Attracting and retaining public service staff a challenge, warns Howlin

Government pay policy will pose a key challenge in attracting and retaining a skilled workforce in the public service for the future, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin has said.

He said it was noticeable that "some pressures" were starting to come through in the context where private sector employers in Ireland were able to pay higher amounts for scarce or valuable skills.

"In the IT sector for example Central Statistics Office data suggests that pay increases have continued over the period of the recession. For some of our more mobile workforce – say, hospital doctors trained at State expense to a high calibre over many years – we are competing with employers across the world."

In a blog published by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, Mr Howlin said "choices will need to be made, as we emerge from the fiscal emergency and start broader based recruitment, to ensure that the pay policy for the public service continues to balance the effective delivery of public services and Government policy with sustainability and affordability into the future".

The Minister said for most public servants, where the public sector was the leading, or only, employer - for example in teaching or policing - “ we have to set pay rates that will be sufficiently attractive to attract the necessary number of high quality recruits, in particular graduates, while taking into account the other benefits of public service employment, including pensionability, and the Exchequer’s ability to pay”.

“Pay is not the only attraction that an employer can offer a future employee. We will have to develop and promote the civil and public service as a good employer, one interested in reform, in doing a good job and doing so in a way that is accountable, open to change and to improvement.”

Mr Howlin said in addition to direct cuts to take- home pay and pensions, the last few years had also seen some radical reform to the conditions of service of public servants. He said “ previously untouchable” areas of conditions, such as hours, flexible redeployments, sick and annual leave benefits, and so on” were all reduced.

He said the workforce in the public service workforce, “which was never large by OECD standards”, had fallen by 10 per cent through voluntary departures and non-filling of vacancies. He said new entrants since January 2013 had a radically revised pension scheme that better reflected earnings over the period of employment in the public service.

Mr Howlin said if there had been no changes made by various governments to pay and staffing levels after 2008 and if staffing increases had continued to rise on the same scale as in the previous 5 years, “we estimate the paybill could have been 50 per cent larger in 2013 at around €21billion, rather than €14.2 billion as was actually the case”.