Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

The purpose of undertaking a comprehensive review and transformation of the public service requires in the first instance an analysis which is hopefully objective. An organisation such as the OECD is more likely to be objective than an internal review, which if conducted by the Government would immediately be regarded by the likes of Deputy Kenny as inadequate. The OECD was commissioned to conduct the review and I set out in my earlier reply its extensive, comprehensive and independent nature. It pointed to some strengths in the service and to the good things we are doing as well as to areas where, as a result of the way they developed, we need to reconsider the organisational remit in order to determine how we can better organise the delivery of public services.

Upon receiving the extensive and comprehensive report, we asked a number of people from within the public service, as well as people in business with a competence or interest in the area, or who had management experience of change programmes in other sectors, to set out an implementation programme for the comprehensive change envisaged in the OECD report. We have now received the report and are in the process of implementing it. That is the right way to go.

If the process is to be done properly, an overview should be taken by others of the strengths and weaknesses of the system. The peer review process should be done by others rather than within the service, where people will have a certain view that there is not much wrong at all.

There are people within the service who want to get on with having modern performance benchmarks in place where underperformance can be dealt with and where the need for deployment and flexibility, training and the provision of leadership can be dealt with. This leadership takes in how to identify and motivate people who can lead in these areas to manage what is a very complex series of organisations delivering critical services for the citizens of the country. We should not be simplistic about it while suggesting it is not an area which can be reformed. It can and it will be reformed.

Another point was made on getting in an outside body. The allocations made during the course of 2008 for Ministers were adhered to in the main and we have been able to come in within those expenditure parameters. After the six-month Exchequer returns we saw the rate of deterioration in our tax revenues which led to a gap, and we made decisions on making economies in our spending to ensure we came within what we set out to achieve this year. In the second six months of the year we identified further full-year savings, and these have been confirmed. Those savings remain in place with full-year effect for 2009.

The deterioration in our public finance position and the tax revenues coming in on that side have come as part of the global recession, which affects us no differently than anyone else. The rate of the deterioration has been such that we have ended up in the position of being down between 13% and 15% in tax revenues on what could have been expected based on growth forecasts from everybody in this economy as of November last year. That has opened a gap of €8 billion that needs to be closed.

We have insisted we will try to do that while not totally undermining our capital investment programme, the means by which we can build up capacity in the country, as well as the road and other transport networks. It will also build up our education system with school buildings, colleges, universities and institutes of technology etc. There are other areas of social spending, for example, we will spend €1.6 billion on social housing next year. All those allocations remain in place because we must provide those services through capital investments.

We have a gap in our current day to day spend that will have to be closed over a period. We need social partnership on the basis that I believe it is a problem-solving process rather than a problem-avoiding process. We will decide over a credible timeframe how we will close the gap and at the same time, to the greatest possible extent, adhere to the 2016 partnership principles. They are about trying to improve this society over the period ahead, knowing that the envisaged growth in revenues that fed into the ambition of that programme will now have to be modified as those resources will not be available to any Government in the immediate years ahead.

One either decides to do this in a way that is inclusive, participatory and gets people around a certain set of problems on the basis of a common analysis and understanding of the choices for dealing with them or we end up in a position that puts at risk the benefits deriving from such an approach. I believe that collaborative approach is the right one. It is not about outsourcing the Government's responsibility regarding expenditure programmes or public service numbers, whether in respect of the particular advisory body the Deputy is talking about or others. Ultimately, the Government remains responsible for the political decisions it will have to take, but it will do so on the basis of the best advice and collaboration that we can muster in a limited timeframe, working with the people who have been part of this country's success in the past. When the pressure comes on in tough times it is all the more reason why one should work in that way, rather than simply regarding it as a process to be used when it comes to the dispersal of extra resources that came about because of the good times we had in the past. That is the approach that is being taken.

Common public service contracts constitute one of the recommendations to provide for easy flexibility across services, with local authority staff coming into the Civil Service. That cannot be provided by fiat, but will have to be negotiated with public service unions. People have to buy into this process of transformation for public service reform also. We intend to proceed with it and will work with people in that regard, but we have a voluntary industrial relations culture which must be respected. We will have to sit down with people to get through that process. The benefit of the task force report we are discussing in these series of questions is that they have visibly set out for all stakeholders in the service how we will proceed in prioritising the work as identified in this report, which also reflects the OECD's priorities. That is the way to proceed but it will not be done by a Minister going off into a corner and devising a common contract saying "Here it is, I have it" and when it is published, saying "Am I not very efficient because I have done it within a week of the report's publication?" That is nonsense and it is no way to govern. One must sit down with those affected by the proposed reforms and get their agreement on the basis that it will improve the workplace and career prospects, and provide training for people in the service so they can achieve their potential. It should get away from crisis management and get on with the more strategic approach that respects the various stakeholders' positions in this reform programme process. It will probably best guarantee its success by doing so.

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