I move:
"That the Order entitled the Public Bodies Order, 1925, which was laid on the Table of this House on the 7th day of January, 1926, shall be and is hereby annulled."
This is a Statutory Order which, unless annulled within 21 days after it has been laid on the Table of the House, comes into operation, and this is the only method that one has of calling the attention of the House to the contents of the Order should one wish to do so. This is an Order of great importance in that it covers practically the whole ground of our work of local administration. It covers the procedure for road work, the method of raising rates, and all that is connected therewith in full detail. It only touches slightly on the work of county boards of health and public assistance, they having been already dealt with in a previous Order to which I have already called the attention of the House. As the House knows, the tendency of modern legislation is to give very wide powers to Ministers to proceed under Orders. The Statute only lays down certain general lines for guidance, but all the details, many of them of extreme importance, affecting the whole of the work, are dealt with by Orders. In giving such wide powers, the House only reserves to itself, in most cases, the right to criticise, and that is what I am asking the House to do now. I would first of all call the attention of the House to Article 3 of this Order, which reads: "The Minister may from time to time assent to any departure from the rules and regulations contained in this Order."
As I read that Article, it means that the Minister may change the Order in any manner that he sees fit. If that is so, it is very little use making these statutory Orders and laying them on the Table of the House or of taking power to annul them should we see fit to do so. Yet, after a certain period has elapsed, the Minister has power to upset, and to depart from, the rules and regulations contained in the Order. That would appear to hand over the whole manner of changing these Orders to the power of the Executive, and to take the power away from the Oireachtas. I should even go so far as to suggest that nothing of the kind can be done, and that to do so would be ultra vires.
I now pass to the Order itself. I do not know if Senators have got copies of it in their hands. The Order is one of very considerable length and contains a large number of forms. I will not attempt to deal with more than the salient points in it. I first ask the House to examine the new form on which rates are to be demanded. I do not know if the House is quite aware of the procedure, but at a certain season of the year, when the rate books are being prepared, a lot of extra work is thrown on to the local authority and it is necessary to engage a large number of temporary clerks to do this work. My information is that under this new form of demand note four times as much work will be involved in the future as has been necessary in the past. Each separate rating has its own demand note. The amount demanded has to be split up under five heads, namely, roads, county services, health district charges, poor relief, and separate charges. It is split up, too, in reference to the demand on land and the demand on other hereditaments. To take a case of which I have personal knowledge I have myself received something in the region of 150 demand notes. The valuation in the case of one of them is as low as 3/-. If the rate there was 10/- in the £, the amount to be demanded would be 1/6, and that 1/6 has to be separated under the five headings I mentioned in proportion to (1) expenditure on roads, (2) county services, (3) health district charges, (4) poor relief, and (5) separate charges, involving perhaps calculations of fractions of 7-32nds or 12-32nds or whatever the fraction might be. That has got to be done, if the law is carried out, by the temporary clerks engaged for the purpose, some of whom may not be very dexterous at figures. I submit that in many cases it would either be beyond their powers altogether or would occupy an inordinate amount of time. I believe the reply to this is that it is portion of this work as prescribed by law. It is also suggested. I believe, that I was responsible for the amendment that led to this, but I have been looking up the official debates and I cannot see that I am, but if I am responsible then I think it is a case in which I should be adjudged for certification.
What I had in mind in proposing my amendment was that every demand note should show, as is done in the case of the City of London, the total amount demanded for main services—roads, lighting, cleaning, education, etc. That would mean one calculation for every demand note, and I wanted to have that printed on the back of the demand note. On the face of the demand note no such particulars are given, nor are they necessary, but even if one is responsible for what has turned out to be an act of lunacy, why drag in all these other charges as well? If all these particulars are to be given it will, as I have said before, involve four times as much work in the preparation of demand notes in the future as was the case in the past.
I now pass to another very important matter, that is, the method of accounting for the roads. I am glad to see that the Government have recognised that there is something to be gained by an attempt at a disintegration of the cost of the roads, and the apportionment of the cost to individual roads. That is implicit in the Order. When you come to examine the technique proposed the conclusion is irresistible that the method proposed to be employed will not serve the purpose of costings or of control. It will be necessary, if the county surveyor or the local authority is to use an account that will be of the least value for the purposes of control of individual works, that a completely separate set of accounts to this prescribed in this Order be adopted—that is, of course, to what is the practice at present. The official forms are really of no practical assistance to the county surveyors. Any up-to-date surveyor has his own forms, which he prepares in his own office and adapts to his own purposes. One had hoped that these new forms would have been drawn up on the plan of the unofficial forms now in use and which would have been of real service to the county surveyor in his work of control.
