Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

I am glad to have an opportunity of speaking on this Bill. As you and I know, a Cheann Comhairle, we have had public service reform in the past, we even had a dedicated Minister for the public service in years gone by. However, over the years, the mission statement has become clouded and we have arrived at a situation in which major public service reform is required. It is also demanded by the public. As previous speakers said, there is an expectation among the public that services will be delivered from whatever Department. Even in difficult financial times such as those in which we are living, there is still such an expectation.

We must examine the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the services we provide and how they are delivered. A problem that has arisen over the years is that Governments have devolved responsibility to outside bodies that were previously attached to Ministers, who, in turn, were responsible to this House. How often have we heard, over the past years, that the Minister has no responsibility to the House for something? Sitting on that side of the House, we were told again and again that X, Y or Z was not the responsibility of the Minister, despite the fact that all Ministers had budgets from which they took sums of money that they handed over to bodies that were not accountable to anyone. We have now come to a juncture at which we must ask ourselves some questions. How efficient and cost-effective are the services we have, and are they delivered on time and in a responsive way?

I compliment those who are dedicated public servants, of which there are massive number. Ninety-nine percent of all public servants are dedicated public servants who wish to do a good job but are often frustrated for various reasons, find themselves hamstrung and cannot respond in the way they want to. Whether we like it or not, we have handed over responsibilities to various quangos, to use a word I do not resort to very often - unelected and unaccountable bodies that have taken upon themselves a great deal of autonomy in the way they do their jobs. That must finish.

What is proposed here is the transfer of responsibility from the Minister for Finance in respect of a number of services, including the entirety of functions relating to the public service. These transfers include the functions of the Minister for Finance with regard to a number of offices currently under the remit of the Department of Finance, including the Commissioner of Valuation, or the Valuation Office. This has been the subject of some discussion in recent times, with particular reference to how valuations are arrived at in determining rates, in view of the fact that ratepayers are having great difficulty meeting these demands in a recession. Other functions transferred include those relating to the State Laboratory, the Commissioners of Public Works, the OPW, the Public Appointments Service and the Commission for Public Service Appointments.

As Deputies know, there was reform about seven years ago in which the Civil Service and Local Appointments Commission, which we had lived with for many years, was changed to a different system. Many of us spoke against that at the time, and we were right, because it did not improve efficiency or the quality of life of those within the service and did not at all address the issue of job satisfaction, which is important for those involved in the delivery of services to the public.

The first thing we must recognise is that the public expect a response. Sometimes the response is fast, efficient and effective but sometimes it is not. There are various reasons for that failure. It may be because of a lack of staffing, a lack of focus, or a lack of responsibility or shared responsibility. My experience has been that where responsibility is shared between two, three or four bodies, eventually nobody accepts responsibility. Everybody has authority, everybody has power, but nobody accepts responsibility. That is how it has been for a long time. I hope the Bill will address this in a meaningful way.

Another proposal is to place public service reform functions, for the first time, on a statutory footing. In other words, the legislation is there to back it up, and all that is needed is to refer to the legislation and follow up accordingly. How often have we seen legislation of a creeping nature which evolves of its own accord, or the appearance of rules and regulations that take on a life of their own and have progressed to the extent that one would scarcely recognise the original legislation?

The Bill also transfers the responsibility for managing public expenditure within the overall envelope set by the Government, while the Minister for Finance will retain responsibility for overall budgetary parameters. Many years ago, the copious application forms that were required to be filled out for a simple tax return were a source of irritation in the House. Form 11 was devised as a simple answer to what was a frustrating problem for many people. Over the years, however, that has evolved as well. A couple of other forms and a couple of other pages were added on, and eventually we arrived back to where we were 25 years ago. A simple local authority housing application form used to have two pages. My belief is that it should be possible to fit onto two A4 pages, printed on both sides, information about an applicant that is sufficient to give the adjudicating authorities a clear impression of who the person is, his or her family circumstances, and his or her entitlement to housing of whatever nature. However, it is now no longer possible to do this.

We now have forms of 27 pages and more, some of them in duplicate, with the same questions asked again and again. I cannot understand the point of it but I know it causes people to spend more time perusing them. It now takes four people to do the job that one person did previously because of the volume of correspondence that is placed in front of them. We all know, as Members of the House, that when one gets a copious document one looks at it once or twice and then pushes it to one side. If there are 40 or 50 pages in it, one will push it to one side a second time or a third time. The problem is that the content within the document may need urgent attention, which it would have got if it had been simplified in the first place. A situation has evolved in which shovelling paper from one desk to another has become so laborious that it occupies people's time in such a way as to deflect from their original mission and the job they are supposed to do.

As legislators, we are supposed to know about legislation. Most in this House have a fairly good idea of what legislation entails, what are people's entitlements and how the law should function. However, we regularly get lectures from everybody on what the law consists of, or we find that perhaps somebody went to court about something. We know that all legislation is subject to court decisions and so on, but there was a time when any public representative was able to tell a constituent in five minutes about his or her entitlement to local authority housing, a medical card or social welfare payments of one kind or another, or about issues of planning permission in urban and rural areas, and could walk away in the clear knowledge that good advice had been given.

