Heating and electricity bill up €500k in Government department despite remote working

Department of Social Protection secretary general John McKeon. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

A €500,000 increase in a Government department’s spending on heating and electricity, while its staff were working remotely, was because all office-based computers were left powered on.

The head of the Department of Social Protection (DSP) has said that “for security and other reasons” a remote-working protocol was used during the first year of the pandemic “which required desktop PCs to be maintained in a powered-on position”.

Secretary general John McKeon, who will appear before the Public Accounts Committee today, told PAC vice-chairperson Catherine Murphy that in this scenario, “remote PCs were simply used as a screen rather than having access to data and systems directly”.

Such remote administration is a tool typically used by companies’ IT staff to assess staff PCs and install necessary upgrades from afar.

Earlier this week, it emerged via a parliamentary question response to Ms Murphy that the department had spent €4m on heat and electricity in 2020, as opposed to €3.5m in 2019 — an increase of 14%.

In its response, the DSP made no mention of the remote admin issue, but said that its buildings had needed to be “heated, lit, and ventilated for longer periods”.

Mr McKeon has said that his department is “currently rolling out secure laptops to staff to eliminate this requirement”.

He added that other contributory factors to the department’s overheads last year included the cost of electricity and gas increasing "significantly”, and the fact the department had used “four additional buildings to facilitate temporary staff recruited to manage the unprecedented administrative demand of processing the pandemic unemployment payment”.

In his opening remarks to the PAC today, Mr McKeon is expected to tell the committee that the evidence of his department’s operations during the pandemic will help to dispel the “lazy caricatures” of civil servants being “cosseted, of not being innovative, of being inefficient, of lacking customer focus”.

Today’s hearing is also expected to deal at length with the matter of bogus self-employment.

The Department of Social Protection, which is currently conducting an investigation into the practice at RTÉ, is the body with primary responsibility for dictating a worker’s employment status.