It is opportune for me on behalf of our organisation, with staff dispersed throughout the country not only in a decentralised but in a regionalised way and who provide a local service, to address the committee. That indicates our ability to manage our business with staff dispersed throughout the country but who contribute to the overall business of the Department. In my short presentation, I will outline some of the key issues around the structure of the organisation and how decentralisation has been implemented to date and how we perceive the next phase of it will assist us. There are some issues involved which we view as challenges we need to address, and I will deal with them in that way.
Our mission and goals, as outlined, show that as a Department we have a policy as well as a service delivery responsibility. Since 1986, the policy and service delivery areas have been functionally separated, yet a close link has been maintained between both sections. Therefore, the service delivery area contributes to the development of policy within the organisation and the policy reflects the experience of staff delivering the service on the ground.
Our structures, as outlined, were divided on a narrow social welfare service executive arm basis. Some 3,800 are full-time staff and 900 are working on a work-sharing basis. Some 25% of our staff are already working in decentralised offices; 44% are working in local and regional offices; and 31% are in the Dublin headquarters office. We have 12 headquarter offices, seven of which are in Dublin, and one each in Sligo, Longford, Dundalk, Letterkenny and Waterford. We are dispersed quite broadly across the country. We have ten regions with 58 local offices, and 69 branch offices which are services provided by private individuals to the Department on a similar basis to which postmasters provide post office services. We have five agencies: the Combat Poverty Agency and Comhairle, which are both involved in this decentralisation plan; the Pensions Board, the pensions ombudsman and the Family Support Agency.
We have gone through a number of decentralisations over the last 15 years and have coped well in all circumstances. That is not to say that there were not difficulties and challenges at each one, but we have been able to deal with them and address them. In 1989, we decentralised a number of pension functions to the Sligo office. This was done on the basis that these were mainly long-term schemes where interaction with the customer was less frequent and could be managed either by phone, e-mail or mail. That has proved to be so, to date. Since decentralising in 1989, we have increased the number of staff in Sligo to 552 on the basis of new schemes which have come into play and other developments in pensions — in particular, the provision of pensions to people who had contributions pre-1953 and the extension of free travel to certain individuals. That has led to the increase in numbers in those areas. In each instance the new work has been absorbed into the area with good planning and little difficulty in the long term.
In 1991, we went to Letterkenny with our child benefit and treatment benefit schemes. The numbers have increased slightly in recent times to 190 because we also transferred our maternity benefit schemes in the last number of months to Letterkenny. That was an opportunity where technology has reduced the level of work in the Letterkenny office so were able to transfer the maternity benefit scheme relatively quickly to Letterkenny to absorb the staff in those areas.
In 1993, we went to Longford with a number of long-term disability, illness, carer and other similar schemes. The numbers in 1993 were 178 and have grown to 283 because of new schemes. The disability allowance scheme, which was brought into the Department from the health boards in the mid-1990s, has been absorbed into Longford and is being operated well there. The carer's allowance and carer's benefit schemes were introduced and also placed in the Longford office.
In 1995, we had a small decentralisation to Waterford of 28 people. They are dealing mainly with the PRSI payments for self-employed customers. In 2002, our accounts branch transferred to Dundalk.
The current decentralisation programme planned for the Department is different to anything we have experienced to date, partly because it is part of a much bigger programme which involves sections across the Civil Service and the public sector. From our own perspective, it is a fairly big programme in that we have 1,310 posts to be decentralised to seven locations. That is 20% of the Civil Service posts which are planned for decentralisation, and also includes Comhairle and the Combat Poverty Agency. In this decentralisation programme all headquarters and central section posts will be moved from Dublin to decentralised areas but following that we will still have in the order of 600 posts in the Dublin regional area, mainly in the local offices providing unemployment payments, information and other social welfare services to our customers.
Our new planned headquarter locations are for Drogheda and we will have 525 people moving there. That figure includes 225 IT posts which were recently announced. Some 85 posts will be going to Carrickmacross. At the announcement it was intended that Comhairle would go to Carrickmacross, but following the decision on the IT move to Dundalk, and an examination of some of the Department sections that were moving there, we felt that given the synergies to be gained by moving Comhairle with the Department to Drogheda, we would swap. Therefore, some of the Department sections will now be going to Carrickmacross, while Comhairle will go to Drogheda.
