Senior civil servants have said significant resources must be put into decentralisation programmes to ensure a smooth transition and minimise the loss of "corporate memory" from departments.
They also warned of the need to "be realistic" about the length of time it takes to make such major moves and train staff.Mr Liam Irwin, Assistant Secretary of the Revenue Commissioners, and Ms Bernadette Lacey, Director General of the Department of Social and Family Affairs, were before a Dáil committee this morning.Mr Irwin told the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service of his involvement in a major decentralisation of the Revenue Commissioners announced in 1987.Some 900 staff were moved to Ennis, Nenagh and Limerick.Mr Irwin was involved in moving 550 people from the Collector General’s office to Limerick, in what he called the "biggest single decentralisation to occur to date".It had been obvious from the outset the move would require "quite a bit of planning", he said.A steering group was appointed to oversee issues such as staffing, training, industrial relations, office equipment and IT issues.Mr Irwin said that "with the benefit of hindsight" the high-level management of the project was "extremely beneficial".It had been vital to the move to ensure no loss of tax to the Exchequer and no disruption of service.Mr Irwin said the move had "worked well" and that there was no disruption of tax collection.At the time, an extra allocation of 1 per cent of the department’s revenue budget was secured from the Department of Finance to help the move, Mr Irwin said.It had been made clear that the move was voluntary.However, there was "a substantial loss of skill" in the course of the move.Between 10 and 12 per cent of staff from the Collector General’s office applied for relocation to Limerick, which meant around 75 per cent of the new staff were "entirely new" to Revenue.A huge investment in training had been necessary.Every task undertaken by the CG’s office was profiled and benchmarked in the course of planning for the move to see if it could be undertaken more effiicently.Mr Irwin said that overall, his experience of decentralisation had been positive.All the functions of the CG’s office had been decentralised "without any loss of efficiency or effectiveness".But he warned that there were costs involved.Ms Bernadette Lacey of the Department of Social and Family Affairs noted her own department was dispersed throughout the country, which indicated its ability to manage its business with people in various locations.She said the department had "coped well" with a previous decentralisation plan, but that was not to say there were not "difficulties and challenges"."But we have been able to deal with them and address them," she said.Ms Lacey noted that each position filled in the decentralisation of 100 jobs to Sligo required three movements of personnel.Ms Lacey also warned of the "need to be realistic" about the timeframes involved in decentralisation and about training off staff.She said that if a large number of staff were being moved from one area, it should be ensured there wasn’t a simultaneous movement from another area.And she said where staff moved, one needed to be sure they would stay for at least a couple of years to avoid "churn" within the department.