While the Northern Ireland Executive prepares to implement a consultation process on its plans for a review of public administration in Northern Ireland, a team of local consultants from PA Consulting has just completed a major review of the Irish Government’s modernisation programme. Here the Belfast-based head of PA Consulting on the island, Dr Michael Maguire, outlines the lessons to be learned from the Irish experience.
As the Northern Ireland Executive embarks on its own review it is interesting to consider the experience of government reform in the Republic over the last ten years. What steps have been taken to become more efficient, more accountable and better managed; and what can we learn from their experience?
The PA Consulting Group team completed the review for the Department of the Taoiseach. It was one of the largest studies of its kind ever carried out across the Irish Civil Service and one of the few studies to have been undertaken in Europe.
During the Review process, which took 7 months to complete, the PA team enjoyed unparalleled access to politicians and senior civil servants.
This included meetings with the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and nine Ministers and Ministers of State, meetings with the Secretary General and the management boards in 23 government departments. A questionnaire was also distributed to 30,000 civil servants seeking the views of civil servants to the reform process.
An evaluation report was presented to the Department of the Taoiseach and is available from its website. The Taoiseach arranged for a copy of the report to be sent to each civil servant in Ireland.
The Irish Civil Service represents a wide collection of individual business organisations.
The challenge was to assess the progress towards reform across 23 departments/offices in a wide range of areas, from foreign affairs, to defence, to fishery protection to the payment of social welfare support and pensions and economic development.
The study set out to assess how the Irish Government had performed against reform and modernisation objectives first set out in 1994. The objectives of the reform process included:
- To make the operation of government and decision-making processes more open and transparent to the citizen;
- To achieve an excellent service for the government and for the public and client at all levels
- To reduce the burden of government on the citizen – including the reduction of “red tape”.
Better management of people, improvements in financial management and the use of information technology were also highlighted as being fundamental to effective government reform as was a new approach in dealing with cross-cutting policy issues across government departments.
The study team found that there is no question that the Irish Civil Service in 2002 is a more effective organisation than it was a decade earlier.
Although some of the observed change would in any event have been driven by developments in information technology the study team were confident that much of the observed improvement in Civil Service structure and process was attributable to the change framework set out in ‘Delivering Better Government’.
In 1994 only a very limited number of Departments spoke of their ‘customers’ and no Department was faced by the challenges of freedom of information and the assignment of functions to named civil servants (both of which have now been implemented).
And the need to reduce the burden of red-tape on the citizen was essentially unheard of.
Clear progress can be seen in all these areas.
The operation of government and of the Civil Service is more open and transparent in 2002 than it was a decade earlier.
Less progress, however, could be found in relation to key the key internal management of departmental business.
A challenge envisaged, for example, was a move from the traditional personnel administrational function to a more strategic approach to the management of people.
Many senior managers interviewed as part of our research expressed frustration and slow pace for change; 67% of civil servants in the survey believed that under performance at work was not challenged and only 26% of civil servants agreed that promotions in their department/offices were made on the basis of merit and individual performance.
The study team recommended that there was a clear need to continue to develop the management of change within the Irish Civil Service with a particular focus on developing the people, financial management and information technology as the key agents to achieve change.
It was suggested that such change might require the introduction of new legislation (particularly relating to the recruitment, reward, and management of people).
In effect, this would give much greater autonomy to line departments in these areas than has previously been the case.
In Northern Ireland the debate on government reform is still at an early stage. The review team has only recently been appointed and the overall process is likely to take 12-18 months. Certainly there is unlikely to be any radical change prior to the net Assembly elections.
What if anything can be learned from the Irish experience? I think there are three initial areas for consideration.
Firstly, it is important to have a clear view as to what the reform agenda is trying to achieve. The initial terms of reference cover a number of areas including the role of politicians (democratic accountability), community relations (cross-community issues, equality agenda) and the largest area of concern - “institutional relationships” (relationship between local government, quangos and central government).
This represents a very broad agenda and the priority areas (for example, reducing the cost burden on the citizen, increasing the role of the private sector in delivering services, increasing local accountability or reshaping the nature of local government) will need to be hardened prior to work being commenced.
Secondly, while the existence of 11 departments is not part of the review process (understandably given the fragile nature of political relationships) the nature of the work carried out by those departments should be. There is a view in some quarters that the Northern Ireland Civil Services does not need modernised.
The entire thrust of the Irish Strategic Management Initiative has been focused on the ways in which central government conducts its business.
A review which confines itself solely to agencies / organisations outside government will be limited. How radical will the review team be allowed to be and can they think the unthinkable?
Finally, the issue of implementation needs to be considered from the beginning. This means getting the right kind of political support to deliver change. Lukewarm support from politicians to a radical change agenda will not be sufficient to deliver.
Experience from elsewhere shows that unless there is visible and consistent support from politicians to administrative reform it will under deliver.
Also the Irish experience shows the significance of leadership within departments to manage change – what support will be given to those who want to take on new ways of doing business?
It is early days. The review process is being finalised and I have no doubt there will be an extremely interested audience in both proposed process and great anticipation over the outcomes.
The experience of the Republic of Ireland shows that timescales are inevitably longer than anticipated and that results cannot be taken for granted. Time will tell Northern Ireland.
