Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 4 to 6, inclusive, together.

The OECD review of the Irish public service, Towards an Integrated Public Service, published in April 2008, benchmarked the public service in Ireland against other comparable countries and made recommendations as to the further direction of public service reform. The programme is designed to create flexibility in the deployment of people and other resources, to improve performance by organisations and individuals and to address the immediate priority of securing maximum value for public spending. The public service agreement, agreed at Croke Park, provides the industrial relations environment for the successful implementation of the transforming public services agenda.

To date, progress has been made across a broad range of areas of the TPS programme. In the human resource area, for example, there have been four main instruments that have contributed to the implementation of expenditure savings, notably the incentivised scheme of early retirement in the public service, the special Civil Service career break scheme, the shorter working year scheme and the moratorium on the filling of public service vacancies by recruitment or promotion. There has already been a reduction of 12,000 in public service numbers since the end of 2008 with no reduction in services. In addition, recently a voluntary early retirement and a voluntary redundancy scheme have been approved for certain categories of staff in the public health service. The purpose of the schemes is to achieve a permanent reduction in the numbers employed in the public health sector from 2011 onwards and to facilitate health service reform.

An e-Government strategy has been put in place. It is being implemented to achieve an improvement in the use of electronic means for delivering public services, and the savings that go with that. It should be noted that according to the latest EU Commission e-Government benchmarks, Ireland's ranking for online sophistication has improved from 17th position before the report came forward to joint 7th position. A rolling e-Government programme that includes 20 individual projects has been initiated and is operational.

A national procurement service was also established on foot of the transforming public services agenda. It is about improving the public service's buying power by organising procurement of common goods and services across the public service. It is achieving better value on procurement spend and savings in the region of €35 million have been identified and implemented already. With regard to shared services, work is ongoing on specific proposals and there are significant potential savings associated with such initiatives. Work is being advanced on shared services in several sectors, in areas that include human resources, pensions administration, payroll and financial management.

There has been an extension of the operation of the organisational review programme so that all Departments and major offices will be reviewed by the end of 2012. Work is also progressing on the development of new performance and governance frameworks for State agencies and the greater use of service level agreements. This is happening against a background of agency amalgamation and abolition and fewer staff numbers. There has also been the reconstitution of the top level appointments committee.

The terms of the Croke Park agreement provide a means by which we can radically transform the public service through greater flexibility, redeployment, changed work practices and overall reductions in numbers. We will require good leadership from management as well as staff if the commitment to avoid further pay reductions and compulsory redundancies is to be honoured. The Government has no wish to back away from the commitment into which it entered at Croke Park, but it can do this only on the basis of full and comprehensive delivery by all of the parties. The Government considers that any party that chooses to remain outside the provisions of the agreement cannot expect to benefit from the commitments it gave as part of the agreement. That is our clear position.

That is an update of the progress to date on this matter.

See this speech in context