Mr. Ronnie Downes:

I thank the Deputy.

First, let me acknowledge the point he made about heroics. Certainly, this has been a tough year for everyone and for those in the health service and in various parts of our public service who deliver and continue to deliver public services to a high standard during those tough times. I thank him for that acknowledgement.

With regard to remote working, that has been a relatively new experience for most civil and public servants over the past year. We have gone from a position of 98% or 99% of civil servants working in the traditional office to it being completely reversed with 97% or 98% of civil servants working remotely. Of course, that is not the case in the health service where certain front-line workers have had to keep working.

Regarding the Civil Service experience, there is much working ongoing with surveys, getting feedback and a sense of the impact remote working has had on public service performance. There is probably more work to do to collate and interpret that information, but the initial signs we are seeing are that people have adapted very well to the remote working environment. Departments continue to deliver on their core missions.

Looking forward, the Deputy asked whether we would develop an indicator for that. Certainly, there are some operational indicators which would be relatively routine to build in into the future regarding the number of staff who work either on site or remotely or in a blended working environment, which some people think we are evolving into. Ultimately, the purpose of this performance report, subject to the committee’s views, is and should remain not so much on the operational issues but on what is being delivered in terms of public services, outcomes and impacts.

The Deputy asked how we select outcomes and impacts. In the first instance, the people who know and the organisations that know their business best are in the Departments and are the Departments themselves. It is a matter for Departments in the first instance to come up with output and impact indicators. Members will see throughout the report that, for each organisation, we have broken down the indicators very simply into outputs and impacts. Outputs are things that are delivered on year to year.

Looking at page 12 of the report, which refers to income supports for children, for example, there are the number of monthly child benefit payments, and €1.2 million is delivered by the Department of Social Protection. There are also listed several impact indicators, such as the percentage of children at risk of poverty. We can see that percentage has declined, that is to say the situation has improved to some degree, certainly since 2017, and there are the percentage of children in consistent poverty and deprivation rates. Looking at supplementary payments, there are impact indicators there such as the percentage of people without heating at some stage during the past year, which is something people can understand what that means, and the percentage of people who are unable to keep their homes adequately warm. Rather than just providing the number of household benefit payments, which is 440-odd thousand, which the Department is delivering, it is about what it is actually doing in terms of the impact on people’s lives.

There is also the method of how we select the indicators. There are opportunities as we implement, embed and evolve our processes for performance supporting and accountability, including the role of this and various sectoral committees, for members as parliamentarians and in committees to ask questions, challenge or make suggestions to counterparts and colleagues in Departments as to whether there are other indicators members would like to see to give a better flavour or a more rounded account of what is being accomplished in different areas and what are the things that matter most. Perhaps I will leave it there for the moment.