January’s 1bn benchmarking bonanza

THE vast majority of civil and public servants were yesterday cleared to receive the next stage of their benchmarking payments in January.

Close to 1 billion will be divided out to civil and public servants as the second benchmarking installment, totalling 50%, is paid.

Although doubts still linger over some teachers, prison officers and cleaning staff at Dublin City Council, the performance of 27 government departments and statutory bodies, as well as the entire health service, has been assessed and approved by Performance Verification Groups (PVG). The Department of Education’s PVG also last night cleared payment to all teachers except those in a handful of schools which had taken industrial action.

However, talks are continuing with 40,000 primary and secondary teachers in a dispute over parent-teacher meeting times.

Neither the Department of the Environment nor the Department of Justice has published the recommendations of their PVGs. However, it is thought that a decision on payments to prison officers, currently in dispute with the Department of Justice over overtime, may be postponed pending a resolution.

Generally the three PVG reports published yesterday expressed the view that all civil service grades had displayed clear evidence of improvements in work practices.

The absence of any incidences of industrial action in the civil service since July 1 this year is cited as an admirable achievement.

However, each report also highlighted matters of concern.

Civil service PVG chairperson, Donal de Buitléir’s report expressed dissatisfaction “with the generally slow pace of progress in relation to the HR agenda”, highlighting differing levels of progress by civil servants.

“There are clearly some organisations that have set themselves challenging and difficult targets, while others have displayed less ambition,” he said. Problems were also identified with the ability of the civil service to accept competitive, merit-based promotion. Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton said the Government had locked itself into a bad deal struck on behalf of taxpayers. Mr Bruton said yesterday’s PVG reports bore little resemblance to action plans produced by every department in the summer which contained detailed lists of goals and projected dates of achievement. “The documents published today are not comparable to the action plans published in August,” he said.