Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

One may or may not be involved, but if one is asked a straight question one should get a straight answer. Politicians have to give the lead in that regard and I strongly endorse what Deputy McDonald said about that.

I do not accept that the instinct of government is to protect the State, but it is to protect and support the people as best we can. It is true that countervailing issues often present themselves. The Deputy asked particularly about the statute law revision programme, which is in its final phase now. As she knows, two pieces of legislation have been enacted on foot of that. It was basically cleanse the Statute Book of redundant and non-applicable law. That difficult job of work was undertaken initially by the Attorney General's office and latterly by my Department over the last few years.

Deputy McDonald mentioned the issue of outsourcing. No more than quangos, outsourcing is often an effective way of doing things. Sometimes, however, it not effective or efficient. I have cited an example before. Wexford County Hospital used to have its own laundry. Wexford happens to have one of the most efficient laundries in the country, Celtic Linen, that provides linen services and scrubs to hospitals around the country, as well as to hotels. One would not replicate a laundry on a tiny scale instead of outsourcing that service to an effective provider of daily fresh linen.

The idea of outsourcing is that one makes rational decisions on the most effective and efficient way of delivering a service. We do not label one service as "good" and another as "bad" because it is delivered by a private sector worker. All workers are of equal value, so it is a matter of making rational choices that are efficient and effective. It also allows public sector workers to focus on things they are best at. There will of course be cases where public sector services are utilised by the private sector because that is the most effective and efficient way of delivering them.

Deputy McDonald referred to senior civil servants. My own Department has done a lot of work on examining the contractual base for appointing senior civil servants. Mr. Paul Reid is a practical example of that, if he will forgive me for saying so since he is here. Mr. Reid was recruited on a contract basis to head up the reform and delivery office, with a set purpose, objective and skills base. Similarly, other people we have employed, like the head of the office of Government procurement who has a skills base in procurement, were engaged on a contractual basis with set delivery targets. The chief information officer was recruited on the same basis, coming from a skills set with a specific mandate to do a job of work over a set period of time that is measurable. I think we will see more and more of that happening within the public service. People will come in for specific timelines, on a contract to do a particular job of work.

The HSE's single integrated finance system was mentioned. In the roll-out of shared services we first looked at HR management, which is up and running and will be completed by January 2015. The second one is the payroll shared service, which is in the process of being set in place in three locations, including the midlands and the west. That is a work in progress.

The next one we examined is the financial management shared service. We are doing a scoping exercise on that at the moment and while I do not have the feedback on that, it is coming. We are looking at how we have a more integrated financial management system that brings efficiencies. There is a model in Norway that presented itself to me, but we have also looked at others to see how that can be done. It is in the early stages of scoping to have an integrated financial system that does financial back-office supports more efficiently. There will be subsets of that whether they are in the local government system or in the HSE. I hope I have answered all the questions.