Few of 800 public sector payments to be reduced

THE GOVERNMENT is expected to announce reductions in allowances for staff in the Civil Service who previously served as private secretaries to Ministers. There are 800 allowances paid across the public service and this looks likely to be one of the few targeted.

Up to now staff who served as private secretaries to Ministers have been able to keep 50 per cent of the allowance once they had been in the post for more than one year.

Private secretaries to Ministers receive an allowance of €20,685 a year. The private secretary to the Taoiseach receives €24,427.

However, no overtime payments are made to staff in these posts.

The reduction of this allowance is expected to be one of the few areas in which serving personnel will be affected by reforms to 800 allowances currently paid to public servants. The reforms are being put forward by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin.

There are, however, likely to be changes in allowances for new entrants to the public service.

Mr Howlin is expected to bring his proposals for reforming the system of allowances to Cabinet today.

The Minister had asked all Government departments to prepare business cases for the 800 allowances currently paid to staff across the Civil Service, health service, local authorities, education sector, Garda and the Defence Forces.

The Minister had planned to generate savings of €75 million this year and €150 million next year as a result of the changes to the allowance system.

At present €1.5 billion is paid out annually in allowances to staff.

Highly placed sources said last night that a reduction in allowances paid to staff who had previously served as private secretaries to Ministers was likely as the personnel concerned no longer performed the role.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform did not comment on the issue last night.

Mr Howlin has said the review of allowances had proved to be more complicated than he had anticipated.

Speaking last week, the Minister also said a lot of allowances paid to staff in the public service should be relabelled as core pay in the future where they were really part of the basic wage.

He said a lot of allowances were misnomers.

He received an allowance for being a Minister, while he noted a deputy principal got an allowance for being a deputy principal.

Mr Howlin said Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn had radical ideas about the way teachers were paid. Mr Howlin said Mr Quinn was proposing a restructuring “so you don’t have allowances for this and allowances for that so you have grades of teacher with core functions attached to it”.