Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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277. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the plans, if any, to reform the commission for public service appointments to ensure that public appointments can be done in a timely efficient manner given that it can take up to 24 weeks for certain vacancies to be filled. [53337/22]

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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The Commission for Public Service Appointments (CPSA) was established under the Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Act 2004. The Commission is the principal regulator of recruitment and selection processes within the public service. It has a statutory role to ensure that appointments in the organisations subject to its remit (that is, those that fall under the authority and scope of the Commission) are made on candidates’ merit and as the result of fair and transparent appointment processes. Its primary role is to ensure probity and fairness are at the heart of public service recruitment. While the CPSA can deal with complaints from candidates about selection processes they have participated in, it does not undertake recruitment itself and therefore has no direct responsibility for the operation of any particular recruitment process, including the timeliness of any such process.

The Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Act 2004 also established the Public Appointments Service (PAS) and gave it powers regarding the undertaking of recruitment for the civil service and certain other public service bodies. These powers include responsibility for operational issues in recruitment in the public service bodies for which PAS has remit.

The Public Appointments Service runs a wide range of ‘openly advertised’ recruitment competitions and ‘interdepartmental’ promotion competitions within the Civil Service. The activities are primarily focused on the sourcing of candidates for roles in the Civil Service; the most senior roles in Local Authorities; trainee Garda, and some promotional campaigns for An Garda Síochána; and a range of management, executive and specialist roles across the civil and public service. The Public Appointments Service also has a key role in the identification of suitable members for State Boards.

For competitions which are run for specific clients, PAS agrees the competition timeline with the client at the outset of the process, however, situations can occur which impact on PAS’s capacity to meet the agreed delivery dates. When there is a delay in the process PAS will communicate this to the client and take whatever action is necessary to get the process back on track.

PAS runs a large number of competitions for specialist and generic roles from which clients across the civil service can draw on. In the context of the current challenging recruitment market, PAS has experienced reduced candidate applications, and increased attrition rates throughout all stages of the process. The candidate pools for most of our generic competitions are being quickly exhausted and PAS has had to run more competitions over the last two years than we would previously have needed. As a result, increased resources and effort is being absorbed in an attempt to maintain the required service delivery levels.

Over the course of 2021 and 2022, PAS has also experienced an unscheduled increase in demand for resources from across the civil and public service. In 2021, PAS had a 51% increase in the number of requests received from the previous year. This trend has continued into this year as the volume of requests received to date has already surpassed the volume of requests received for the whole of 2021. While PAS makes every effort to deliver a quality service to our clients, many of the factors due to the extremely challenging market are impacting our service delivery timelines in some areas.