THE BODY charged with implementing the Croke Park agreement on public service pay and reform has criticised plans submitted by the Department of Education for change and modernisation in its sector.
It is understood that the implementation body was unhappy at the level of detail provided in the action plan for Croke Park drawn up by the department, particularly in relation to the third-level sector.
Informed sources said the implementation body also asked the department to take into account the recent Government decision to reduce the numbers of Vocational Education Committees (VECs) from 33 to 16.
It also urged the department to look at the issue of shared services in the education sector in areas such as administration, human resources and finance.
It is understood the implementation body suggested there could be scope for greater shared services between VECs even after the proposed rationalisation as well as between VECs and institutes of technology.
A spokesman for the department said last night it had received a number of queries from the implementation body, but that this was not unique in the public service. He also said the department had been asked to elaborate on a number of areas.
The spokesman said consultation was ongoing between the department and the implementation body and that it was “business as usual”.
Separately, the implementation body told the Department of Health that it had set out “a clear and substantive list of identifiable actions” for delivery under the terms of the Croke Park deal.
The body also told the Department of Health that it would give it further advice in due course on the assignment of a value to savings arising from proposed reform measures in the health sector.
The implementation body has also told Government departments that their action plans “will have to be reviewed at the end of this year in light of the decisions taken by the Government in the context both of the estimates and the forthcoming budget, to ensure that they support the changes likely to follow from those decisions”.
The chairman of the implementation body, PJ Fitzpatrick, said the action plans would have to be verifiable and would have to withstand public scrutiny.
He said he did not think anyone, whether on the management side or the trade union side, was under any illusion about the scale of the challenge involved.
“There’s no doubt these have been prepared in the context of the budgets that the departments and agencies have at this time. I think everybody knows that the funding available and the staffing available to departments, agencies and sectors is going to be different following the budget.”
“The action plans will obviously have to be revisited by departments and agencies when they know precisely what the budget decisions are both in terms of the funding available and the numbers,” he said on RTÉ radio.
Meanwhile, the Department of Finance is to meet unions representing staff in the Civil Service today on its action plans under the Croke Park agreement.
It is understood that the Department of Finance plans to consolidate plans drawn up by individual departments in the Civil Service as well in the State agencies into one overall reform document.
Under the terms of the Croke Park agreement, the Government has given a commitment not to cut pay further for staff in the public service or to introduce compulsory redundancies until at least 2014.
In return, the unions have agreed to co-operate with a wide-ranging programme of modernisation and reform.
The deal also provides the potential for staff to recoup some of the pay cuts experienced over the last year or so from savings generated by the reform programme.