Public service perceptions

ECONOMICS:The Government is running a series of TV and radio ads, inviting people to give their views on the state of public services.

This is in the context of a major review of the Irish public service currently being conducted by the OECD.

This review is due to be completed by the end of the year. Its findings will help shape the public service of the future and provide useful information about how the Republic compares with other countries in terms of public service governance and delivery.

The OECD review reflects a heightened interest in reforming the public service that seems to have developed of late both within and outside government circles. That interest in the subject has quickened is not surprising.

The appetite for public service reform tends to increase at times when expectations and actuality diverge, as they have done in recent years, most obviously in relation to the health system but also in other areas like education and general infrastructure provision.

Public service trade union leaders, not traditionally conspicuous by their enthusiasm for disturbing the status quo, have started to wake up to the public mood and its implications and to reposition their organisations on the reform issue.

At the recent MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Peter McLoone, the general secretary of Impact, said that there was a strong culture of support for public services throughout the country, but he warned that it would not continue unless there was a vast improvement in some areas.

He also argued that those who had the greatest interest in reforming public services were those who were employed in their delivery.

This is a variant of a view that I've expressed before in this column, namely that the champions of public service provision should also be the champions of public service effectiveness and efficiency because a wasteful and/or ineffectual public service is its own worst advertisement.

In this connection, McLoone made another point that deserves repeating.

He suggested that plans for reform had often been resisted by staff interests because they were presented to public servants, or perceived by them, as changes that were motivated solely by the desire to cut costs.

By the same token, economists who advocate reform are often painted as enemies of the public service on the grounds that their proposals spring from an ideologically driven desire to reduce the size of the public sector. This may be true in some cases, but it is not generally true.

The fact is that the dividend that accrues from raising efficiency can either be used to reduce the overall cost/size of government or to enhance the quality and/or scope of public service provision.

Which of these broad options is taken is a matter of political choice.

That political choice in turn will be strongly influenced by how well regarded the public service is by the broad mass of tax-paying citizens or, to use McLoone's language, how strong the culture of support for public services remains.

A reform programme that improves efficiency and effectiveness and thereby boosts the overall performance of the public sector has an obvious role to play in this regard.

Of course, boosting the performance of the public service is not a new aspiration. We've heard plenty about it in the past. Indeed, the last great wave of public service reform, which started in the mid-1990s under the auspices of the Strategic Management Initiative, had as one of its core objectives the achievement of a more performance-oriented culture in the public service.

To this end a whole new system for measuring, monitoring and managing the performance of divisions, teams and individual public servants, called the Performance Measurement and Development System (PMDS), was put in place at huge cost in terms of time and resources.

One indication of the gargantuan effort involved is that fully 10 years elapsed between the time that consultants were initially engaged to advise on its design in 1997 and the time of its implementation in January 2007.

Much of this time was absorbed by detailed and painstaking negotiation with staff interests.

Even at that, one has the very strong impression of an elephant labouring to produce a mouse because the link between individual public servants' pay and performance - surely a critical link in the achievement of a performance-oriented public service - remains as weak and tenuous in the brave new world of PMDS as it was formerly.

This is not just a matter that relates to the efficiency and effectiveness agenda. It is also a matter of equity - equity within the public service, because it is simply unfair that outstanding public servants should be paid the same as those whose performance needs improvement, and equity between the public and private sectors, because increasingly workers in the private sector have the opportunity to boost their pay through performance.

It is time for everyone concerned to bite the bullet on this one.

Jim O'Leary lectures in economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@nuim.ie