If we come to examine these forms we find that an attempt is made to apportion to each road the cost of the material used upon that road. I would like to show how that is done. There is an account called the materials account, in which the expenses connected with the proportion of the materials is charged. That account will be allowed to run up for periods of anything up to six months. The county council may shorten that period, but one knows that in these matters the council has really no say and that the authority rests entirely with the officials themselves. Now that account is charged on the expenditure for a period of say half a year for every road in the county. Then at the close of the half year or other period the secretary to the county council is provided with information as to the materials used upon those various roads and the cost is apportioned on a flat rate or an average rate over the various roads in the county. That is to say, this sum charged against a road is not really what the actual cost of the prepared materials for that road is, but the average cost of the materials for all the roads. You find something like this: The material account shows a charge against it of something like £10,000 and the county surveyor provides certain information of material gone here, there and everywhere. Dividing the amount of material into the cost to be apportioned you get the sum which enables you to close the account and to find the individual amounts to be transferred to the accounts of the different roads.
Any accountant would certainly agree that this is not the true cost and is not the cost of the expenditure upon that road, but is simply the average cost of expenditure upon all the roads. That system does not lend itself to the purposes of control. The county surveyor wants to control his own operations by some organisation within his service. If you take the case of an individual quarry gang, an accountant can keep an account of that quarry as the county surveyor works it, and he can have returns of its output prepared periodically either weekly, fortnightly or monthly, and so he is able to calculate the output of the quarry and to calculate what it costs in the year to work and see how it compares with the case of other quarries or previous work of that character. None of those elementary straightforward well-known costing methods is possible under this accounting. These accounts will serve certain purposes; certain forms will be filled up; they can always be made to balance, sums can be apportioned, there is no check whether they are put into the right or the wrong place; they will be apportioned and will appear arithmetically correct, but they will not be a true cost and will not be of any use for the purposes of control. Therefore I say that these forms, especially forms for the roads, are of the nature of so many of those Government forms, mere elaborations and computations serving no real living purpose.
Moreover, in the case of county surveyors, the road-accounting authority is divided. Now it is absolutely essential if these road accounts are to be of any value, that the bulk of these accounts should be entirely under the control of the county surveyor. He must have an accountant ready, upon whom he can call at any moment, and who must be an officer in his own department. As the Order prescribes, most of these accounts are kept in the county secretary's office, and the county surveyor has only control by courtesy, and not by right, and has not that immediate personal control over the official keeping the account which he should have, and which efficiency in administration requires that he should have. For these reasons I ask the House to take a serious view of this new Order, and to say that it serves no useful purpose, and to annul it, and to let the old Public Bodies Order remain in operation. But I do not wish to leave the matter without putting some constructive suggestion forward to the Minister as to how the whole matter should be treated. Everyone knows that in any new requirements of this kind you cannot go off in a hurry—it is perfectly impossible—as the Minister is trying to do, to get a number of officials, however competent in an office up in Dublin, to devise new forms of accounts, and to expect them to be of any service until they are tried out.
I may mention, incidentally, that it is rather strange that it was not until these account forms were got out that the officials, as a whole, were consulted. No doubt individual officers were consulted here and there, but it was only after the forms were out that the views of the county surveyors as a body were sought. The only way to deal with this matter, in my judgment, is to take one county, and say to that county, "You are to be made the subject of careful, detailed and detached experiment; we will cut you off from all those other counties." Burn the whole of the Public Bodies Orders for the time being, so far as that county is concerned; put in one commercial accountant to collaborate with the secretary, the county surveyor, and one official of the Local Government Department, and see whether they will not be able to build up some system of accountancy, paying no attention to what has gone before, but establishing those methods of accounting and of control with fewer forms. The fewer books used the better they will have done their work. Try that for two or three years. Let that county be used as a trial centre. At the end of two or three years, if you cut yourselves away from the traditions, prejudices and complications of these Orders, built up elaborately for generations, and show that you have arrived at a practical system, providing a ground within that system that can be made the subject of a new Order, then I submit that that is the only way that real reform of administration can be arrived at and recommended and carried out.
