Cowen must supply passion to achieve reform of public service

JIM O'LEARY ECONOMICSTHE LONG-AWAITED OECD report on the Irish public service was published earlier this week and featured on RTÉ's Questions and Answers on Monday night. John Waters, one of the panellists, opined that life was too short to read OECD reports. He has a point.

This one runs to almost 400 pages. Another panellist, Alan Shatter, represented it as a savage indictment of the current Government or something to that effect.

Well, the OECD doesn't do savage, whatever about indictments. The language throughout is careful and diplomatic, the intention being to encourage with praise (sometimes faint) rather than hector or berate.

The report's analysis and recommendations are organised around four overarching objectives:

(i) ensuring the capacity of the public service to achieve its objectives;

(ii) motivating public servants to perform well;

(iii) achieving a citizen-centred approach to service delivery and;

(iv) strengthening governance.

Many of the OECD's recommendations, unsurprisingly, have a familiar ring to them. Examples include those relating to increased mobility for public service workers, greater flexibility in recruitment and remuneration, more delegation of decision-making powers to line managers, better performance indicators, greater emphasis on outputs and outcomes, and so on.

Indeed, there is scarcely a recommendation in the report that arrested one's attention on the grounds of novelty, except perhaps the idea of creating an integrated leadership cadre or Senior Public Service.

Although the report may not amount to a damning indictment, it is by no means uncritical. It judges Ireland's reform effort to be on a "sound trajectory", but clearly signals disappointment with the pace of change.

In general, it finds that the Irish public service has done well in terms of putting the right processes and procedures in place, but not so well when it comes to embedding them in practice.

In relation to the all-important aspect of embracing a performance focus, for example, a lot of time and effort has been expended on building the impressively-named performance management and development system (PMDS), which is long on measurement, but short on management and development, the dimensions that ultimately matter.

Another key OECD criticism relates to how the heavy hand of the centre (essentially the Department of Finance under the current regime) creates rigidities throughout the public service that negatively affect performance.

The OECD argues for a move away from the current "command and control" system to one where authority would be devolved and flexibility enhanced at local level, all predicated of course on the achievement of agreed performance targets.

Not that the OECD's vision is of a centre with significantly diminished power and influence. On the contrary, what is envisaged is a centre that, instead of primarily fulfilling a control function, would fulfil a strategic leadership role.

The area of human resource management (HRM) is one where the case for much greater flexibility and delegation of decision-making authority is particularly compelling.

According to the report, the centralisation of HRM limits public service mobility and career development opportunities, inhibits the autonomy of local management and limits the development and sharing of skills and competencies across the public service.

One suspects, too, that the centralisation of HRM means that there is a shortage of HRM skills at local level, which, if unresolved, will make it difficult to achieve a successful delegation of decision-making.

Of course, successful HRM practices and policies require the collection and analysis of data, including information about vacancy levels, skill shortages, attrition rates and the reasons for attrition. Back in 2002, the first report of the benchmarking body noted with concern the paucity of such information in the public service and stressed the need to address and resolve the problem.

Six years later, the second benchmarking body report had to repeat the same point. There had been little or no improvement in the intervening period.

One has the impression that the nature and importance of HRM are poorly understood by public service employers.

The report characterises Ireland's approach to public service reform as incrementalist and goes on to say that "while achieving a certain degree of stability and consensus, this has led to isolated reforms that evolve over time, rather than a coherent reform package".

The risk, as the OECD sees it, is that this sort of approach becomes incoherent and introduces tensions into the system. A reform initiative that the OECD had in mind when offering these observations is the so-called "decentralisation" programme.

But the authors of the report also seem to have been mindful of Ireland's social partnership model in making these remarks, a model that may have conferred too much leverage on public sector unions, allowing them to slow, frustrate or prevent changes that they perceived to be injurious to their members' interests.

The alternative approach to reform, that of constructing a coherent package of mutually reinforcing measures around a number of key motivating principles, the whole animated by a vision of what the public service is and where it should be brought to, requires political leadership.

Successful reform needs passion as well as reason. The OECD report supplies the latter in spades. It is over to taoiseach-designate Cowen and his new cabinet to supply the former.

Jim O'Leary is a senior fellow of the Department of Economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@nuim.ie