I’m going to claim partial credit for that idea.  I can’t remember whether I actually said it to Ruairi himself, but I was punting the idea around the Labour Party backrooms for a couple of weeks before I left for Canada.  Here’s some of the flesh I put on the bones of the idea while talking to people about it.

From East Lothian Museum (licenced under Creative Commons)

Why a Minister?

So why do you need a Minister for public sector reform?  Why not a committee or a working group or even just a Junior Minister?  The reason for this is that in order for the Public Service to both respect and cooperate with the process, and for the person in question to be able to legislate (both primary & secondary) at will, a cabinet level post is required.  This also stops, or at least hinders, interference from other Ministers. 

Who that Minister should be is a different matter, but it would need to be someone with a very good idea of what they wanted, the determination (and vision) to see it through, and a strong two-way respect for/from the public service as a whole.  Preferably, it should be a TD who’s not going to run for election again – this avoids too much personal risk entering the decision-making equation.

This Department Will Self-Destruct in…

Public service reform of the type we’re envisaging here isn’t an ongoing process.  This is a once-a-generation type of change we’re looking at.  Smaller, incremental change should be ongoing, (and the bigger process must create systems that facilitate it) but this is the time – and the opportunity – for major structural change.

Because of this, it’s important to give the proposed Department of Public Service Reform a predetermined lifetime.  Five years, being the normal lifetime of a Government (all going well), would be appropriate.  It’s long enough to hopefully avoid procrastination and “waiting them out”, but short enough that there’s a visible endline at all times.

The staff (more to follow) hired for the Department should be on five year contracts or secondments.  Those not already Civil Servants should not become Civil Servants in the old sense of the term (job for life, etc), but should of course have decent terms and conditions.

Civil Servants Deciding Public Sector Reform?

As I’m sure readers are already mentally pointing out, establishing a Government Department of Public Service Reform will mean having a building full of civil servants doing the work.  The people who best understand the public sector are public servants themselves.  But they’re also an interested party – some interested in strong reform, others interested in the status quo.  Group theory would suggest that in large numbers they’ll tend towards the latter.

So yes, you need civil servants working in this hypothetical Department.  But you also need to bring in people from the wider public service and from the non-public sector.  I’d say that your ideal mix would have the analysis/decision-making units of the Department made up of civil servants, other public servants and non-public sector people (be they from academia, private sector, NGOs or elsewhere).  It would also include people from each of those sectors (civil/public/non) from other countries.  The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand should be considered just as much as European nations.

The civil servants assigned to this Department should be hand selected from the best and brightest in the rest of the public sector.  They should be recruited by the new Department, not sent to it because they’re an inconvenience or of no use to their previous Department (as is alleged to so often happen in the Irish public service).

A mix like this would, hopefully, allow for some creative thinking while taking into account how the public service actually works in practice.

Bringing it all together

With a good Minister and the active cooperation of other Government Ministers, such a Department could be making a real difference in a realatively short time.  Its remit should be broad enough to allow for service improvements, quality control improvements and cost-beneficial additions as well as cost cutting.

But, I hear you cry, the Unions would never allow it.  Not right now they wouldn’t.  And that’s why one or more parties needs to run into the next General Election with a policy like this (in about as much detail as I’ve given) clearly laid out.

While the Unions might complain about such proposals, and some of the consequential reforms, being brought in off the cuff, it’s a different ball game altogether when there’s a clear mandate in place from the people.  One might take one’s chances on industrial action when there’s no clear mandate.  But if the people have spoken clearly, they’re not going to take withdrawl of any services well.

So, what we need is:

• A Minister for Public Service Reform
• A Department that only lasts 5 years
• Lots of non-civil servants staffing that Department
• Wide-ranging powers and terms of reference
• An election

Shouldn’t be a problem, then.

The cries from the media (and many of the assembled public) that nobody told them there was anything wrong with the economy are becoming annoying now.

By jazzmasterson, Flickr (cc)

They were told – but they chose to ignore the warnings.

Two years ago, in January 2007 (yes, despite the media’s insistence that nobody said anything before the 2007 General Election), Pat Rabbitte, then leader of the Labour Party, told a conference that Ireland “could not take a continued strong economy for granted, and claimed the current coalition was complacent to the point of smugness about the situation.”

The following day, Ruairi Quinn, a former Finance Minister, said that “any minor fluctuation in the international economic situation would leave us extremely exposed.”  And:

“Complacency will get us nowhere. We must be vigilant and mindful of our economy’s weaknesses. Otherwise, we risk losing the prosperity built on the efforts of hardworking people across the country.”

But the media in particular didn’t want to know.  Despite their normal penchant for bad news, journalists at the time just wouldn’t cover any negative talk about the economy seriously.

So please, stop saying nobody warned you.  You were warned, and you either chose to ignore the warnings or chose to take Fianna Fáil’s counterclaims at face value.  Face up to it.

creative commons: Cynergy

And it doesn’t stop there.

Ruairi Quinn TD:

“Although the government has decided to increase the school building programme, it has cut back on the funds to furnish national schools. What’s the point in building classrooms that will have no desks or equipment? This smells like a dig-out to builders.”.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the only dig-out to builders in this budget.

As we all know by now, Fianna Fáil have taken the medical card away from pensioners, causing huge consternation and uproar.

