Dr. Patrick Moran:

The primary aim of the public service performance report is to increase transparency and accountability around the delivery of the outputs that were intended to be funded through the budget allocations the previous year. That is then supposed to feed into discussions for the following year, with the various Vote sections in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, around whether those targets were being achieved, if they were not being achieved, why not and how come the resources that were assigned for that purpose did or did not result in their delivery. The transparency and accountability piece provokes those discussions and also gives a really broad but not very deep insight into some of those issues.

There are a lot of other performance budgeting and evidence-based policymaking processes over the course of the year that are supposed to build on that. An example is the spending review process, where Departments and Vote sections can pick up on issues that are uncovered in the true performance budgeting reporting, and do a deeper dive into them using a lot of the data we will have collected. The other benefit of performance reporting like this is around budget time, when naturally enough much of the discussion and focus is on the additional funding and new measures, whereas 95% of the expenditure is on established programmes and measures that are already funded. Looking at the overall performance draws attention to where there might be opportunities to use the existing or base allocation better, so it rebalances that discussion as well. That is the root with which it is supposed to influence-----