Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

In the limited time available to me, I wish to address some of the points raised by the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, regarding public service reform, an important issue about which his Government has done nothing. Reform of our public service, institutions of State and public expenditure decision making system could make a huge contribution in the medium term to the cost of administering the State's services. Week after week, the Committee of Public Accounts considers various stories of overspending by one Department or another. Year after year, the Comptroller and Auditor General produces annual reports detailing the breathtaking scale of waste. From time to time, his office carries out value for money audits which expose the extent to which we are not getting value for money. The budgetary cycle is such is that we are usually examining expenditure after the event.

Without being specific, the Taoiseach stated that our economy needed structural reform. Our public service is certainly in need of structural reform. At the last election, the Labour Party committed to appointing a Minister who would drive public service reform. The Croke Park framework continues to have merit but its potential will never be realised unless it is presided over by a Minister. I do not wish to undermine the work being done by Mr. Fitzpatrick, in whom I have confidence, but to acknowledge that the wider reform agenda will not be implemented without a Minister who is accountable for it to this House. I remind Deputies of the experience of benchmarking. Some trade union leaders claim they were minded to run with certain reforms but public service management showed no appetite for change. How are we to reform the public service if sections of its management do not believe reforms are necessary?

In addition, we need to redefine the relationship between Ministers and their Departments and between a Minister and his or her Secretary General. Nineteenth century notions of personal ministerial responsibility coupled with legal ministerial responsibility for all official departmental acts and the legal competence of civil servants to perform such acts without any necessary recourse to the Minister lead to a situation where accountability to the Oireachtas is demanded on an entirely fictitious basis. It is absurd to persist in the make believe notion that a Minister is personally responsible for every action in his or her Department no matter how trivial it may be or how remote he or she was from it. It is a dereliction of accountability to excuse a Minister because he or she did not know something in his Department that he or she should have known. It is not acceptable that a Minister might fail to intervene when he or she should have done so or neglect to stay informed of potential, as well as actual, problems. Our system suits weak Ministers and traditional civil servants. When cock-ups occur, they circle the wagons and engage in collective self-defence. The Minister's impenetrable corporate shroud protects the civil servant and Minister alike from individual examination and accountability. This system breeds the kind of Minister who sees himself or herself as an ambassador-at-large who photographs well but does not read a brief. There is a world of difference between being an ambassador plenipotentiary and being a Minister who wields executive power.

We need to revise the Ministers and Secretaries Act and the Public Service Management Act so as to clarify the functions that can be transferred to the Secretary General of a Department. If a Minister takes a decision personally, he or she should say so and account for it. Where the Department takes a decision under a delegated power then the senior official should say so and account for it but the Minister must account for the degree of supervision exercised over the Department in respect of delegated powers. Senior civil servants are important people who should get credit for their achievements but they should also take the blame when their decisions turn out badly.

Deputy Bruton referred on several occasions to the report on public expenditure decision making I prepared for the Committee of Public Accounts in 2005. That report questioned the appropriateness of our traditional system for modern conditions. Sometimes I think Deputy Bruton is the only Member of this House who read it. The committee adopted the report and endorsed its recommendations to the then Minister for Finance. The Minister took some of the recommendations on board but did not act on the more meaningful ones. The report sought to examine whether the traditional budgetary cycle is adequate to today's conditions. The committee took the view that the Estimates formation cycle, that is, the so-called Estimates campaign, and the bilateral negotiations between line Departments and the Department of Finance should commence much earlier, perhaps as early as January, and end by summer. It was agreed that the Estimates volumes and budget day documentation should contain information on existing levels of service and their full cost in order to assist the Parliament in undertaking output and performance scrutiny and to enable Deputies to understand fully what moneys are being voted, to what end and for what level of service, and what is old and what is new money. Apart from the critical issue of timeliness, the traditional practice of taking last year's allocation line by line and increasing it by inflation is no longer good enough.

It is ironic to observe the process in recent days whereby information is reluctantly fed to the Opposition because the Government is in extremis and desperately wants to hold on to whatever is left of our economic sovereignty. My report suggested that changing the timing of the Estimates cycle would allow earlier completion of this phase of the budgetary cycle. This would require the following changes - abandonment of the abridged Book of Estimates; earlier publication of the White Paper on income and expenditure; publication of the Estimates and the budget as a single event staged in September or October before proceeding immediately to the parliamentary scrutiny of Estimates and Votes and approval or appropriation; and alterations in planned expenditure to be made, if necessary, as a result of parliamentary scrutiny.

The existing system of scrutiny of the Estimates by the relevant committees is not effective. We considered the establishment of a budget committee but decided instead to recommend better resourcing for the Select Committee on Finance and the Public Service so that it could properly scrutinise the Estimates of all Departments. The specialist back-up unit for this committee might have the power to request, where necessary, relevant papers and records from Departments. A consequence of this enhanced role for the Select Committee on Finance and the Public Service would enable the other sectoral committees to analyse, in more detail, the level of service being given by the Department within its remit.

Timeliness of information release is critical, particularly in respect of the Estimates. The situation we now have is unsatisfactory. The ex ante phase of scrutiny is little more than nominal. The Revised Book of Estimates is still not published in a timely fashion and scrutiny in committee is rushed and often cursory. Parliament is often dealing with spending "proposals" half way through the year to which they relate. The fact is that so many of the routine daily operations of government are connected to the budgetary process. What is good for the health of the budgetary process is good for the health of the overall system of governance.

We must then turn our attention to how this House does its business. Sensible changes are crying out to be made. An overly defensive, discredited Government will never make the necessary changes. If we are to restore confidence in politics, so badly undermined by the appalling scale of dereliction of duty by Fianna Fáil Ministers in this and the previous Government, the new Government will have no choice but to implement measures that will restore public respect for this House.

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