Civil service unions examine ways to cut staff numbers

CIVIL Service staff unions last night met with the Government to discuss how it intends to reduce the headcount under the terms laid out in the Croke Park deal on public sector pay and reform.

Under revised plans in the Croke Park deal, the Government wants to reduce the number of civil servants on the Exchequer payroll from 36,200 to 34,600.

That revised plan says that department and state bodies should review their workload, making sure it is assigned to and carried out “by the most appropriate teams and at the lowest appropriate levels within each organisation and to eliminate unnecessary grade drift in decision- making”.

As there can be no compulsory redundancies in the service, other mechanisms need to be found.

Tom Geraghty, general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union which represents executive grades in the civil service, said the moratorium on public service recruitment is going to reduce the numbers employed in the civil service.

He said reduction in that way would be significantly greater in the higher grades because of the older age profile of those workers.

“The role of those who leave will have to be reconfigured,” he said.

“There is a new era where we now need to look at imaginative ways of getting work done, of distributing it differently.”

He said a lot will become clearer as the different roles become vacant.

“It will have to be established whether you still need to be doing what has always been done,” he said. “Whenever a certain section is looked at it may be found that there is a surplus of staff but in another section there may be a shortfall.”

Mr Geraghty said the expectation was that if the reduction in overall numbers could not be achieved through the moratorium there were options for deployment built into the Croke Park deal.