Risk aversion in the public service is “holding us back”, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers has said.
He indicated the Government would in future encourage public service staff to be prepared to take more risks as part of its attempt to accelerate the development of infrastructure.
Speaking at the conference of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland (ACEI) in Dublin on Thursday, the Minister ruled out the possibility that the €275-billion capital spending plans could be rolled back to pay for any overruns on current expenditure by Government departments or as a result of any global economic downturn.
“Capital expenditure lines cannot be compromised by poor financial management within Government departments”, he said.
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Chambers said if there were to be any economic contraction or disruption, “protecting capital expenditure is critical to Ireland’s growth path into the medium term”.
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He suggested in such circumstances “we would have to make other decisions in the context of current expenditure”.
The Minister said in previous economic cycles, capital spending “was the first to be compromised – and we are paying the price for that today”.
The Government had €4 billion in unallocated capital funding, he said, which would be made available towards the end of the coming five years. This would incentivise and reward delivery agencies across critical sectors such as water, transport, energy and housing, he added.
Chambers said the Government would be publishing what he described as “risk appetite statements”. This would be “a signal to public servants and people making decisions across their system to take a greater level of risk, to move away from the risk-averse nature of how our systems have been defined for the last 10 years in particular”.
He said the political system needed “to back decision-makers, to put speed and delivery over multiple layers of circular process, which isn’t yielding the momentum and delivery that we require”.
The Minister said “risk aversion is holding us back”.
He maintained there was a need, firstly, “to be explicit in what we expect from them in their policy consideration”.
“And it hasn’t happened before that we’ve told them to take risks, that we’ve actually said: ‘Upgrade your risk appetite to promote speed and delivery over everything else you’ve been doing’. And that’s a much different signal and direction to public servants who make decisions than what’s been there for years, which is multiple layers of process, guidelines, broader consideration, handing it over to someone else to check”, he said in a question-and-answer session at the conference.
In his address to the conference, Chambers said the Government’s plan to accelerate the pace of infrastructure delivery was working. He said it was starting to see clear, tangible results in terms of reduced delivery timelines, improved outcomes in judicial reviews taken to stop or delay important projects and a systemic culture change across our public services that embraced risk and prioritised delivery.
“My department has removed unnecessary external reviews and increased thresholds within the infrastructure guidelines. This has an immediate impact, saving up to 26 weeks on the Waterford Wastewater Treatment Plant project.”
“Due to changes already seen and the confidence that has been provided through the plan, Uisce Éireann have brought forward the commissioning of the Greater Dublin Drainage Project from late 2032 to Q4 2031 – a reduction of 12 months to the project timeline”, he said.
The Minister also maintained that regulatory simplification was well advanced on a number of fronts.
He said the Marine Area Regulatory Authority (Mara) – set up to improve infrastructure delivery – had been quickly identified as requiring change in how it operated.
“That is exactly what we have done and Mara has now changed the designation of Uisce Éireann and Local Authorities to ‘fit and proper’. This reduces timelines for Marine Area Consents by approximately 30 per cent for these State bodies,” he said.
