I move:
That a sum not exceeding £6,651,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on 31st day of December 1983 for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for the Public Service and for the payment of a grant-in-aid.
I propose to discuss Vote 19 — Civil Service Commission; Vote 20 — Superannuation and Retired Allowances; and Vote 50 — Increases in Remuneration and Pensions, along with this Vote and I will move these Votes after the debate.
Before dealing with the financial details I would like to turn to the subject of public service reform. Deputies will be aware of the Government's deep commitment to reform. It is my intention to pursue vigorously our policy objectives in this area and I would like to outline to the House some of the practical measures that we intend to take to achieve real public service reform.
Firstly, however, I want to scotch the impression that we are merely interested in reform for reform's sake. We are interested in, and committed to, the principle of reform because we believe it to be necessary if this country is to realistically come to grips with the difficult and intractable problems facing us today.
We have had enough pious rhetoric about reform. I now want to see certain changes made, and made quickly. Much has been written and said about the need for structural reform, for delegation and for the separation of the role of policy formulation from that of policy execution. In essence the basic objectives of these highly desirable aims are increased efficiency and effectiveness in the civil service and in the wider public service.
It goes without saying that there is a need for change in the organisation and work practices of the public service. For too long the modus operandi has been one based on the traditional approach — if the system works, why change it? But too many existing procedures are either antiquated or outmoded and do not allow for the speedy and efficient resolution of our deep-rooted financial and other problems or, perhaps more importantly, for the formulation of policies which are realistically designed for the future development and welfare of the country.
The speedy implementation of policy decisions hinges on efficient and effective structures. I intend to continue with the work that has been going on to improve the central policy areas of Departments and to assign responsibility for executive action to accountable units. Lest I might be accused of not practising what I preach, I intend to apply, develop and refine the new management systems in my own Department for a start.
Existing concepts of accountability in the public service need urgent examination and review. Accountable management must involve some measure of delegation of responsibility. While the final responsibility will always rest with the Minister, it is a nonsense to imagine that the Minister can know of every one of the many administrative actions that take place in his or her Department each day.
Power must therefore be delegated and bureaucracy eliminated. The concept of the Minister as the corporation sole must be ended. Individual public servants must carry responsibility for their official actions and I believe that the vast majority of public servants will welcome a greater, and indeed a clearer definition of their responsibilities.
With the establishment of relevant structures, more appropriate to our times, Ministers can devote more of their time and ability to policy matters and executive affairs. Within such structures there will be maximum delegation of responsibility to individual civil servants, on their own personal responsibility, for the implementation of Government policy.
Having outlined my objectives in relation to accountable management, and accepting that public servants do things in the course of their duties which the Minister cannot possibly be expected to know about, we inevitably come to the conclusion that the procedures for accountability to the Oireachtas, acting on behalf of the public, must be strengthened.
Financial constraints have prevented successive Governments from appointing an Ombudsman, but I hope that such an appointment can be made during the lifetime of this Dáil.
While pursuing justice and equity in administration we must also look to developments in management skills and technology in order to provide value for money. While continuing to direct the efforts of my Department into the traditional management services and operational research, I take a particular interest in the increasing possibilities for better administration offered by the development of computers and information processing.
I have under consideration, and I hope to bring into effect this year, proposals for a shift of resources both in people and equipment into increased computerisation. This will involve considerable administrative reorganisation but should yield substantial benefits in performance and in economy. In any event, development in the area of automatic data processing will be forced upon any administration which regards itself as part of the developed world.
People generally and not only public servants will have to have, as part of their general equipment, an increasing familiarity with computers. For those in midcareer in the public service, it is important that these new technological aids to management be understood and mastered. I have recently announced that the Civil Service Training Centre will provide for the courses and training in computerisation necessary in the future.
Through the administrative research programme of the Department a study of the management development requirements of serving staff for computerisation is being undertaken by the Institute of Public Administration. The interim results are promising.
One result of computerisation will be to provide a more cost-effective public service. There is general agreement that the cost of the public service is now the major factor in public expenditure and taxation. In the light of the phenomenal increase in public service numbers between 1977 and 1981 there can be no dispute about the need to reduce numbers from the peak of over 300,000 reached in the latter year. The measure taken in July and December 1981 to restrict and reverse the growth in numbers were continued by the Estimates provisions which were published before the Government took office late last year. The restrictions have been not only endorsed therefore but promoted by parties on both sides of the House and, as a result, actual civil service numbers have fallen for the first time in more than a generation.
