In some respects the publication of the Public Service Reform Plan has come after a period of substantial effort on the part of local authorities to down size. The Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government already had available to him a menu of reforms arising from the work of the Local Government Efficiency Group which reported under the previous Government. It highlighted savings of over €500 million through recommending the merger of management functions, increased sharing of services, along with individual initiatives across virtually all local government services. The Minister, on appointment, established an implementation group to begin the process of embedding efficiencies into local government at a pace not seen in most of the public service. This group is expected to report shortly.
In the meantime local authorities, in a necessary move to sustain their financial position and the obligation to return annual balanced budgets, have pre-empted much of the recommendations so far as they could, in the absence of specific direction from the centre. Staff reductions, service re-configuration, contracting out of services etc. have been a feature of local government in the past year. The merging of the councils in Limerick is advancing, thanks to the lead shown by the Minister, while Waterford and the two Tipperary councils are also moving on possible mergers. More generally, progress is being made on merging several bodies under the remit of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government while the integration of community development into the Department is now well advanced.
The Programme for Government did hold out some light for local authorities in that, perhaps for the first time, an incoming programme clearly recognised the need for an overall comprehensive examination of public service delivery, something local government managers, councillors and academics have suggested should be a central feature of the overall reform of local government. Previous efforts to reform the system, some would have argued in the past, were well meaning but largely ad hoc in the absence of an overall comprehensive reform package covering all of the public service. Furthermore, the continued role out of local administrative units under other departments had long been a source of both local political and managerial irritation as it suggested an unwillingness to use existing and democratically accountable local authorities to deliver public services, as would be the case in most other advanced economies. Whatever about the legitimacy of this view, the Programme for Government seemed to suggest a clear recognition of the need to enhance the role of the local councillor and to place local government back at the heart of local public services delivery. The question that might be put now is whether there is any evidence from the Public Service Reform Plan that this is indeed the case?
Certainly the overall process envisaged in the Plan seems to suggest so. The framework set out in the Reform Plan highlights the need for an integrated approach to public service reform and, within this, the sectoral role for local government. Throughout the document there are actions which might include local government, and that suggest cross cutting initiatives having a place within the overall reform process. There is however a dependency on further elucidation in many of the proposed reform actions through for example; the move towards the GovStat initiative, the idea that over time there might be a move towards a fully integrated senior public service and; that there might be an increase in democratic accountability through the streamlining of agencies and public funded bodies that operate at arms length from the main public service, local and national.
There are however, understandably, gaps in the Plan in regard to the move towards a more integrated process between local and national. Some of the business process thinking is still centred, if you will excuse the pun, on individual departments with little to no consideration of the need to address the diagonal policy arena in which much public policy is now placed. The move, for example, to merge the VEC and Fás services under Solas, has a lot of merit. The new service does however, have to operate within a spatial planning environment which, if past experience is to be recognised, is an overriding influence on the design of training and education services. There is little to suggest in the Plan, that this has been a factor in coming to a decision about the re-structured organisation of training and education at local level. Unfortunately, this is a serious gap generally throughout the plan. If this gap is not addressed unnecessary barriers will be created to its otherwise successful implementation. Such an example is not isolated.
In fairness, it might be argued that the reform is taking place within a particular economic context. There has to be some concern nonetheless that there continues to be a gap in understanding the relationship between the spatial dimensions of public service delivery and the organisation of implementation which the Reform Plan is seeking to address. It is difficult to appreciate exactly why this might be the case. Previous experience from, for example, the lack of foresight on education provision over the past decade should surely have pointed the need for reform which embeds spatial perspective into the organisation of public service and that this requires public service alignment which is complementary and not disaggregated as may well occur if the current direction is sustained. Setting such services within a planning and organisational framework which complements the spatial organisation of the state might be more appropriate.
