Mr. Ger Deering:

In terms of culture, I do not think the quality of service or where there is a poor quality of service is a cultural issue because, as has already been stated here today, there are excellent examples of really good services being provided by the public service. We saw that during Covid but we, in fact, see it many times. I think it is something a bit more basic in the sense that it really depends on people having champions and having an open mind.

It also depends upon the fact that when people design a service, it is designed from the outside in and not from the inside out. It is very tempting if one is working in an organisation to design one’s service, not necessarily to suit oneself, but where one is not thinking outwardly. In some countries there are actual designers where when a new public service is being designed, these people almost represent the consumer, that is, the person who is going to use that service.

Many public bodies have started asking what the public wants from their website and not what these bodies themselves want to achieve from it. Until all organisations consult with their consumers and customers and the people who use their service, listen to them and then design their service to suit them, we will have these problems with quality.

The reason I am saying that it is not cultural because if it was cultural, it would be across the public service. We probably have more examples of good service now than of poor service, which allows us perhaps to focus better on the areas where service needs to be developed.

Another reason services are not as good as they could be is that we often tend to tack on things. This happens by virtue of legislation. An example I mentioned in my presentation is that the Office of the Ombudsman is about to get a significant new role in respect of people being able to make protected disclosures. I am perhaps going to make a pitch here but the office needs to have the resources to do that. Sometimes we give additional functions to an office without thinking about the resources that are needed. One cannot just keep tacking on services and sometimes one needs to do a very fundamental review of the services being provided. If something is going to be added on, perhaps one needs to step back to ask that if one is designing this today, would one just add that piece or would one just do something fundamentally different?

I would say that this is more about leadership than culture. There is a great culture of innovation in many parts of the public service and I know that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is trying to drive a culture of innovation.

The other thing that we must link to that also is that we need to be careful about a culture of blame. By that I mean that if one is going to work in the public service and be innovative, that involves taking risks. When people take genuine risks, have measured the risks and have genuinely tried to make an improvement and it goes wrong, we need to be very careful not to demonise people when things do not go as they should do. There will be mistakes and problems in any walk of life. For me, the important part is that people learn from any mistakes like that, learn from any developments and improve their services accordingly.

On reaching the utopia in respect of FOI, where people put information up, I believe we are going to have to persuade such people from a very practical point of view. There are two elements to this. One is the ideal of what we should do and the culture of openness and transparency, which we have got to keep promoting. We also have to take, however, a very practical approach and persuade people that not giving this information is not in their best interest or the most efficient way to run their business. There are two approaches to this. It is the cultural thing of doing this because it is the right thing to do but there is also the idea of doing it because it is the practical thing to do and if we can demonstrate - and I believe we can - the amount of time that goes into dealing with a FOI request. We can ask the person who has now released all of that documentation under FOI to one person or requester, what was to stop the person who has received that request putting that information up on the website the day that that document became a document or was created, or whatever the case may be? I fully accept that there are areas such as tendering where there are measurable sensitivities and that not everything can be put on a website or made publicly available, but if it can be given out on FOI then it could have been put on the website in the first instance. I come back to the fact that I will concentrate on the areas where it is public and not obviously personal information that people are seeking under FOI.

The position is different in different bodies. FOI is around for a long time, as am I, unfortunately, and I remember when it was introduced where people saw it as a kind of intrusion into the work of that body. We have moved passed that and I certainly hope that we have. We need to get rid of any last vestiges of the notion that people asking a public body for public information is somehow an intrusion. It is not but is an entitlement, is good governance and is how we should go.