There has been some adverse comment about the fall in numbers. However, I would like to state a few pertinent facts. The reduction is only a fraction of the rise which took place between 1977 and 1981. No civil servant has been made redundant. We have maintained some recruitment. Viewed against the situation in the private sector, public servants are surviving the recession very well indeed.
While I consider the present restrictions under the recruitment embargo to be a crude instrument to achieve reduced numbers they are by no means as crude as the alternative of redundancy. I hope, generally, to substitute more selective measures which are likely to involve redeployment of staffs within Departments and between Departments. If and when I do so there may be protests about the inconvenience caused by redeployment. I will merely say again that such inconvenience cannot compare with the hardship and misery of unemployment.
My ultimate objective is a more efficient, a more effective public service. I want to see an improvement in the quality of the service provided for the public. I am firmly of the opinion that like any large organisation the reputation of the civil service rests largely on its direct contact with the citizen, whether that contact is at an employment exchange, a tax office or at the reception desk of one of our Departments of State.
I have already said that I want to see more open, friendly and less inhibiting surroundings in these public offices where, after all, the citizen comes either for his or her entitlement or for information as to a particular problem or complaint. The impersonal nature of some of our public offices only furthers the sense of unease and frustration that people have who, by force of circumstances, attend at such offices.
All citizens are entitled to efficiency and courtesy in their dealings with the public service but, for the more unfortunate in the community, it is doubly important that their dignity should not be affronted in such dealings. I have, therefore, assigned to a section of my Department special responsibility for the improvement in public office facilities, and increased training for staff in dealing with the public.
I have also declared war on the "hatch" system which is particularly irritating to the public. I have begun the process too whereby many of our existing official forms will be either redesigned, using simple, ordinary everyday language, or else abolished. There is a myriad of these forms throughout the public service which many people have great difficulty in understanding and which contribute in no small way to the overall negative attitude that people now have to our bureaucracy. Indeed I sometimes think, when I read some of the gobbledegook in these forms, that if the people who design and write such forms had to fill them in themselves the forms would be considerably easier to understand.
Recently I wrote to all Members of the Oireachtas asking them to indicate to me the type of forms they come across in their constituency duties which they find particularly helpful or particularly difficult. I hope the practical experience of Members can be used to bring about a simplification of official forms.
I consider these steps small, though by no means unimportant ones. It is through practical changes like these that not only will a better service be given to the public but the public's perception of that service will change, hopefully for the better. If as a result of the changes the interface — to use a jargon word — between the public service and the public in general can be made pleasant and human, I feel that I will have made a major contribution to public service reform.
Of course we must always bear in mind that people are the essence of any organisation's effectiveness and that they are an increasingly expensive, complicated and sophisticated resource. The best structures in the world are of limited value unless they are filled by the best people available. It is essential, therefore, to ensure that the right people are in the right jobs — people with the capacity, skills, competence and experience to manage large resources of staff and money and to provide expert, reliable and realistic advice to Governments, individual Ministers and managements in Departments.
In general I am satisfied that present recruitment procedures, through the Civil Service Commission, are securing for the service an adequate share of the talent leaving our schools and third-level educational institutions. I believe strongly, however, that there should be open competition to talent for certain top civil service jobs. The system that ensures automatic succession, based mainly on the principle of seniority, is no longer tenable. In short, I believe firmly in the concept of meritocracy in the civil service.
The circumstances in which the present system of promotion evolved have changed dramatically and the demands of a new technological age are now more insistent than ever before. This year, for example, a new interdepartmental scheme of promotion for some assistant principal posts was introduced. This is a significant step in the direction of widening the field from which such promotees have traditionally been selected. It will also be a means of further encouraging promotion on merit, and of increasing mobility of staff between Departments. I hope it will be possible in the near future to have arrangements for more open promotion to higher grades than assistant principal and likewise to lower the barriers to promotional mobility at such levels between the administrative, professional and technical grades.
