Departments and agencies miss reform plan deadline

A NUMBER of Government departments and agencies have missed the deadline for submitting action plans for the implementation of the Croke Park agreement on public service pay and reform.

Government departments were scheduled to submit the proposals to the Department of Finance by yesterday. However, the department said last night while it had received some proposals, others remained outstanding.

The department said it was envisaged when all the action plans were received, they would be refined into a single public service reform document which would be submitted to the implementation body for the agreement.

No date has been set out publicly for the completion of this process.

Earlier this week, Minister of State for Public Service Reform Dara Calleary said the implementation body had asked the main bodies in the public service to submit their action plans for effecting the changes set out in the deal this week.

“These action plans will include proposals that will lead to cost savings or which minimise the impacts of current resource constraints or service quality or availability, or actually improve services through technology or other means,” he said. Mr Calleary said under the Croke Park agreement public servants would “have to change, redeploy, retrain, take on more responsibility, adopt new work practices and work across professional, technical and sectoral boundaries”.

He said urgent progress was needed towards a public service that was leaner, more effective and more focused on the needs of citizens.

Mr Calleary said the implementation of the Croke Park agreement coupled with the Government’s programme for transforming public services required “commitment, energy and flexibility on behalf of all in the public service”.

This followed ballots in various trade unions representing staff in the public service.

The Croke Park agreement was negotiated between public service trade unions and the Government earlier this year and formally ratified by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in June.

Under the deal, the Government has promised not to cut pay further or to introduce compulsory redundancies in return for co-operation by staff with a wide-scale reform programme across the public service.

The agreement also sets out a mechanism for staff to recoup some of the money lost in recent pay cuts from savings to be generated by the reform programme.