Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

We had 2,500 submissions from people on the frontline with really good ideas that I want to incorporate. When I was going into the Department yesterday, a man stopped me and said:

Minister, you're doing a good job. We're waiting for somebody to bring about reform. I've been 40 years in the public service.

So public servants do not have closed minds and they are all taxpayers. Most of them can see ways ahead. They are the ones whose euro are being wasted. They want decent services and to ensure that expenditure is not wasted. They see where it is being wasted and they want better value for money. We have superb people in the public service who are delivering really well and we want to unleash their potential fully.

Senators will see that we will go much further than the programme for Government. The restructuring of the public service will require a flattening of structures, as well as devolving responsibilities and budget lines so that people at the coalface can make decisions themselves. In that way we will not have this oversight layer of people with rank who must take numerous decisions to approve matters. People who know how to spend money will therefore be able to do so. I have spoken to my ministerial colleagues on the same basis so that they should unleash the deliverers of services, while understanding the pool of money available and properly evaluating its expenditure. New thinking is at the core of the spending review.

Once the spending review's proposals have been brought to Government, I intend to bring them before this House so that we can have a full debate on them.

There will be resistance to change, of that there is no doubt. Some people cannot seen things being done differently. I do not know if most Members do this but I always renew my car tax online The payment of second home charge, introduced by the previous Government, can be done online. That system is a very effective tax collection system. It is a good idea and why can we not have more of that? We do not need to set up a bureaucracy to do everything.

With due respect to the previous Administration, there has been a tendency to set up a new quango for everything and that had many consequences. It isolated the parent Department from responsibility. New systems were set up and all these bodies had chief executives, directors of publicity and whatever else. They were not accountable because Deputies could not ask a parliamentary question about most of them. I have tried to meet everyone concerned since I came to office in recent months. I met the chief executive officers of the non-commercial semi-State bodies. I told them that most of them were doing a great job but, unfortunately, we could not afford most of them, that in better times we might be able to come back to them but that now it is incumbent on them, in the first instance, to examine their consciences to see if they can amalgamate or return the function to the parent department. The other side is that there are State agencies that are more efficient than the Civil Service. I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater but I want to have a proper analysis of the outputs from State agencies and so on.

I do not want the notion of outsourcing to be a bugbear. Many services are outsourced now. In my local authority area Wexford County Council has determined not to continue with refuse collection because it was in competition with the commercial sector and it was becoming unaffordable.