The Government's decentralisation policy could do lasting damage to our Civil Service, writes Marc Coleman, Economics Editor
When you're in a hole, stop digging, was former taoiseach Liam Cosgrave's advice to a struggling colleague. Last week the public sector union, Impact, sent the same message to the Government in relation to decentralisation.
The union represents about one tenth - mainly specialist and technical - of the staff affected by the Government's plan to relocate 10,300 public servants. In a stinging analysis of the policy published last Wednesday, entitled "Why Decentralisation isn't working", it reports that of the 1,034 Impact members due for transfer, 876 refuse to move.
On Saturday, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern acknowledged the existence of refuseniks, and promised to respond. "The management of that - of who can go, what grades and how - is a difficult exercise," he said. But his doubts about decentralisation relate to its timetable, and not its raison d'etre. The dig will proceed but at a slower pace, the Taoiseach said. But growing evidence suggests the Government is digging in a minefield, and that before another turn of the spade, a total review of the policy should be conducted.
The first problem is that those due for relocation cannot be forced to move and must be replaced. Consultants Farrell Grant Sparks - hired by Impact to estimate the cost of this - have come up with a figure of €65 million. "Management needs to take its head out of the sand and analyse the factors behind people's reluctance to move," says Impact spokeswoman Louise O'Donnell. The second is that, as O'Donnell points out, staff remaining in Dublin will have "little or nothing to do" and this represents further wasted resources.
Even this may not scratch the surface of the real, hidden cost in terms of the disruption to service as untrained staff replace old hands. A 2004 study conducted in the UK and Ireland by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) puts the cost of recruiting a professional at €6,760 per head. And it costs an organisation an average €88,235 in lost productivity for each new staff member to ascend the learning curve. With nine out of every 10 of Impact's own 1,034 members unwilling to move, the number of total refuseniks may reach between 8,000 and 9,000. If correct, these numbers add up to a massive hidden cost.
The direct costs of decentralisation are already being felt. At the last election the Government promised to cut public sector employment by 5,000. But - and in spite of caps on the numbers of nurses and driving testers - public sector numbers have actually risen by around 20,000, strongly underlying a large - and some would say inflationary - increase of 13 per cent in public sector pay this year.
Are there any benefits? For the implementation of routine procedures, tax processing functions of the Revenue Commissioners for example, decentralisation can save money and relocate jobs from Dublin to other parts of the country (correcting the Dublinisation of the Irish economy was one of the reasons used to justify decentralisation). But its spray gun implementation and glacial progress make decentralisation look like a small fig leaf designed to disguise the failure of what could have been more effective policies: Public transport services, road and rail infrastructure and broadband access outside the Dublin region remain a source of international embarrassment while - due to backbench pressure - the spatial strategy is too diffuse to create any serious economic rival to Dublin.
No thorough examination of these issues was undertaken before Charlie McCreevy - in a surprise budget speech in December 2003 - committed the Government to decentralisation. A financial model was subsequently created to balance the revenues and costs of property transactions related to moving locations.
But this land-based approach to assessing decentralisation ignores a whole host of other costs, costs which could render the policy a disaster, according to one expert who has worked close to Government but refuses to be named.
He says that - unlike parts of the Revenue Commissioners for example - key policy-making and implementing departments depend on networks of policy knowledge and flows of information that require close physical proximity to operate effectively. Break those up and serious systemic and operational risks will be the end result, he warns.
Demoralisation of civil servants is yet another risk. For many civil servants, expectations for promotion now require them to unexpectedly uproot their families and lives. And moving from the capital may reinforce this by creating a loss of prestige: Proximity to the centre of government is an important compensation for many civil servants whose job requires them to be self effacing.
For those long in harness, this total change in the "rules of the game" comes at a stage in their lives when alternative career options have long since dried up. The resultant panic and frustration could create a dangerous mood amongst those engaged in sensitive areas of policy work.
Disturbingly, no risk assessment has been conducted on such implications. The Mullarkey Working Group - a group set up under the chairmanship of former secretary of the Department of Finance Paddy Mullarkey - established structures and procedures for corporate governance and risk assessment in the Civil Service, structures and procedures which arguably should have been used to assess decentralisation.
Section 4.11 of the Mullarkey report says that secretaries of government departments should exercise the right - as acting accounting officers - to examine the costs implied by policy change and to challenge the implementing Minister, and sees this as an important right for good governance.
So far, any properly quantified cost benefit analysis has been limited to the Department of Finance assessment of land transactions associated with decentralisation. This, according to critics of the policy, falls well short of what is required. The body that might act to redress this is the Comptroller and Auditor General. But it sees its role as dealing with irregularity, impropriety or lack of integrity.
Decentralisation may just fall short of these criteria, but its effect is hardly auspicious. A net profit from the sale of land. A few more votes in marginal constituencies. And the efficiency, morale and standing of a significant part of the Civil Service ruptured forever.
Hardly a good day's work.