UNC scoffs at MORI poll

OPPOSITION Senator Wade Mark has scoffed at the results of a $2.5 million opinion survey done for the Government by UK polling firm, Market Opinion Research International (MORI), on the delivery of public services. Minister of Public Administration, Dr Lenny Saith, presented the findings in the Senate on Tuesday. The untendered, three-year poll claimed 88 percent of the population feel safe, 63 percent think Vision 2020 will be achieved, and 81 percent are satisfied with TTEC.

But Mark dismissed the results as outlandish. He scoffed at the poll’s claim that 88 percent of the population feel safe. “This is unbelievable!” He said Trinidad and Tobago was known as the world’s kidnapping capital after Colombia, and that our murder rate was out of control. “Yet MORI is paid $2.5 million to tell Trinidad and Tobago that the Government is performing well?!” he said incredulously. Mark was concerned that MORI had seemed to have not actually done the survey, but had on the document cited a group, HHV and Associates. The poll results themselves, Mark said,  had inherent contradictions.

For example, he asked, how could 57 percent of people feel satisfied with our democracy, while the same survey reported people saying that “a great deal” was to be done to improve our governance. Mark queried how much the survey stuck to its theme of the delivery of public services. Noting that the survey asked what percentage of the population felt satisfied with the Government’s performance, Mark hit: “What’s that got to do with public sector reform?” Similarly he wondered how did a question on “election pledges” pertain to the issue of public service reform. Mark noted that prior to conducting this study from 2002 to 2005, MORI head, Robert Worcester, had visited Trinidad to work for the PNM in the 2002 general elections.