Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

An extensive consultation process has been undertaken by those who authored the report over a 17 to 18 month period. We do not now need another report on a report on which there was already consultation. Having had the recommendations comprehensively set out and having had all that consultation with various stakeholders in the preparation of the report, the job now is to sequence an implementation agenda as to how we implement and make the vision set out in the report happen. The vision is quite radical in the sense that it seeks to move beyond examining the provision of the service in terms of Departments working within their own remit. The whole idea is to try to establish a senior public service cohort of people at senior management level who can ensure the delivery of the service is best guaranteed by a reorganisation that will deliver these services in a way that meets the expectations of our people. That is the purpose of the public sector reform idea. There is a recognition that our public service has considerable strengths, but it also obviously has many challenges. We need to proceed with a reform process along the principles of partnership which have served us well up to now. We have already had various initiatives. This process involves pulling all that together. The issue is not a question of the need for further consultation in that respect.

In regard to those who are employed in the task force, they are people who have been involved in change management issues, namely, senior managers within the public service who are aware and understand the personnel issues involved, who have an intimate acquaintance with how the service is organised, where the responsibilities reside and how services are implemented and have been developed. Therefore, they come with a collective expertise of public sector involvement and private sector experience. They bring that discipline to the table to examine what way we can assist in ensuring that the reform of the public sector is one that provides a better service, better outputs and a more co-ordinated and integrated approach ensuring that we organise the service in such a way as to meet the more challenging economic environment in which we will have to operate in the years ahead, regardless of the phase of the economic cycle in which we are currently. Having regard to our demographics and a range of other issues, the whole premise behind even health sector reform is governed by the demographics, specialisation, the need for reform of how work is organised, work practices, the need to provide greater discretion at the front line and the need to develop community services. A series of ideas must be brought together in a way that enables people to manage the existing service and also to change it for the future to ensure we can have a sustainable level of services provided as efficiently and effectively as possible in, for example, the health sector, although one could examine a range of other challenges in other areas of public policy.

For those reasons, this task force should be allowed to get on with its work. It will report at the end of the summer, probably in the early autumn, and we can debate it in the House and see where we will go from there with it, but at least we will have moved it on to a phase where we can start to see how we would go from A to Z, or even from A to D or A to F in starting this process of public sector reform, which is a complex issue. We have seen sectorally how complex and complicated it is and it is no less complex in terms of the service generally.

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