I move:
That a supplementary sum not exceeding £26,266,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of December 1980, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, and of certain other services administered by that Office, and for payment of certain grants-in-aid.
My Department's original Estimate for 1980 was for a net sum of £234.864 million. This Supplementary Estimate makes additional provision for £49.766 million under nine subheads but there will be increased appropriations-in-aid of £23.5 million. This reduces the net amount now required to £26.266 million making a net total for the year of £261.130 million.
An extra £22.458 million is needed under the subhead A. Of this amount £21.34 million is to meet pay increases, including the cost in 1980 of the first phase of the second national understanding. Here I might say that the staff of my Department, like other employees in the community generally, benefit under the national rounds of pay increases. They also secure other increases in pay or improvements in their conditions of employment where these are necessary to bring them into line with comparable groups of employees inside and outside the civil service. I would like to emphasise that all these increases in pay and improvements in conditions have been granted under the agreed scheme for conciliation and arbitration for the civil service.
The balance of £1.118 million required under subhead A is made up of higher social welfare employer's contributions, increased expenditure on overtime, and the staff costs of a second television licence campaign, partly offset by savings elsewhere in the subhead.
The additional sum of £520,000 under subhead B is needed mainly because of higher subsistence rates and more travelling by engineering staff arising from the accelerated telephone development programme.
Under subhead C an extra £10.34 million is required. Of this amount £9.3 million is for purchase of sites and provision of new telephone exchange buildings and extensions for the telephone service. The balance of £1.04 million is to meet increased expenditure on rents and rates and higher costs of light, heat and power.
Under subhead D an additional £200,000 is required to meet the higher cost of conveyance of mails by rail.
An extra £460,000 is required under subhead E because of price increases in petrol and oil used by postal vehicles.
A further £11.66 million is required under subhead F mainly because of increased expenditure on engineering stores and equipment. The extra provision includes £300,000 for price increases in petrol and oil used by engineering vehicles.
Under subhead G an additional sum of £1.068 million is required for repayments to the Exchequer because telephone capital investment in 1979 was higher than expected when the Estimate was being prepared.
Under subhead H an additional £120,000 is required because of increased subscription payments to international bodies of which this administration is a member.
The extra £2.94 million needed under subhead J is required to meet the higher cost of pensions and lump sums because of the second national understanding and other pay increases.
Of the increase of £23.5 million under appropriations-in-aid, all but £100,000 represents the recoupment from telephone capital funds of higher expenditure on telephone development under subheads A, B, C and F. In fact, expenditure on telephone development will amount to £123.4 million as against the provision of £100 million on which the original Estimate was based.
That £23.4 million extra proposed for telephone development reflects the Government's commitment to providing a high quality telephone service in the shortest possible time. Improvements in the telephone service cannot, of course, be brought about without paying the necessary cost. For example, the revised provision for subhead A includes the cost of about 1,000 extra engineering staff recruited this year to enable, in particular, the local cabling systems to be strengthened and more telephones to be installed in the years ahead. More overtime was worked also this year to allow of more connections being made than would otherwise have been possible while awaiting the recruitment and training of extra staff. Similarly, in order to provide more telephone connections, more stores were needed and this has contributed to the increases under subhead F.
Deputies may recall that in earlier statements in the House I referred to the streamlining of procedures associated with the provision of buildings, including both the internal precedures in my Department and in the Office of Public Works and between both. This streamlining is bearing fruit and more progress is being made with a number of buildings than it had been expected would be possible. This, in turn, will lead to improvements in service in the centres concerned earlier than would otherwise have been possible and this will, I am sure, be welcomed by Deputies generally. The speeding up of course has had the effect that more work will have to be paid for this year than had been provided for in the original Estimate, and this additional expenditure is now included in the increased provision sought under subhead C.
Similarly, it has been possible to make substantial progress with the ordering of new telephone exchanges, both trunk and local, and with development of the trunk network generally, and this too has affected the expected out-turn under subhead F.
These three subheads — A covering pay, C which deals with accommodation and F which provides for engineering stores and equipment — account for most of the additional money now required. As the extra money is needed mainly for telephone development purposes, I propose to deal briefly with progress on telephone development.