We will have 225 posts going to Carrick-on-Shannon; 25, which is the Combat Poverty Agency, to Monaghan; and 100 to Sligo where we already have a large number of staff — in the order of 500 — which will add to the variety of work in the Sligo area. We have 230 going to Donegal and 120 to Buncrana.
Before I address the issues of those seven decentralisations, I think it is worth looking back at the lessons we have learned from pervious decentralisations in the past 15 years. In general, it is recognised that the service provided by the Department is an excellent one, both to customers and politicians. We have managed to do this type of programme well and have been able to follow up afterwards to ensure that in the long term the situation works.
There are things that we did need to learn from the decentralisation process. One of the first, which was quite a surprise to us, was the fact that for each post we moved we had to make three movements. That was somebody new going into the post, somebody going out and, very often, by the time we went to move, somebody would have been promoted and moved on. We also had the experience — particularly in Sligo but also in some of the other areas — where people decentralised to Sligo and when other towns came onto the plan, they then opted to move on to the next town. That caused a large amount of churn for the Department and, particularly in the Sligo area, required us to put in post-decentralisation support for the people in that office to manage the issues that were arising from the loss of expertise, the constant absorption of new staff and the ongoing training programmes. It is something that we have learned and is something we will address in going forward.
The second thing we learned concerned tailored training programmes. We have fairly robust training programmes within the Department as it stands, but in the context of decentralisation we need specific training programmes. This is because we will be bringing in groups of people in larger numbers than we would normally do in recruiting. These tailored programmes allow us to train people in specific ways. We like to think as laterally as possible in developing these programmes to see what the best approach is, so there are multi-layers of training for staff both in formal classroom situations, on the job, and in coaching and mentoring. We have done it in the past and as part of our future programme it is part of what we are currently developing.
We have also found that we need to be realistic about the time frames in which we can do things. Issues arise when we are moving a number of staff in one particular area. We need to be careful not to try to move large numbers from other areas at the same time because staff will be pulled out of each of the areas for ourselves and other Departments as staff opt for different towns and cities around the country.
We need to be realistic about the length of time it takes to train somebody. People often look at our Department as mainly being a large processing factory and much of the work involves processing procedures. At the other end of the scale, however, there is a need for a longer term absorption of people on policy development and research work. We need to be realistic that while people can be trained fairly quickly in process work, the numbers involved will be quite large, therefore the programme to train them all will take some time. The number of people involved in policy will be quite small but the length of time to train someone in that area will be longer.
In terms of staff we need to be sure we can overlap staff, so that staff members who are leaving sections can stay on for a period of time to mentor or coach people who are coming into jobs. We are aware of the need for key trainers in each location which is moving. We need people who have expertise in a particular function and we must retain those people while the programme is ongoing. We are aware that some of our key trainers will want to decentralise, though not necessarily in the area in which they work at present. We need to ensure we have sufficient key trainers to get the programme to work to plan.
We need a redeployment plan and to be aware of those people who are not moving with their current section — how we will move them on and how to find a location which will suit them for the long term. Given the numbers involved, there will be issues regarding the release and redeployment of staff. Also in the staff area, when staff opt to go to a decentralised location, they must commit to that location for a period of time — we need to be sure they will stay a couple of years rather than moving on to the next centre in order to avoid problems we have had with previous decentralisation programmes — the loss of expertise and the constant training are issues for us.
Resources have been and will be a big issue, and I am not talking about people so much as IT support, facilities, addressing the accommodation issues of staff and making sure the tools we need to do the job before, during and after this are available. During the transition we will likely need more resources than we have currently. Accommodation has been an opportunity in that in each of the previous decentralisations we moved into new offices, so it was an opportunity to purpose-build these to meet the needs of our business. This helped us with our development.
Communication is a huge issue which has been raised already. Certain people have concerns about how the programme will affect them, currently and in the future, and there is a need for us, as management, to ensure our plans are transparent, coherent and that people can see their role within the plan and where the future is for them. We need to communicate to reassure them that the programme works. We need a quality assurance plan to make sure the service does not get worse or degrade in any way during the transition phase and that is something we have expertise in doing in other areas.