I would like to say quite bluntly that the criteria by which officers are selected for promotion within Departments is a matter of concern to me and to my Department, to say nothing of the concern expressed by staff interests who have stressed the lack of consistency, as they see it, in internal selection practices. While in no way seeking to impose a rigid uniformity I am aiming at a codification, and clarification, of promotion procedures. Draft guidelines for a code of good practice have been prepared by an interdepartmental committee and when they have been duly considered I strongly hope that they will find acceptance among departmental managements generally.
Effective promotion procedures, and indeed any system of accountable management, need to be accompanied by staff appraisal or assessment. An appraisal scheme, embracing executive grades, is now being implemented in Departments and it is my intention that similar schemes should be introduced for higher grades as soon as possible. There is a scheme of staff exchanges in operation for a number of years. I believe that there ought to be greater mobility between the private and the public sectors. In other words, I would like to see employees being swopped for a time between these two sectors. A substantial amount of the criticism of work practices in the civil service emanate from the private sector. The experiments that have taken place in interchanges of staff have been extremely successful and have mitigated somewhat the more raucous criticisms of both the personnel and the work practices in the service.
However, there has been disappointingly few experiments in staff exchanges. Indeed, these experiments have taken place mainly in my own Department. I believe that the private sector could do significantly more to ensure greater cross-fertilisation of ideas and work practices by showing a greater willingness to participate more than it has done to date in this experiment.
In recent times my Department have prepared a comprehensive staff development plan for their employees and other Departments have been encouraged to do the same. Such plans need to cover: the placement, as far as possible, of staff in those jobs, within their grades, which best suit their talents; on-the-job training; formal training; the granting of facilities to staff to secure higher educational qualifications relevant to official needs and fresh and challenging work experiences.
While on-the-job training is the responsibility of line managers or supervisors, all Departments now have the full-time assistance of specially selected training officers. The training officers are in turn helped, where necessary, by my Department to acquire their particular skills. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is that Departments provide good on-the-job training for their staffs. On such training will depend for many years to come the ability and commitment which officers bring to carrying out their everyday tasks.
Formal training for more senior staffs is mainly provided at the Civil Service Training Centre in my Department and also by the Institute of Public Administration. Departmental training officers arrange formal training for junior staff. My Department are currently able to meet all demands by other Departments for training courses, as is the Institute of Public Administration, but in a way I would prefer to see a situation where there were waiting lists for trainees, such is the importance I attach to this activity.
It is understandable that with present staffing restrictions some managers find it hard to release staff for training.
However it is regrettable that many senior officers are basically not as committed to training, either for themselves or their staffs, as would be desirable.
My Department are constantly trying to bring about a change in such attitudes. I hope that, as more managers attend training courses, especially those designed to improve management competence, they will become increasingly more convinced of the need to release their own staff on similar training courses.
For several years past staff have been encouraged to acquire higher qualifications such as university degrees. It is important that the qualifications sought should be relevant to the needs of either the employing Department or of the service generally.
Currently the present facilities offered for such qualifications are being reviewed, in conjunction with the staff associations, to ensure the maximum advantage consistent with economy from them.
It is vital to have a well motivated staff with the highest possible job satisfaction and commitment. This year saw the publication of a report commissioned by the Institute of Public Administration on the factors affecting the motivation of the civil service executive grades. The report made many recommendations, all of which are worth careful consideration and some of which I have already mentioned, such as good placement and planned staff exchanges. My Department are actively following up all the recommendations of this report.
I turn now to some of the financial details relating to my Estimates. The Estimate for the Office of the Minister for the Public Service is £6.651 million, involving a net increase of £455.000 on the outturn for 1982. This amount is required to cover the day-to-day running expenses of my Department of which pay for staff amounts to £5.046 million or 76 per cent of the total.
Among remaining items of expenditure the largest amount represents the expenses of leasing, renting and maintaining computer facilities at the Central Data Processing Services Unit.
There is a provision of £990,000 for the payment of a grant-in-aid to the Institute of Public Administration. This grant-in-aid is towards the general expenses of the institute and includes the corporate subscriptions on behalf of Government Departments. As Deputies will be aware, the institute plays a very important role in training and educating public servants, in promoting and carrying out administrative reseach, and in publishing muchneeded source material in public administration.
