Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I propose to take Questions Nos.1 to 3, inclusive, together.

The review of the Irish public service, "Towards an Integrated Public Service", published in 2008, benchmarked the public service in Ireland against other comparable countries and made recommendations as to the further direction of public service reform. It confirmed the many strengths of the system and identified challenges that needed to be addressed. Transforming public services represents the blueprint for a new type of unified public service focused on common goals, with greater co-operation and reduced boundaries between sectors, organisations and professions, with a much greater integration of services around user needs and far greater efficiency in internal data sharing and administration through shared service models.

Progress has been made in a number of areas to date, including progress in a range of instruments in the human resource area which continue to contribute to the implementation of expenditure savings for this year, notably the incentivised scheme of early retirement in the public service, the special Civil Service career break scheme and the shorter working year scheme, together with the moratorium on the filling of public sector vacancies by recruitment or promotion. A new e-Governmentstrategy for 2010 has been approved by the Cabinet committee on transforming public services. The strategy highlights new approaches to overcome some of the difficulties there are with putting certain services on-line and should thereby help to achieve an improvement in the use of electronic means for delivering public services.

The national public procurement operations unit, established in 2009, continues to leverage the public service's buying power by organising procurement of common goods and services across the public service. During 2009, in addition to achieving better value on procurement spend, savings of €27 million were achieved by public bodies with the support of the unit. It is intended that significant additional savings will be targeted in 2010. Work is ongoing on specific proposals in the area of shared serviceson the basis that there are significant potential savings associated with such initiatives. Work is currently being advanced on shared services in a number of sectors, including human resources, pensions administration, payroll and financial management.

The organisational review programme has been extended in order that all Government Departments and major offices will be reviewed within the next three years. The team, which is based in my Department, carries out and publishes assessments of the capacity of individual Departments and major offices to meet their challenges over the coming years. Four organisations were reviewed last year - the Department of Health and Children, the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, the Central Statistics Office and the Property Registration Authority. These reviews are due to be published shortly and will be accompanied by follow-up action plans on the key findings prepared by each of the four organisations. An additional three organisations will be reviewed this year, namely, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. My Department will also be reviewed this year, with this review being led by a senior official from the Department of Finance.

Work is progressing in regard to the development of new performance and governance frameworks for State agencies and the greater use of service level agreements in this context. Work is also under way on the establishment of the senior public service to centrally manage and deploy top public servants. Initially, the service will be introduced in the Civil Service, before being extended across the wider public service.

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