From illogical to absurd: Coalition's public service record

Inside Politics: If competence is one of the key issues in the next election campaign, the Government's record in dealing with the public service over the past four years should prove a severe embarrassment to Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats.

The Coalition has been saved from greater embarrassment because of the timidity of Fine Gael and Labour in pointing out the scale of its failure, but this has now emerged as a significant obstacle to a new social partnership agreement.

The Government's policy on the public service has been contradictory and incoherent. On the one hand it conceded an astonishing benchmarking deal, which involved substantial pay increases without any real productivity gains. Then it imposed a disastrous policy of decentralisation, which seems purposely designed to emasculate the public service.

It doesn't make sense to provide public servants with a pay and pensions regime that ranks as one of the best, if not the best, in the world, and then to destroy the efficiency of the system and undermine the morale of its key personnel with a ludicrous policy of decentralisation designed for narrow party electoral purposes.

The two issues have had a negative impact in recent weeks on the efforts of the social partners to put another three-year national deal.

Public servants have rightly been growing more vocal in their opposition to decentralisation while the penny has dropped with unions representing workers in the private sector that pay and conditions have been eroded significantly in recent years.

The publication of official figures, which show that public sector workers earned 40 per cent more than those in the private sector in 2003, confirms the absurdity of the benchmarking exercise which was based on the notion that pay in the private sector was substantially higher.

Given that public servants have job security and stunning pension arrangements, it is quite clear that the whole exercise was based on politics rather than economics.

To compound the failure, there was no real productivity in return. Many of the problems that bedevil the health service, and other public services, involve old work patterns that lack the flexibility required to deal with changing circumstances. Fundamental changes in how public services were delivered might well have justified benchmarking, but the real changes were minimal. The whole exercise was a ploy to curry favour with a significant segment of the electorate in the run-up to the last general election.

Decentralisation was another obvious political wheeze designed to win votes in the local elections of 2004 by scattering public servants to 53 locations around the country. It failed miserably in its main objective when the Government parties took a pasting in those elections. Instead of burying it as quickly and decently as possible, the Coalition has desperately tried to prove that the policy lives on.

In the past few days both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have indicated they are open to some modification of the scheme but they still do not seem to appreciate just how fundamentally flawed it is. The increasingly vocal objections of the unions will probably halt the plan to move the headquarters of Fás to Birr.

Mary Harney has publicly acknowledged that the employees of semi-State companies who want to remain in Dublin do not have the option that civil servants have to transfer to another department. That acknowledgment will probably have the effect of scuppering plans to move a range of other State agencies out of Dublin.

However, the Government still does not seem to appreciate that the plan to move half of the Government departments out of Dublin is even more absurd. If implemented, it would undermine the structure of a Civil Service that has served the country well since independence in 1922. The long-term implications of such a move would have damaging consequences for generations to come.

The point has been made again and again that there is no problem about decentralising specific units of public service, but that to try and move whole departments is a recipe for disaster. The net effect would be that a minister living in one part of the country, with a department based in another, would spend most of his or her time rushing to Dublin to attend Dáil or cabinet meetings, with a few trips to Brussels in between. At a deeper level, the break-up of the Civil Service would limit its ability to perform to the highest level and would lead to an unquantifiable amount of duplication, waste and extra expense.

The main Opposition parties have been tentative in their criticism of the Government's policy towards the public service. Fine Gael did oppose benchmarking but a fear of losing votes paralysed the main Opposition party in its initial response to decentralisation. Labour, with its strong union links, was loath to criticise benchmarking and it appeared tentative on decentralisation for fear of alienating supporters in rural constituencies.

More recently both parties have got over their reluctance to take a stand, with both now saying they would not proceed with decentralisation as planned by the Coalition. Both parties are agreed that it makes no sense to move the central policy-making functions of Government departments out of Dublin, whatever about sending specific service delivery units to different parts of the country.

Decentralisation contributed to the losses suffered in Dublin by the Government parties in the local and European elections, with no corresponding gains in areas set to benefit from the plan. Judging by last week's Irish Times poll, the issue is still damaging the Government, and if it continues planning for decentralisation until the general election, it is asking for trouble.