Column: Minister On Cost Of Living & More
[Opinion column written by Minister Alexa Lightbourne]
On Friday 17 July, the House of Assembly debated the Cost of Living Commission Amendment Bill, legislation that requires a business to give written notice before raising the price of an essential commodity by five per cent or more within a year. The Opposition spent the day warning the country against it. Then the clauses came before the committee, and they objected to none of them.
The cost of living is the number one issue in this country. Members on both sides named it as such on the floor of the House. It filled the doorstep conversations of the 2025 General Election in every parish. It lives in the trolley arithmetic at the checkout, in the pause before a light bill is opened, and in the plans a family shelves for one more year. The people required their Government to act on it, and they sent us to Parliament to deliver relief and to prove that it arrives.
The bill gives the Cost of Living Commission investigative powers that carry weight. It requires written notice of significant price increases on essential goods, and it leaves temporary sales and specials alone. It expands the public price database, so families can compare essentials before leaving home. A business that disputes a decision holds a right of appeal to the Supreme Court, and inspectors come from frameworks that already exist under the Consumer Protection Act. A statute written in 1974 becomes an instrument fit for the Bermuda of 2026.
The Cost of Living Commission has done the work of understanding first, sitting with grocers to learn how a price is built before it reaches a family’s basket. Over successive years, the Government has provided approximately $40 million in duty relief on essential goods, and 198 tariff lines now carry low or zero duty. Fuel duty on electricity generation is phasing to zero, worth approximately $375 a year to a household. Each measure widened the essential goods that carry relief, and this bill broadens the definition again to reach the critical services of shipping, wholesale, and retail food that decide the shelf price. Duty relief is public money in another form. A Government that forgoes revenue so prices can fall owes the public proof that prices fell. The evidence before the House says too much of that relief stalled between the dock and the shelf. Relief must reach the register to count.
Weigh what the Opposition brought to the debate. They warned of layoffs, of burden, and of businesses they described as “quite scared.” They asked why a Minister may adjust the notice threshold, and the answer is the ordinary one: powers exercised under statute answer to Parliament, and Ministers answer to the public. Then clauses one to twenty came before the committee, and a full day of alarm produced not a single objection. That is the record of the day.
They offered limited ways to strengthen legislation that saw no change under their watch: a statute they neither evolved nor repealed in office, and one this Government has now amended in a single session.
The debate also turned outward. Members observed that Bermuda buys its goods across long supply chains, and that closer Caribbean sourcing could bring real relief once a shipping route exists to carry it. Set this bill beside the region’s answers and the alarm loses its footing. The Bahamas maintains statutory price control on a breadbasket of household staples. Jamaica’s consumer authority publishes supermarket price surveys so families can compare before they spend. Bermuda’s bill asks a business to give notice and to share information, which places us at the measured end of the regional spectrum.
The Opposition’s hollow reply has one feature: it asks families to wait instead of building the infrastructure of transparency. Legislation that shines light on the cost of living should draw support from every bench. At the top of the parliamentary session, they advocated for transparency and accountability, but when presented with a structure to shine the light on the number one issue impacting Bermudians, they said no.
Bermuda has run this experiment for years. Strip away the speeches, and the Opposition’s instruction to Government comes to this: do nothing that requires anyone to explain a price.
Doing nothing is the most expensive policy on the table. Families pay for it weekly, and that is the shame of it.
The Ministry, with support from the Cost of Living Commission, will sit with small business operators on implementation. The Commission will publish what it finds and who is supporting the effort, and it will answer for what is found.
This legislation faces a single test: whether the price of living in Bermuda becomes easier to see, easier to question, and harder to raise without answer. Warnings from the sidelines cost nothing and change nothing, and the country’s defining issue deserves representatives in Parliament prepared to act, a Commission equipped to ask, and a Government willing to be measured by the result. On Friday, one side of the House stood up for that work. The other side, many of them duly elected to confront the number one challenge in Bermuda, objected to the light.
- Alexa Lightbourne is the Minister of Home Affairs
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