As I said about Sligo and some other areas, we need post-implementation support. We need to get all of this right to understand how much support people need after moving to a particular location. There is also the sense that if we over-support people can feel we are nannying them, so we must be aware of getting this right. The other thing we need to get right is the dedicated central support team. That is a team which will keep an eye on the whole programme across the Department to make sure all the pieces fit together and that we are timing and sequencing things properly.
The decentralisation programme, as announced, provides us with a number of opportunities. In terms of our structures the programme is a catalyst for us to look at the whole Department to see how we are organised and structured. We do that on an ongoing basis but this is an opportunity to stand back and see how the work is done. In the context of the proposals, there is a northwest axis, through Monaghan and down to Drogheda, which the Department will be working along. There are opportunities there to see how the work of various areas will fit together. In terms of staff it is an opportunity to provide more mobility for them and one issue with the current decentralisation programme is that when people move to particular areas they may be confined to that job for quite a long time. Broadening decentralisation opens up more opportunities for people both in terms of promotion and mobility. From the reports of those who have already decentralised, there is a better work-life balance for many people, as they do not spend as long commuting. However, there may be a problem for some of us in reverse commuting if we move to Drogheda, myself included.
In business processes and streamlining there is a catalyst within the decentralisation programme which gives us an opportunity to do a lot more. In order to move the business and make sure it works well we need to review — my colleague from Revenue referred to this earlier — the business process. We have done some of that already. After the event we will have a process manual, guidelines, good training programmes and so on, ensuring the quality of the work and the staff doing that work post-decentralisation will be as high, if not higher, than that currently going on.
I mentioned accommodation before and we expect the accommodation we move into will be modern, purpose-built and will help us to streamline our processes. IT is critical to the business because our systems must operate on a day to day basis and we hope to have the opportunity for a new infrastructure — to improve on the infrastructure we already have, to put in better supports for businesses so we can do our work in a different way, given we will be a different organisation geographically and organisationally. We also want to see video conferencing used more extensively around the organisation. We have had some small pilot schemes but we see this as being a greater facet of our business in future. There is also the issue of telephony, not just for ourselves in communications, but in doing business with customers in the future. Recent studies have shown our customers are keen to do business with us over the phone — that was the preferred channel of communication and with decentralisation we hope to improve our phone services.
The challenges for us are in the main areas on which I have focused — our business continuity, the service quality and continuity, and I refer back to the quality assurance plan — that we would be able to maintain the quality of service to customers during the time. We have a very strong customer ethos in the Department. I can instance the recent postal strike, where the staff rowed in behind us despite having their own concerns about their future. They managed that process very well and that ethos is always there. It is what keeps us going and we need to continue that into this new organisation through the programme of decentralisation.
There are issues surrounding the loss of corporate knowledge which we will have to address. People will leave the organisation who have long experience with it. We must also be aware of the impact on offices which are not currently included in the programme — we are aware that some people in our regional offices have indicated their wish to participate in the programme and we must make sure we can resource them. I have also mentioned staff churn and how we will manage that.
Redeployment of staff and career development must be addressed in the coming months. At this stage we have just an initial idea of where people will go, how many people will opt to decentralise and how to relocate or redeploy staff post-decentralisation. We will need to retain the services of people in Dublin to help us deliver the decentralisation programme. We need to keep up staff morale. We must ensure that people do not become demoralised because they feel they are not valued. We have already put in place a very good communications strategy for dealing with this issue. We need good training and job skills in the departmental culture.
There will be challenges for the ICT infrastructure to ensure we can put in place the infrastructure. It is proposed that the IT centre will move. We must ensure this move will not clash with other moves, because some stability will be required during the process of transition. There are central services which provide services to other areas of the Department. We must ensure these can be maintained during and post-transition, and that the central support functions are re-organised and restructured to meet these.
The successful implementation of the next phase of decentralisation will depend on having a realistic programme, on which we are currently working. A fair bit of work has been done on the detailed plans, including the sequence and timing of the moves, the resources available to us, the management of the whole process and IT continuity. Our guiding principles have been and continue to be to provide service to customers and support for staff, which is what we intend to implement over the next phase.