What happened? Evolution, through changes many of which were introduced by that august body, An Bord Pleanála, and others on the recommendation of local authorities or the County and City Managers Association, the combination of which leaves us requiring a PhD to study some of the documents placed before us to find out what exactly they are supposed to do. One would need somebody to carry around the various documentation and such a person would be gainfully employed - and seriously, laboriously and physically employed - in the course thereof.

Reform of the public service must have at its core a determination to reduce the volume of duplication, cross-referencing and repetition of the same performance by four or five people when one person is all that is required to do the job. This Bill, coming as it does at a very difficult time, has been brought upon us out of necessity. If it had been introduced eight or ten years ago the necessity now would not have arisen because the problems would have been resolved or would never have arisen and we would have a much more efficient system operating cost effectively, rapidly and in a far more satisfactory way from the point of view of the people we represent.

Something for which I try not to blame myself, although it has become popular for everybody to blame themselves for everything, is shirking responsibility. If we as elected representatives shirk responsibility because of a dislike for doing the unsavoury, we hand over responsibility to somebody else. People who are not elected will gladly take it upon themselves and they will evolve what they see as legislation-based rules and regulations for perhaps the betterment of the community or perhaps not. However, this is what happens when public representatives and legislators opt out and resile from the responsibilities they have been given and the job is taken over by somebody else.

What we now have on a regular basis are people presuming to have responsibility and authority, and acting thereon in a way which raises serious questions, is laboriously repetitive and which eventually grinds down the system to make it entirely dysfunctional. A classic example is the wisdom of the House a number of years ago in creating a new body called the HSE. Like many people at the time, I was very reluctant to do so. We saw it as an off-loading of responsibility by the powers that be, namely, a Department, and handing it over to a private body, which is what the HSE is. A private body took over full responsibility and the Government of the day and the Department handled over the money lock, stock and barrel. This body runs the services according to the way it sees fit.

At this stage, it is no secret that things have not run in a satisfactory fashion. The reason for this is because there was no accountability. It is in respect of accountability that the major part of reform has to focus in the time ahead. If we do not have this focus, the legislation we propose to pass will have no effect and in a couple of years we will find ourselves in the same situation and people will ask why the services do not work, why services are not available to the public which wants them and why things do not happen when they are supposed to. This should not happen because once we put in place legislation we should accept responsibility for it. We should try to ensure it works in accordance with the wishes of the legislators and not in accordance with somebody's interpretation.

I am not a legal practitioner and nor do I wish to be but I remember a time when often in the courts a Minister's Second Stage or Committee Stage statements were quoted as a means of determining what the Minister's intentions were at the time the legislation was passed. Nowadays, one could have somebody else's intentions; it could be a second-hand or third-hand interpretation of what the Minister's intentions were at the time. Regularly, people suggest they know what the Minister was thinking when he introduced legislation. I have been around the House for quite a while and most of the time I find it difficult to understand what anybody is thinking. How can somebody once or twice removed come to the conclusion they knew what a Minister was thinking when legislation was introduced without ever making reference to the debates in the House during which the legislation was passed?

I hope this legislation is effective and that it sets a new standard of accountability for those areas in which we do not have accountability. We have accountability in some areas and we have good and efficient delivery of service. However, standards have slipped over the years. As we all know, when I was first elected to the House when one tabled a parliamentary question one thought about it and those to whom the question was addressed read it carefully. They did not come to a conclusion as to what one was thinking when one tabled the question, they answered the question exactly and precisely as it was asked and they were right to do so because that is the way it should be. Over the years, this became vague. I do not blame the present Administration because it is addressing the issue.

I remember when I was in Opposition tabling questions to which I knew the answer. People might wonder why I tabled a question if I knew the answer but there are always benefits to getting confirmation that the person to whom the question is addressed also knows the answer and is prepared to put it on the record of the House. Once upon a time, if a Minister gave a misleading or inaccurate reply to a parliamentary question his or her resignation was called for. Over the years, we have slipped because we allowed everything to pass and slide. Now, we have a convoluted system that is hugely bureaucratic and repetitive, and many systems are at cross-purposes to each other and have multiple responsibilities or no responsibility at all. This is a sad scene.

The way we have evolved the delivery of services is not in accordance with best practice, the wishes of the public or, in very many cases, with those engaged in delivery of those public services. For my sins, I served on local authorities and on the old health boards, as did most other Members for their respective sins, of which there are many I have no doubt. Over the past ten or 15 years, reform has taken place in the local authority system and today nobody can honestly say with hand on heart this reform has benefited anybody. It has made it more unworkable and created more bureaucratic enterprises in the system than ever before. The old health boards were faulted and a previous Government decided to change them. As I stated, it introduced the HSE. Prior to that, it increased and reduced the number of health boards and eventually ended up with a mishmash which was unaccountable, irresponsible and had to be changed.

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