‘New blood’ for top civil service

A MAJOR shake-up of the senior civil service in order to bring in new blood and end a “compartmentalised” culture was signalled yesterday.

Public Sector Reform Minister Brendan Howlin said the move would be a key overhaul of the way government works.

The minister said he would bring plans for the senior public service to Cabinet shortly and it would break down barriers preventing the Government making the best use of its civil servants.

“This is so we have joined-up public administration at the senior level — a forum, a structure where you’d have an interchange of ideas and free flow of people between government departments and other sections of public service.

“It’s a system that has worked very well in Britain.

“You have shared management techniques so that you have a mechanism to communicate strategy across government departments. So, people can move much more easily between departments and bring people from outside state agencies into government departments to break down the barriers that have been there in the past where people get compartmentalised.

“We discovered during the Programme for Government talks how compartmentalised government policy was, that there was very little horizontal dialogue across departments.”

Mr Howlin denied that a new Croke Park deal would be needed to deal with public pay issues.

“We’ll take it step by step. I’m optimistic about Croke Park,” he said ahead of a review into whether the agreement is delivering the expected savings.