’s eighth since returning to power in 2017, heralded an end to austerity and a turning point for the island’s finances.