Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I support the Bill. I am disappointed that the Minister will not agree to allow it to go into committee. We are setting down that replies should be given within a specified period. One could argue that the specified period might be too short and that could be amended but the idea that there is some right or power of local authorities not to answer correspondence other than the exceptions highlighted by Deputy Niall Collins seems to be a power local authorities should not have. They should have no right to refuse to reply.

When I was Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs and subsequently when I was the senior Minister in the Department of Social Protection one thing I put my mind to was to ensure people would get replies to queries. People tended to use the Minister's office as the fall-back position and if they could not get a reply from the system they often wrote to the Minister. I monitored this carefully for a simple reason.

I am pleased that Deputy Regina Doherty lives in a local authority where all the staff of the whole local authority are superb. I am unsure whether the footballers of her county are uniformly superb. It has been my experience of life for many years, as the effective employer in a community co-operative and subsequently as a Minister, that in all work places there are people who are committed. These are in the public service as they are in private service. There are people who do the job at an adequate level. If the truth is told in every public service and private service company there are people who under-perform. If Deputy Doherty can show me any public service or private service company of any size in which everyone is performing to the top level, as she has suggested, then I would be pleased to see it. Perhaps the Deputy will organise for me to go to such a local authority and meet all these people, all of whom without exception are performing to a high level.

I will continue to stand up for public servants. They are no different to anyone else and the level of performance varies. Often the problem in the public service is that there is a chain by which things get dealt with and if there is one mañana person in the middle of that chain who leaves the file on the desk then nothing ever gets dealt with.

The Minister has referred to various systems by which one can go and complain here and there. First, those of us in the Oireachtas could not use those facilities. In addition, many local authority members are reluctant to use those systems because they are afraid that if they do they might be victimised in some way and they might find the answers come to them even more slowly.

When I was Minister, I developed a system in order that a reply would come back in two weeks. Why did I do this? Because it cut down on work and it was the efficient thing to do. If one operated on the same basis as a work study expert in a factory, the one thing one would eliminate, which takes up a vast amount of time, is the second call of the person seeking a reply to the letter, either by correspondence or telephone.

We succeeded in my office in making sure that each section gave a substantive answer on the current situation within a fortnight. When I left the Department, there were three outstanding representations on the desk in my office that had not been answered. The reality was that by forcing people to give expeditious answers, we cut down the work enormously and we made it a lot more efficient, because people were not ringing back again and again trying to get the same information.

What information did we give? There is a certain bread company that talks about "today's bread today". We insisted on today's answer today. In other words, we would not get what we used to get from a certain education Department, when I could have filled my office with replies such as "I refer to your matter". I recall once writing to a Department looking for a form, and I received an answer which stated, "Dear Deputy, I refer to the letter you wrote to the Department. The matter is receiving attention and you will be contacted in due course." I could not understand why the person did not just get the form, put it in an envelope and send it to me in the post. We have all had the experience of getting an acknowledgment and getting very little action over the years. It improved over time, but we know that back in the old days, the answers came irrespective of the who was in government, but we never got a substantive reply.

When I moved to the Department of Social Protection, there was obviously much more correspondence. A Deputy would write to me asking when a decision would be made on, for example, an application for a pension. The Deputy would then write a second or third time, and no answer of any substance would be issued, other than an acknowledgment. The person then got or did not get what he or she was entitled to. It was the person who got the substantive reply. A month later, the Deputy would get a reply stating, "Dear Deputy, I refer to a representation you made six months ago. You will be delighted to hear that your constituent got [whatever it was] last month." That was a total waste of time for everybody. The Deputy wanted to know where the matter was in the system at the time he wrote the letter, so I instructed civil servants to write back stating, "Dear Deputy, I refer to your application for [whatever]. This matter is under consideration with [whoever] and is at [whatever] stage, and a decision should issue within a certain time." If other Deputies are like me, that was the kind of basic information they were seeking at the time.

We managed to make significant improvements by giving the real time information. It did not give the Deputies the answer, but it provided information on what stage of the process it was at and how long it would take. Therefore, I believe what Deputy Collins is proposing is correct. In fact, I will go further and say it should be extended to cover the whole public service, because the systems to which the Minister refers are simply not working. In his speech he states that, "A universal standard set in law, of 20 days for a substantive reply, runs the risk of reducing the scope for more rigorous requirements and better performance where this is appropriate." I do not know who wrote the speech, but I do not know what that means. If the substantive reply is that the matter is being considered and these issues have been raised and there needs to be further examination of certain issues, that is a substantive reply. What Deputy Collins is not considering a substantive reply is the standard letter Deputies receive on the first iteration, which in most cases states, "Dear Deputy, I refer to the letter you wrote on behalf of a constituent, and a reply will issue in due course." Having worked an efficient system, I can tell the Deputy that all of these arguments are spurious and do not stand up to scrutiny.