Just as bad was the bare-faced bailout for developers, where the Government will now provide mortgages to those who can’t get bank mortgages – fair enough, as long as they confirm that people can pay. Until, that is, you read the details. It only applies to new houses. Now, if your aim was to unfreeze the property market by getting some property sales going, wouldn’t you include second hand houses too? This is clearly not being done to ease the property market. It’s being done to help out developers.

But the big one that’s gone unnoticed is that, despite being “desperate for cash” as one FFer put it this week, the PRSI ceiling still wasn’t moved. Under the current system, PRSI is only charged on income up to €50,700 (changing to €52,000 in January). This is about as regressive a tax as you can design. Taxes are supposed to levy more as you earn more. PRSI levies less as you earn more.

Last week’s Turbine had a good rundown:

Income above €50,700 is only liable to the 2% [health] levy (or a 2.5% levy above €110,000). If the ceiling is abolished, all income would be liable to both PRSI and the levy.  It’s worth looking at the impact of such a change on take-home pay. The ceiling, currently €50,700, caps the amount of an employee’s income liable to PRSI at 4%. Income up to this point is also subject to a further 2% levy.

Some calculations below the fold.

Mr Regular (€50,000 salary)

All of Mr Regular’s income is currently under the PRSI ceiling, so he is paying a total of 6% PRSI and levies in 2008. After taking account of the weekly PRSI exemption, his 2008 PRSI/levies liability is €2,735. The abolition of the ceiling will have no impact on his PRSI/levies liability in 2009 (assuming no change to the weekly exemption or rates).

Ms Up-and-Coming (€80,000 salary)

A portion of Ms Up-and-Coming’s income is currently over the PRSI ceiling, so that not all of her income is subject to PRSI in 2008. After taking account of the weekly PRSI exemption, her 2008 PRSI/levies liability is €3,460. Should the ceiling be abolished in 2009, Ms Up-and-Coming will be worse off by €1,172 per annum.

Mr Made-It (€175,000 salary)

A significant portion of Mr Made-It’s income would not be liable to PRSI in 2008. After taking account of the weekly PRSI exemption, his 2008 PRSI/levies liability is €5,826. Should the ceiling be abolished, Mr Made-It will be worse off by €4,972 per annum.

Answering a Parliamentary Question (ref 12243/07 if the link isn’t working) from Ruairi Quinn TD in 2007 (which I’m reasonably sure I wrote, and I’m certain I submitted), then Minister for Social & Family Affairs Seamus Brennan said that removing the PRSI ceiling would result in a return to the Exchequer of €295m.

Mary Harney and Brian Cowen have both said during the week repeatedly that the withdrawal of the medical card from the over-70s will save €100m.  So, by removing the PRSI ceiling and making sure that the rich pay more, we could not only let those who have given a lifetime of service to the country keep their hard-earned benefits, but we could also do any of the following too:

• Leave the standard rate of VAT at 21%, rather than increasing it
• Not increase the excise duty on petrol
• Cancel the Air Travel Tax
• Double all the benefits to pensioners in this year’s budget: increase the pension by €14 instead of €7 per week; and increase the fuel allowance by €4 instead of €2 per week; and increase the fuel allowance period by a month instead of a fortnight

That’s welcome, and long overdue.  Bruce Schneier wrote about it back in 2006.  California has for some time had a mandatory disclosure law, and it’s forced companies to take notice of the cost of losing data – especially in terms of their reputation:

Disclosure laws force companies to make these security breaches public. This is a good idea for three reasons. One, it is good security practice to notify potential identity theft victims that their personal information has been lost or stolen. Two, statistics on actual data thefts are valuable for research purposes. And three, the potential cost of the notification and the associated bad publicity naturally leads companies to spend more money on protecting personal information — or to refrain from collecting it in the first place.

Think of it as public shaming. Companies will spend money to avoid the PR costs of this shaming, and security will improve. In economic terms, the law reduces the externalities and forces companies to deal with the true costs of these data breaches.

So, let’s hope Dermot Ahern is serious about this.  We’ve got far stronger data protection laws than the US in most areas – they need to be extended to mandatory disclosure.  This is exactly what I was trying to get done when I first wrote those Parliamentary Questions in January, so it’s good to see it come to some level of fruition.

Update:

Digital Rights Ireland have more on this.

Today, a new series of PQs shows that they’re heading for 45 devices lost this year alone.  That’s almost one a week.  That’s bad.

What’s worse, though, is that, despite the repeated losses of personal information all year, neither the Department of Communications, Energy & Natural Resources nor the Department of Education & Science have introduced any whole disk encryption solutions.

Ruairi Quinn:

Ruairi Quinn TD (with Pat Rabbitte TD)

It beggars belief that the Department of Communications, tasked with developing our country’s IT infrastructure, has absolutely no policy on securing IT devices.

I wouldn’t even allow my personal laptop go out and about without Truecrypt encryption.  Why are two Government departments so closely associated with technology allowing my data to be left on buses and stolen from cars without any protection?  Especially when there’s little or no cost (Truecrypt is free).

What are Ministers Eamon Ryan and Batt O’Keeffe up to that they’ve missed the news all year?

By the way, if you think you can spot my fingerprints all over this, yes I did write the original PQs and this week’s followup PQs.  I wrote the Januar press release, but not this month’s one.

Update:

Mulley has a list of the actual responses.