Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the reforms which have taken place within the public sector dealing with the facilitation of interagency staff transfers and transfer requests by staff within the same agency looking to relocate geographically; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [46659/12]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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Civil Service departments and other public service organisations vary in relation to the approaches they adopt to the transfer of their own staff between locations and no centrally agreed approach is applied. There are no formal arrangements in place within the civil service to facilitate requests for transfers to other locations/employments, except in the case of grades represented by the Civil & Public Services Union. Transfers for these (mostly Clerical and Staff Officers) are arranged in accordance with formal procedures agreed with the Staff Side at General Council under the Conciliation and Arbitration Scheme for the Civil Service. Transfers between grades in the civil service can be arranged on an informal, head-to-head, basis. Such transfers are arranged between the officers seeking to move and the relevant Personnel Units and require the agreement of both Personnel Officers.

The arrangements for the other Public Service sectors are a matter for the relevant parent Department in each case.

The Public Service Agreement 2010-14 (Croke Park Agreement) provides for agreed redeployment arrangements to apply in the Civil Service and in other parts of the public service. Under the Agreement, redeployment generally takes precedence over all other methods of filling a vacancy and supersedes any existing agreements on the deployment of staff. It sets out the agreed redeployment arrangements within the Health, Education, and Local Authority sectors and within and between the Civil Service and Non-Commercial State Sponsored Bodies (NCSSB). It also provides that cross sectoral redeployments will follow the arrangements agreed for the NCSSBs.

The Public Appointments Service (PAS) has put in place a system of Resource Panels of Civil Service and State Agency staff to support the redeployment processes in those sectors agreed under the Croke Park Agreement. The redeployment arrangements allow staff to be moved from activities which are of lesser priority, or which have been rationalised, reconfigured, or restructured, to areas of greater need. In general redeployment opportunities are to be sought in the first instance within each sector (e.g. health, education, local authority, etc.). In practical terms the arrangements represent a means of facilitating the targeted reduction in public service numbers in the period 2010 to 2014 while sustaining the ongoing delivery of services. While staff may be moved between different locations as a consequence of the redeployment arrangements they are not intended to be a staff mobility scheme and were not designed to facilitate requests from individuals for transfers to address personal circumstances.