A welcome initiative will be the move towards performance budgeting and ensuring the shared collection of baseline performance data, something which increasingly is a hallmark of advanced public service delivery. There will, as a result, be a clear need to have active engagement between those preparing policy and those implementing it at the coalface. In this regard there will be some in local government who might think that this looks very familiar. In many respects, the reform proposals of then Minister for the Environment, Brendan Howlin, in Better Local Government in 1997 look very like the broad commitments to change in the new Reform Plan. What is perhaps different is, as acknowledged above, the broad application of such thinking to the wider public service. Also of note is the the engagement of Change Management Teams working to an aligned integrated reform plan and the application of high level delivery plans. There will however be a need to be specific about who takes on the role of change management and whether this is set within a territorial perspective as is the case in most reform efforts elsewhere. The lack of a clear level of responsibility at national level was a clear drawback in the move towards better customer service at local level under the reforms of Better Local Government and the Task Force on the Integration of Local Government and Local Development. Hopefully this lesson will also be appreciated as implementation of the Reform Plan gets underway.
Overall, the move to change management teams must, nonetheless, be a welcome initiative but the experience from the implementation of Better Local Government does provide a cautionary tale. Experience suggests that a real buy-in of national political leaders to drive the process forward with the active support of the senior public service is a minimum necessity if the potential from the suggested reforms are to be made real. The introduction of senior responsible owners suggests clear intent that this might well be the case but again those will need to be specifically identified and be given clear operational criteria within which to function.
One of the lessons from previous reform efforts has been that, while a lot of innovation in service delivery has been demonstrated, there is limited opportunity to mainstream this innovation throughout the public service. Experiences, positive and negative, with shared services, contracting out, combined income collection etc, seem to remain within the local authority, or department which advanced the original initiative. The move towards having the best practice identified and mainstreamed in the Taoiseach’s Public Service Excellence Awards is a very practical action which could be underpinned by other such examples such as the Chambers Ireland Local Government Awards Programme. There are plenty of examples within this particular award programme that could be transposed into wider public service delivery if only the means to do so was made available. In turn, the move towards integrated provision of back office operations should not just rest within the mandate of specific departments. Savings on diagonal based services such as ICT, HR etc would likely be far more substantial if the approach to re-configuration was on a diagonal basis rather than simply taking an approach to back office savings within the silos of particular sectors. The consideration of regional based back office services which reach across all public service organisations in a particular region might well be worth consideration.
The thinking in the Plan will require a dramatic shift in attitudes across both the political and senior public service levels. The idea that a Department is not just responsible for a particular set of statutory obligations but rather also has a wider public service responsibility, is something the Plan highlights. To make it happen is going to require a major shift in the culture of the senior public service and the political leadership of the country, something highlighted by successive commentary as a critical gap in the recent past.
There is, nonetheless, much to acknowledge as positive in the Reform Plan albeit that local government might have expected greater acknowledgement of how its reform process will fit in with and be complemented by the national process. Hopefully, this will become clearer with the publication of the Local Government Policy Reform Statement in the New Year along with the implementation, at the very least on a pilot basis, of some of the recommendations forthcoming under the first report of the Local Government Efficiency Review Implementation Group and not to mention the pilot sector plan highlighted for the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government in the Reform Plan. Such an approach should give further impetus to a local government system which is demonstrating a higher degree of flexibility than some other parts of the public service.
Advancing the alignment process between local government and local development will also be significant, albeit that there must be some concern at the move, as set out in the Reform Plan, to review the role of the enterprise boards. This perhaps reflects, arguably, a continued silo based approach to services, as in training and education, which really do need to be more fully aligned with the spatial policy role, if not organisation, of local government and the market focused perspective of the investment community. This limited reflection of the importance of spatial economies in the thinking and actions in the Plan might prove problematic as implementation of public service re-configuration at the coalface commences. At least the reform plan does try to set out a timetable for implementation. Hopefully the Plan will be further developed within the sectoral reform plans and the forthcoming policy statement on local government reform. Time will tell.
Time now for real implementation!
