Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I thank Deputy Maloney for raising this issue, although the impact of departmental savings is a fairly broad topic. Having listened to him, however, I now understand the focus of his commentary, which certainly merits some discussion. On taking office, one of the things I did was to have a cross-departmental review, which culminated in the Comprehensive Expenditure Report 2012-14 published on 5 December 2011. I also published the capital infrastructure plan on 10 November 2011. Meanwhile, the implementation body's publication of the public service agreement - the so-called Croke Park agreement - progress report was published on 17 November 2011. The public service reform plan, which examined all the public service reforms we wanted to make, was also published on 17 November 2011.

That is the way we will look at bringing about real reforms on the issues referred to by the Deputy. The general public and public servants have been talking about tackling issues like abuse, waste and bad practices. As the Deputy knows, I have set up a website to which people - particularly those on the front line who understand what is going on in the public service - have been invited to make submissions. We got an extraordinary variety of good submissions which have been incorporated into the comprehensive expenditure review. All that documentation is available on my Department's website.

The ceilings we have set will ensure that efficiencies and reformed work practices will play a full part in contributing to what needs to happen in any event, which is budgetary consolidation. Deputy Maloney will recall the issue of performance budgeting which we included in the Revised Estimates Volume 2012, published last week. It was an initiative that now involves almost all Departments. The annual Estimates of expenditure have been re-cast to ensure full alignment with Departments' statements of strategy and to include performance information against each of the high-level objectives set out in the programme.

The old accounting mechanism of allocating a volume of money to a particular budget line is now accompanied - people will have read the tome that arrived on their desks last week - with an actual expected outcome for that money. I hope Oireachtas committees will be able to follow that to ensure that the money voted will have the specifically expressed outcomes in terms of quantities of individuals to be treated, cases to be processed, or specific outcomes to be expected.

The new Estimates offer a much more open way of doing business. The performance budgeting initiative is just one wave of a broad tide of reform which I hope is sweeping over an age-old system for managing public expenditure. One commentator said this was the first time such fundamental reform had happened since Victorian times.

In last December's comprehensive expenditure report, I introduced a new medium-term expenditure framework that sets fixed expenditure ceilings for every Government Department for 2013 and, on an indicative basis, for 2014. Last month, I wrote to the chairpersons of all Oireachtas select committees dealing with Estimates, inviting them to begin the process of engagement with Departments on how next year's Estimates should be shaped. It would also be useful for Oireachtas committees to listen to the front line experience of workers and to put that to Departments in framing next year's Estimates.

Taking the whole gamut of reforms the Government has laid out, the entire system of public expenditure is undergoing a sea change of which the achievement of expenditure savings is just one element, albeit an important one. The focus remains on delivering the best possible services, eliminating waste and abuse, and ensuring that we perform at a world-class level.

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