The long promised government statement on Transforming Public Services has spectacularly failed to live up to the hype that preceded its publication today. This has proven to be a case again of much-ado about nothing.
The report seems to be primarily a cocktail of ideas lifted from the OECD report on public service reform, published in April, and a number of previous government initiatives dressed up to look new.
On public service numbers, for instance, it says that ‘there is an immediate necessity to ensure that numbers employed in the public service are no greater than necessary to deliver public services’. This is hardly a great revelation and one would have assumed that this would have been the approach of any government at any time.
The Labour Party fully supports the need for public service reform and to secure value for monies that taxpayers put into the public service. However, anyone who uses public services will be disappointed at the lack of specific proposals for improvement in the services on which they depend. Fianna Fail has now been in power for almost eleven years and Mr. Cowen has had direct responsibility for the public service for almost four years, but they have delivered little or nothing in the way of real public service reform. The result has been frequent waste of vast sums of public money and services offered to the public are often below par. The failure to modernise has also left vast areas of the public service a frustrating place to work for public servants
Proposals similar to those announced today, in regard to better value for money in public procurement and value for money and policy reviews have been made by this government previously, but have not prevented the shocking waste of money on projects such as e-voting and Ppars, or the splurging of taxpayers money that we have seen in the recent disclosures relating to Fas.
If the government was serious about public service reform one of the first things it would do is totally abandon Charlie McCreevy’s decentralisation programme, rather than simply scaling it back as announced in the budget. Decentralisation has damaged corporate efficiency in the public service and sapped staff morale.
In addition, any real programme of public service reform would have to deal with the bizarre bonus arrangement at upper levels of the civil service, where everyone gets a bonus regardless of performance.
We also need to bring to an end the pattern of political patronage, where in many cases public services are driven by the need to meet the political agendas of Ministers rather than the needs of the public.
Nothing in today’s documents provides any evidence that this government is either serious about real public service reform or has the capacity to deliver it.