Before I do so, however, I would like to preface my comments by repeating what I have said in the House and elsewhere before, that there are no instant solutions that will provide a better telephone service overnight. It is a long haul, involving as it does, providing some 500 new buildings, replacing or extending all existing trunk and local telephone exchanges, converting about 480 exchanges, or almost half the existing number, to automatic working, strengthening all existing trunk routes to carry at least double the existing volume of traffic, adding to the overhead or underground cabling to enable the number of subscribers to be doubled, increasing the rate of installation of new phones from 40,000 to well over 100,000 and recruiting and training a few thousand extra staff. It will involve doing as much work over a five-year period as in the previous 80 years. This is a formidable task.
It is important that Deputies and the public generally should appreciate what is involved. I have never given the impression, and I do not want to do so now either, that there are instant solutions to our telephone problems. There are not. The Department of Posts and Telegraphs Review Group when reporting last year gave their estimate of the time required to bring the standard of our telecommunications service in terms of quality and availability up to the level in other EEC countries as at least five years. That is also my Department's estimate. It is unrealistic to expect that substantial improvements can be achieved nationally in a short time; it simply cannot be done. There are no overnight solutions. But it is a problem that is being tackled with vigour, as will be evident from this Supplementary Estimate. This year I set a target of 60,000 new telephones or almost 50 per cent more than the highest in any previous year. Next year, the target will be 80,000 or almost double the highest achieved previously. That, I submit, is progress — solid progress.
Improvements will come progressively, too, in the quality of service. Quite soon, a new stored programme trunk exchange will be opened here in Dublin and will be brought fully into service over the following six months or so. This will provide substantial relief for the Dublin trunk exchanges which are severely congested and will enable many badly needed trunk circuits to be provided on the trunk routes to and from Dublin and cross-Channel over the next six months. But, again, I want to put it on record in case of any possible misunderstanding that the exchange to be opened shortly will not eliminate all the congestion in the Dublin trunk exchanges. The additional exchanges that will do this are on order and will be in service by 1982.
New trunk exchanges are in course of installation or on order for all key centres where they are needed. These include further exchanges for Dublin as well as major new exchanges for Cork, Limerick, Galway, Athlone, Naas, Tralee, Sligo, Drogheda, Dundalk and at some 14 other centres. These will begin to become available from about the middle of next year onwards and will obviously bring substantial improvements in those areas, as well as contributing to an overall improvement in the system nationally.
Side-by-side with this, the trunk circuit system is being strengthened. New microwave links will be ready for service shortly between Dublin and Sligo, and will be extended to Letterkenny in the first half of next year. A new link is due to be opened shortly between here and Britain to coincide with the opening of the new trunk exchange in Dublin. Microwave radio link or co-axial cable schemes are in progress or are on order for such routes as Dublin-Navan-Mullingar, Cork-Waterford, Dublin-Cork, Cork-Middleton, Navan-Drogheda, Westport to Castlebar, Bantry to Cork, Tralee to Limerick and an east coast link serving Dublin, Wicklow. Arklow, Enniscorthy, and Waterford. Most of these should be in service next year.
This year, 18 manual telephone exchanges serving over 2,500 subscribers were converted to automatic working, and automatic exchanges to replace about 290 of the remaining 450 exchanges are on order. These will be installed over a period of about two years beginning next year.
International subscribers dialling was extended to Sligo and Athlone this year and this facility is being incorporated in new trunk exchanges being ordered.
The telex service is one that is most useful to business and industry and this is reflected in demand which over the last year or so had been running at a record level. As a result there is a backlog of applicants waiting for telex service at present despite the fact that the installation rate is also running at a very high level. But it is planned to virtually wipe out the waiting list during 1981, and I am confident that this can be done, for this increased exchange capacity is needed. A new telex exchange is in course of installation in Dublin at present and will be ready for service in the first half of next year. This will have a capacity to meet expected demand up to the end of the decade.
While, as I said at the outset, there is no magic formula for providing instant, overnight solutions for the problems of the telephone service, it will, I hope, be evident from what I have said that the problems are being tackled with the utmost vigour. And while improvements in many aspects of the service will necessarily take time, solid progress has already been made and the fact that more cannot be achieved more quickly is due to the sins of the past rather than any neglect of the present.
So far as the postal service is concerned. I am glad to say that regular monitoring shows that for the past few months over 85 per cent of first class letters are now regularly delivered on the next day after posting. This represents a considerable improvement and my Department will continue their efforts to improve the standards of the postal service still further.