As Deputies in the House, we can demand and get a substantive reply within four days. It is amazing that the officials can do it in four working days when they have to do it through the parliamentary questions system. I have often felt - I would like to congratulate Deputy Collins on raising this issue - that a similar system should be available where a local authority is not doing what it should do in giving us an answer and a realistic update. If a person writes in 15 times about the same issue, officials can answer by saying there is no substantive change from the original answer, as we used to do with parliamentary questions when Deputies asked the same question again and again. That explains where the matter stands.

There are customer service charters and vision statements on walls. It is fair to say that if systems are not quickly dealt with, they are often more adhered to in the breach than in the action. I cannot envisage what kind of a question could be asked where a substantive reply could not be given within 14 days. I have no doubt the Minister's adviser is telling him or her that a decision has not been made, which is the argument I got in the Department of Social Protection, but that was not the question asked. The people wanted an update as it was at that stage. There is no point in waiting until the decision is made. As the substantive reply is the situation as it is, if there are outstanding issues, the reply should indicate this and that would cover the Minister. I am sure Deputy Collins will agree with my interpretation of what he is trying to put forward. It gets the Minister away from this acknowledgement disease.

The Minister's conclusion is a beauty. He stated, "While at first glance it would appear that there would be no additional costs arising from the Bill, particularly as local authorities aim to respond with all due speed to correspondence, there is a risk that the mandatory and inflexible requirement proposed would inhibit efficient and effective delivery of services generally if resources had to be diverted to comply with it, with consequential impacts on optimal staffing levels." Many years ago, when I was running the co-operative, I had the great blessing of getting a very efficient person into the office who taught me a great deal about efficiency. She thought me that when she was asked a question, instead of writing a note, putting it aside and dealing with it later, she just dealt with it there and then and the person never had to ask a second time. The reason she did this was that it gave her more undisturbed time to get on with the work she was doing. The person never had to interrupt her again because she had provided the information. She thought me a lot about the science of reducing unnecessary work. If we went through the public service and measured the amount of time wasted by people interrupting and trying to get an answer to something for which they had already asked, we could reduce staff requirements and staffing times. Having worked with that system throughout my working life as an administrator, I have found that when we apply that rigorously, we reduce enormously the pressure on staff. Therefore, the Minister's conclusion is fundamentally flawed.

As somebody who ran an industry - in our case we were trying to produce fencing stakes, saw timbers and so on - every day we looked at ways to reduce the work burden and to make the business more efficient. We tried to stop things falling on the floor. We put in magic eyes, barriers and every kind of thing. We did this to ensure we got more production for less effort on the part of the workforce. Anybody who ever worked in an industry or toured a factory will know that a huge amount of time and effort goes into doing that on the factory floor. This suggests that the methodologies that have been tried for 100 years have proven hugely successful in terms of process analysis and processing a product.

Try to persuade people working in offices that every bit of paper should be processed through in the same way and they throw up their hands in horror and state that it should not be done and that they should be allowed to do it their way. It always seems strange that the person on the factory floor is expected to accept that if a scientific approach can achieve a better result with better productivity and less stress for the worker then it is right but the same approach cannot be taken in operating an administrative system. When this approach is taken and one begins to analyse it in this way the results are absolutely startling with regard to how one can increase productivity, reduce strain and pressure on the worker and provide a much better service to the customers.

This is what the Bill is about. It is about ensuring that it is more pleasant for the workers to go to work because people will not phone up to take the head off them, particularly front-line staff covering for more senior staff who have not replied to letters. We know this happens all the time and the poor people in the front line, as happened in the tax debacle organised by the Government recently, get the slamming for people up the line who have not replied to correspondence. Therefore, an efficient system should be put in place and made mandatory. Nobody in industry would tolerate an inefficient system or people stating they will not work efficiently because it is not their way of doing something. Why should it be accepted in administration? It is totally farcical.

I passionately support the Bill and I hope between now and Tuesday the Minister will reflect once again on this and realise that what he is stating is that it should be discretionary for local authorities to be inefficient and not to correspond or reply with up to date information on queries raised. He is against efficiency, courtesy and a good way of doing business being mandatory. I hope that on Tuesday the Minister will come to the House and state that he has accepted the Bill, and that on Committee Stage any detail that needs to be argued out can be. The idea that people are entitled to a basic answer in a basic timeframe is fundamental and from my experience I know it can be implemented if it is done in a sensible way.

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