Ministerial Muppet mayhem as Croke Park ‘reform’ exposed
Obfuscation, downright denial and mismanagement by Government ministers and senior officials is about to result in disorganised chaos. There is no precedent for what lies ahead in human resource deployment.
Two years of pretence that the Croke Park Agreement is achieving enhanced productivity and reform, is about to be exposed as a gigantic sham. Consequences for hospital patients, students and victims of crime are potentially disastrous. Contingency planning is dependent on the willingness of disappearing personnel to agree to being re-hired.
Fundamental flaws in the architecture of public service structures, which have been swept under the carpet through mutual collusion, lie at the heart of this impending shambles. 3,817 employees of the HSE are due to depart. The final figure may vary because individuals may stay, due to miscalculation of their one and a half year’s lump sum entitlement — opting at the last-minute to cancel resignation. Minister For Public Service Reform, Brendan Howlin, and Secretary-General Robert Watt, tried in vain to ensure there would be a three-month gap between the deadline to seek an exit and the departure date. This was rejected by unions. Despite concessionary terms worth up to 15% of enhanced entitlements, by using pre-pay cut salaries, the Government declined to insist on proper breathing space for reorganisation. Adopting new technology and outsourcing takes time.
The second enormous error was to abandon any attempt at selectivity. The selection process as to who goes, within 300,000 personnel, was entirely at the behest of applicants. Units with a preponderance of senior staff, close to retirement age, will bear the brunt of vacancies. No regard was had to the impact this will have on specific regions or specialised divisions. If handfuls of theatre nurses and midwives depart from a particular hospital, there are no controls to refuse requests. No attempt was made to target staff rationalisation in the context of reorganisation.
Take the Defence Forces, where 520 army personnel applied to leave. This is totally unconnected to closures of barracks or scaling back overseas UN deployments.
The Bord Snip Nua report in 2009 advocated that 17,300 public service posts should be abolished. It set out how this was to be achieved, by identifying quangos to be closed, schemes to be terminated and departments to be merged. It said the number of Garda stations should be halved from 700 to 350. It proposed 6,168 employees of the HSE could go through reorganisation of administration — the personnel section alone employs 8,000. In education, they set out plans for staff cuts at third level, merging smaller primary schools and a reduction to the pupil teacher ratio. There was joined up thinking between the delivery of public services and reduction in job numbers. The current free for all represents an abandonment of any semblance of private sector human resource management. Harsh consequences are about to be visited on us all.
The Croke Park Agreement has a mythical jewel in the crown, ‘redeployment’. The notion is that by implementing a Big Bang mega departure, public bodies will be obliged to transform themselves with flexibility, subject to a 45kms movement limit. All evidence indicates a culture of systemic resistance to change. There has been no reduction in 13 separate management grades, facilitating a disconnection between top decisions and frontline execution. Multiple layers of middle management need to be reorganised into a much flatter structure, which is resolutely defied. This obstruction is underwritten by conciliation and arbitration systems that stubbornly refuse to adapt.
Remember Privilege days and the 30 minute breaks to encash non-existent paycheques? Arbitration bodies determined workers were still entitled to celebrate the King’s birthday, Empire Day and race festivals. Unions won both cases on appeal.
Suddenly, we’re expected to believe that supernumerary remaining staff can be slotted into vacant posts. It hasn’t been explained how specialist skills are to continue. A departing neurosurgeon in Beaumont Hospital cannot have their duties carried out by excess janitors or clerical officers. A retiring secondary school biology or French teacher can only be substituted by a person with relevant qualifications. The middle of an academic year, with class timetables already set out, is the worst possible time to retire teachers. School principals and management boards face immediate dilemmas if retirees don’t stay on until the summer holidays.
How quickly will approval be given by the Department of Education to rehire? Disruption is inevitable for students. Up to 3,000 replacement staff are to be approved. Nobody yet knows who or where.
Public service entities comprise empires of mandarins. Their retention is a matter of the most guarded territories. Turf wars lie at the heart of senior officials’ decision-making. We can anticipate the mother of all infighting battles to ensue as line departments seek exemption for their staff in the decision-making process as to which posts will remain unfilled.
Within the HSE, this conflict will be geographic in the absence of policy decisions. When asked by media to outline specific rearrangements, top brass referred queries to local hospital and area administrators. In turn, local bosses stated they awaited decisions from on high. Expect bedlam, unless there is blanket pragmatism to retain people on short-term contracts or a major influx of agency recruits. They are literally making it up as they go along.
This shambolic scheme is supposed to reduce the public sector pay bill by €2.5bn before 2015. This has to be achieved while adhering to the two core tenets of the Croke Park Agreement — no pay cuts and no compulsory redundancies. There is no transparency on the overall finances. Cathal Magee (HSE CEO) claimed at a hearing of the public accounts committee that the average savings to be made, where staff are not rehired, would be 33% of salary costs. Lump sum packages are expected to be of the order of €183m in health and €159m in education. Ministers have declined to give top line figure of total gratuities. They may be as high as €630m. We do know the vacancy attrition will be worst in senior echelons, such as Garda management. Only 33 of 56 positions above the rank of superintendent have been sanctioned for appointment. The brain drain of experienced key individuals is apparent.
Failure by Cabinet to take tough decisions on the Comprehensive Spending Review makes this downsizing almost impossible. The Taoiseach invented ‘Transition Teams’ during media interviews — no one knew what or where they are. U-turns on disability allowances, community employment schemes, disadvantaged schools, Vatican embassy and septic tank inspection charges augur poorly for cabinet collegiality when Brendan Howlin insists on a tough line against concessions.
The retirement scheme and moratorium on public service recruitment, both predated the Croke Park Agreement and could have been achieved without it. Its job is to facilitate transformation in this fell swoop. It’s a con job. It doesn’t alter the glacial pace of change. More Muppet mayhem.
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