Ahern orders major public-service review: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2007/01/07 > Ahern orders major public-service review

Ahern orders major public-service review
Sunday, January 07, 2007 - By Pat Leahy
The government has ordered the most wide-ranging review of the public service ever undertaken, with a view to a radical reform of the way public services are delivered.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern will announce today that he has asked the Paris-based think-tank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), to report on how the public service in Ireland compares to other countries and to make recommendations for future reform.

The initiative comes at a time of growing public concern about the quality of public services in Ireland, despite increased investment in the past decade. Opposition parties have vowed to make public services the major issue in the forthcoming general election.

The review is the first of its type in the history of the public service, although the OCED has conducted sectoral reviews on various aspects of Irish administration, especially education, in the past.

Writing in today’s Sunday Business Post, Ahern warns public servants that he expects major reform to result from the OECD exercise: ‘‘There may be some stark messages for us arising from this review but we should be prepared for them and be prepared to make the hard decisions which reforms often require.”

The OECD will be asked to examine how various parts of the public service relate to one another and how decisions made at political level are implemented - or not - at the level where the public interacts with service providers.

The government will announce three departures in the public service today:

a system of ‘health checks’ to examine the organisation and operation of agencies and departments is to be piloted

a new ‘leadership initiative’ will promote greater interaction and mobility with private sector personnel and

a more detailed system of measuring the performance of the public sector on an ongoing basis is also to be introduced.

Today’s announcement comes ahead of the conclusion of the second public sector benchmarking process, which is expected to be completed in the second half of this year.

The last benchmarking process returned an average pay increase of 9 per cent for public servants in return for some reforms of work practices.