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1000 graduate placements per year could drive change in public sector

Issued : Wednesday 21 July, 2010

Speaking at the MacGill Summer school

We need public services which are cost effective

Every cent of public expenditure must be seen to deliver value to the hard pressed tax payers who ultimately fund the Public Service. Public services must be accountable to a level never seen before. This is essential if we are to begin to rebuild trust in government.

Public Services must be innovative if we are to find solutions to the myriad of challenges facing the State. Public Sector Modernisation is a necessity and must form a central plank of any strategy to rebuild and renew not only the economy, but this great Republic.

Labour believes Government to be a positive force for the common good.

Labour views Government as a means of creating the overarching framework which supports the development of a caring and compassionate society; one which provides a safety net in tough times and a help on the ladder of social mobility at all times.

Paradoxically this means that Labour has a far greater interest in public sector reform and modernization than any other party. We argue that Government and the public service are part of the solution. This places a certain onus upon us. Government matters, now more than ever.

There is no room in a crisis for the continuation of the "business as usual" paradigm. This applies to politics, the private sector and in the delivery of public services. We all need to raise the level of our game.

We fully support the principles of the Croke Park agreement and the desire to provide a framework within which greater efficiency in delivering for the citizen can be secured.

The restoration of trust can provide a basis for confidence about pay levels and security of employment in the Public Service for the future. The devil of course is in the detail and it is implementation of the agreement which will prove whether the principles are brought to life or not.

In 2010 Government in Ireland will spend approx €58bn, of which approx €22bn will be borrowed; roughly 35% of Government current expenditures will be on the salaries and pensions of the 360,000 people who work in the approx 572 Departments and Agencies. (I say approximately because nobody knows for sure how many there are).

Government in Ireland is big, complex, and its mission is critical to each and every citizen of this country. Government in Ireland is the largest, the most complex business in the country. Not only does it provide services for its citizens it also provides the vital framework of laws and regulations without which Business and indeed civil society could not function. But...

We must accept that failures in the public service and in particular in those Agencies regulating Financial Services were a contributory factor to the financial crisis which has nearly destroyed our banking system. We didn't have light touch regulation, we had no touch regulation. This allowed the development of a fiscal tapeworm that was, and is Anglo-Irish bank.

At the foundation of the State we inherited a civil service free of corruption, an inheritance which made the task of nation building much easier than it might otherwise have been. The quality and commitment of Ireland's civil service also played a vital role in laying the foundations of Ireland's economic transformation.

But now the problems facing the public service tend to be problems of systems failures rather than poor quality of personnel. We are fortunate to have a public service staffed by people with talent, imagination and commitment. But the system too often ignores the talent, stifles the imagination and does not value the commitment of its staff.

Over time it has grown in response to public demand, or public need, taking over functions from the church, from the family, and indeed inventing functions never seen before. In doing so it has adapted to changing demands by creating new Departments and Agencies and adapting old ones. In the words of one senior civil servant "if you wanted to design a Government from scratch you would not end up with what we have now".

There is absolutely no doubt that the quality of service in Ireland has improved in many areas. One of the main aims of the public service Modernisation Programme has been to improve the quality of public service.

There have been many successes - notably the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social and Family Affairs, (Social Protection), the Passport Office (notwithstanding more recent difficulties), the Department of Agriculture and Food, the Motor Taxation Department of Dublin City Council.

But Government is not just about service delivery to the public; it is also about the delivery of services within Government such as procurement, financials, payroll, expenses, HR and IT. These services need to be delivered effectively and cost efficiently.

There is strong evidence that this is not the case. Take the issue of HR, the standard ratio of HR to staff in a moderately efficient private sector company is 1:35, in some companies this can be as low as 1:200. In the Irish Public Service this can be as high as 1: 19.

One complaint is often voiced by both the general public and civil servants and that is the lack of joined up Government, or joined up thinking within Government. This is due quite simply to the fact that Government is very poor at internal communication. It is very difficult to get effective co-operation between Government departments. And when two or more Government departments are gathered together things tend not to happen. I always thought the word "silo" was a purely agricultural term. Government Departments are prone to the "silo effect".

This effect is described as the "lack of communication and common goals between departments in an organisation. It is the opposite of "systems thinking" in an organisation. The silo effect gets its name from the farm storage silo; each silo is designated for one specific grain. It is separate and distinct within the organisation. So, a lack of communication causes departmental thinking to lack ideas from other departments. Communication is against the rules.

Maybe it is time to re-think the organizational structures and think more laterally about how we can modernise them. But Modernisation is prone to what we regard as the "law of unintended consequences" In Ireland we have the example of the Freedom of Information Act - which was a response to the fact that if questions had been answered properly in the Dail, there would have been no need for the hugely expensive Beef tribunal.