I would like to put on record my appreciation of the co-operation which my Department receive from the institute.
Receipts on this Vote are expected to realise £1.356 million during the year and arise mainly from charges made for computer work carried out for bodies other than Government Departments.
The second Vote is Vote 19 — the Civil Service Commission. The cost of running both the Civil Service Commission and the Local Appointments Commission is estimated at £1.007 million. This amount is sought to cover the cost of competitions conducted by them, the payments of salaries, wages and allowances of their staff and various other expenses. The total cost is in fact £2.747 million but revenue received will reduce this by £1.740 million to £1.007 million.
The gross cost of the commission has risen in recent years because of the vast increase in the number of applicants and because of increased costs generally.
The decision to reintroduce a reasonable scale of fees for competitions run by both commissions has already been debated at length in this House and I do not propose to say anything further on the matter other than to indicate that because of the economies that are now being achieved I am hopeful, if general financial conditions permit, that it will be possible to discontinue the charging of fees next year.
While on the subject of Civil Service Commission competitions I should say that I have taken steps to discontinue practices which might give the impression that I or any other public representative could interfere and help to get an applicant an established post other than on strict merit.
I have written to public representatives and to applicants who wrote direct to me, explaining that it would be wrong of me to appear in any way to influence the commission. I believe that it is very important, particularly in a time of acute job shortages, that the independence of the commissioners, which has been defined by statute, should be above reproach and be seen to be so.
I come now to Vote 20, the Vote for Superannuation and Retired Allowances, for which a net sum of £36,090,000 is required. The Estimate covers the cost of pensions and lump sums for established and non-established civil servants, widows of such staff and of the Judiciary together with the cost of increasing such pensions under the annual pensions increases.
There is, inevitably, a substantial increase in the cost of superannuation each year because of the increase in the number of pensioners and the annual revision of pensions in line with pay increases.
Vote number 50 — increases in remuneration and pensions — is an additional estimate which was included in the postbudget Estimates Volume. It gives effect to the decision announced in the budget to allocate an additional sum of £60 million on a global basis to meet the cost of pay increases arising under the terms of the amendments to the public service pay agreement.
This money will be allocated and paid to the Departments concerned later in the year to meet any excesses on pay subheads which may arise in relation to such increases.
The bulk of the £60 million — some £42 million or so — is required to meet pay increases which would have arisen in 1982 were it not for the amendments to the original public service pay agreement. Specifically a sum estimated at £25 million is required to meet "recognition" payments arising from the deferment of the application of the 5 per cent third phase of the public service pay agreement.
A further £17 million is included to meet the cost in 1983 of implementing in full special pay awards deferred from 1982. The remaining £18 million is a contingency provision from which will be met any additional costs of special pay awards which may be payable as to the 40 per cent from 1 October 1983 or in full in the case of minor claims or those involving major change on the initiative of the employer.
As regards public service pay generally, the House will be aware that I have been engaged in talks with the Public Services Committee of Congress of ICTU over a long period. Following a preliminary meeting on 21 April with representatives of the committee at which it was agreed that a basis existed for negotiations on a new public service pay agreement, the pay talks proper commenced on 19 May.
A series of meetings ensued which reached an impasse on 21 June when the union negotiators indicated that the position I had put to them was not a basis for further negotiation and that they would be reporting back to the Public Services Committee, as they have done.
While I am naturally disappointed at that development I would like to pay tribute to all concerned for their earnest endeavours to lay the ground for a new comprehensive agreement which would afford an assurance of industrial peace and harmony for the period that lies ahead.
I am satisfied that the talks were treated with great seriousness by all who took part and that there was a strong commitment on both sides to secure an agreement. Given that commitment, and given the importance to the nation of securing a period of stability in industrial relations in the public service, I would hope that it may yet be possible to find a way of reconciling our differences and of reaching an effective accommodation which will minimise the burden to be placed on the taxpayer.
My hope is that, on mature reflection, the public service unions will see the good sense of the Government's approach. In any event, a Cheann Comhairle, I am happy to announce this morning that, as a result of contacts that have been made, the pay talks are expected to resume shortly. It is my earnest hope that, together with the public service unions, I will now be able to reach an agreement on terms that will be in the best interest of nation, the economy and of the union members.
