A "root and branch review" of State services is required to remove costs and barriers that are preventing the public availing of services they are entitled to, the Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey told the Kenmare economic conference today writes Simon Carswell,Finance Correspondent.
In a hard-hitting speech on how the public sector needs to change – delivered just four days before the Budget – Mr Dempsey said that a downside of more than a decade of prosperity was that people came to believe that “money solved everything”, but that those kind of solutions may not have been the best options available.
“Duplication and unnecessary bureaucracy inevitably often prevented what started out as a good intention not in fact delivering for the citizen,” said Mr Dempsey.
“We need a root-and-branch review of all services to remove these extra costs, duplications and barriers that are preventing the public – or making it very difficult for them – from availing of the services to which they are entitled.”
Speaking at the Dublin Economic Workshop’s 31st annual economic policy conference, Mr Dempsey said that it was “extraordinarily difficult” for any Minister at present to take “the helicopter view – to stand still and look at how we re-define the civil and public service for the coming decades”.
“It is extraordinarily difficult because of the current financial crisis which necessarily focuses all minds on reductions and cuts and savings and so on,” he said.
“It’s difficult to think speculatively about making the civil and public service fit for purpose as a magnet employer over the longer term. It is difficult but imperative – it has to be done."
However, he defended the role of the public sector in the financial crisis, saying that there had been “quite an amount of finger pointing, largely at the public sector”.
“The public sector are not responsible for what is happening today either here in Ireland or internationally in the banking sector,” he said.
Mr Dempsey said that the emphasis in the public sector needed to change from "activity to outcome".
"For too long, we have focused on how many hours we're going to put into this, this and this, and not enough on what the outcomes should be. Outcomes are what matter, not activities, not time spent. Outcomes are what should be measured, not processes. We are guilty of that within the public service."
He said that to achieve the radical proposals he was suggesting, the public sector needed the Department of Finance re-establish its role as "the department of the public service" – "a role that become somewhat diluted over the past decade or so," he said.
Mr Dempsey said the public sector has "impermeable silos" that need to become "permeable" so there can "horizontal mobility" enabling civil servants to move around and gain "valuable and varied experience".
He said the failure to reward good performance "rots an organisation from the ground up" and that it was "deeply de-motivating" for high performers when "nobody notices the difference between what they do and what is done – or not done – by lazy or incompetent colleagues".
“The civil service doesn’t deal well with underperformers. That has to change. In this regard, we need to become as demanding as the private sector, where expectations are clearly articulated, where failure to deliver earns a verbal warning, then a written warning, then a second written warning before the person heads for the exit door.”
“At the moment, even when there’s real and present cause for firing an underperformer within the service there’s a wariness, based on fear that the person will take them to court for compensation and the taxpayers will be furious.”
Mr Dempsey said that companies in the private sector know that morale improves when “action is taken against dead weights and good, contributory staff are valued”.
“’Valued’, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean ‘financially rewarded’,” he said. “We’ve taken a crude view of rewards and incentives, in recent times. There’s more to both than money.”
In his speech, the Minister pointed to the experience of a US doctor who wanted to discover how breakthroughs happen in healthcare and found one successful hospital with “off-the-scale survival rates” where there was a “deeply committed” consultant.
Mr Dempsey said the doctor described this as “positive deviance”, which the Minister defined as “kind of a posh term for catching people doing things right”.
“That’s what we must aim at, for the Irish public and civil service,” he said.