While Civil Servants may complain about having to act as research assistants for journalists, and politicians may frown at the release of information on expenses, there has been one very real and serious unintended consequence, that is, many important decisions are now not documented - or are documented as post notes on the file - not in the file.

Historians are now worried that an Act designed to very properly open decision making to the public gaze may in fact have the very opposite effect. As Civil Servants and politicians have refrained from creating a paper trail we may not know in fact how or why certain sensitive decisions were made.

For example will we ever really know what advice officials in the Department of Finance gave to Finance Ministers over the last few years if they did so mindful of later public scrutiny. Public sector transformation is also not easy given the nature of the public service, which is, contrary to public perceptions or political fantasies, a consensus driven entity not a command and control one.

The popular view is that the Taoiseach is rather like Jean Luc Picard on board the Star Ship Enterprise. All he has to say is "engage" and Mr Lenihan and the whole of Government swiftly turns and speeds in the right direction. In point of fact Government much more resembles that old TV series Battle Star Galactica. Departments and Agencies are like a fleet of battered ships, ranging from the most modern to the most decrepit, moving at vastly different speeds, but hopefully in the same direction.

Let me try and make what I have to say somewhat more tangible by giving a practical case study. The General Register's Office is the Government body charged with the important task of registering births deaths and marriages. It was decentralized to Roscommon by Albert Reynolds for the eminently logical reason that Albert had promised xx number of jobs to Roscommon and when they looked through all the central government departments and agencies only the GRO had exactly that number of jobs. There was general agreement that the Agency needed some modernization before being sent to Roscommon.

This was mainly because the queues in the GRO office in Lombard St were measured not by how long the queue was in the building but by how close the end of the queue was to Mahaffy's pub. One reason why the queue was so long was because a huge number of people had to get birth certs to bring to social welfare to claim child benefit or passports. People had to queue to get a piece of paper from one Government Agency to hand to another Government agency.

The second reason for the queues, was that the legislation meant that every birth cert had to be written out by hand. If you wanted a number of copies a clerk had to go to the original register and copy down the details by hand and then make the requisite number of copies by hand. This legislation dated back to 1864.

Reforming the GRO meant changes in primary legislation, the implementation of an IT system, and major changes in work practices. It was not without its hiccups. The computer system was designed to use 24 characters to record a name, which you would think, would be long enough for most names. But not in Cork. One Cork soccer fan wanted to call his son after the names of the entire Liverpool football team, so the system had to be redesigned.

All that effort was required for just one Agency. So you can now begin to appreciate the mammoth task required to transform the way the public service operates. The Government claims to have ambitious plans for the transformation of the public service, and it has a website to prove it.

For a start it intends to bring in a number of very highly paid professionals from the private sector. I'm not sure that parachuting private sector experts into the unfamiliar territory of the Irish public sector will in fact facilitate change.

The people who know where the problems are - and what the solutions are- are already in the service. We need to empower public service leaders to lead, to take risks and drive change. We need to punish inertia more than risk taking.

That said Public Service leaders also need to understand that bonus's are a reward for achievement not just for turning up on the day. If we are to really drive public sector reform I believe we need to think big, start small and scale fast.

Think Big- we need to have a vision for the public service that inspires people in the service and commands the respect of people outside it. Ireland should aim to have a world class public service and that the Irish people know when they hand over their taxes they are getting value for money.

Start small- the nature and the range of public services is so great that we cannot reform everything at once. We need to pick a number of areas and start reform projects. Those that are working, we scale them quickly. These that aren't, we kill them quickly.

One of the biggest problems in public sector reform is that people try to save dumb ideas because they think they have spent too much on them to let them die. PPARs is the classic example.

Scale Fast -the projects that are working, put the resources into them and grow them fast.

Public Sector Reform is like a Munster Hurling Final, you always take your points. You don't wait for the big goal. There is still too much ad-hocory in the way we develop the career paths of civil servants. One thousand third level graduates per annum incorporated into the Public Sector would drive this change in the long run.

Finally we must all acknowledge that asking people to change when you have cut their salaries, cut the funding for their Departments and Agencies and sent out your spin doctors to paint workers in the public service in a derogatory light, is a big ask.

If we want change in the public sector we must start with political change not just a new government but a new way of doing politics. The real hope we have for change is that public servants do not like waste. They do want to do a good job and have ideas on how things can be improved. We as Politicians and public servants need to remember that we exist to serve the public and that the "business as usual" paradigm is no longer good enough.