He confirmed that the system had been severely abused, with people collect salaries without even going to work.
"The URP had become a voters' bank for the past PNM administration and what I had been attempting to do was dismantle the vestiges of that voters' bank without necessarily affecting adversely those persons who have been depending on it for a means of livelihood," he said.
However he said he was uncomfortable with firing all the "PNM people" and replacing them with supporters of the People's Partnership.
The day before the paper reported comments from Arts and Multiculturalism Minister Winston "Gypsy" Peters who had raised the political issue about the URP with colleagues in the government. Peters alsos suggested that tyhe URP needs to be restructured and better managed.
McLeod told the paper doing that like "pulling teeth", noting that it requires more than firing and hiring.
"Even as you move to break up the bad habits to dismiss the malpractice and the malfeasance inside the program, you have to consider you are dealing with people, you are dealing with workers," McLeod said.
"I thought that it will be ridiculous for us to just throw out all of the people in the program and bring on those people who we sometimes very enthusiastically claim to be our supporters...without examining the structure, the practices in the systems and so on. That would have facilitated all of the malpractice that went on and would really have been wasting time," the Express quoted the minister as saying.
McLeod confirmed that over the past six months there has been a 27 per cent increase in persons under the URP, bringing the workforce to 19,300. The invement in the program has been $408 million, with $19 million for URP in Tobago, he said.
He said there is now a template on which to build and to ensure the URP is returned to the program's founding principles.
"The URP program is supposed to lend some kind of relief, all of those persons ought to be considered. Whether they be my supporter or yours, the fact is that they are citizens, nationals of this country, who are sometimes considered unable to do otherwise and to the extent that the URP can assist them, that is what we must do," he said.
Rudy Indarsingh, who took up his new position as a junior labour minister Monday, now has responsibility for the URP. However McLeod noted that he still has oversight. He asked people waiting for URP work not to give up hope.
"Patience is all that I ask at this time," he said. "I know that there are people who desperately need this thing but I also know that such people are going to exercise some patience as they subscribe to decency and fairness and equity and these principles ought not to have any political qualification."
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