It seems that in Opposition it is easy to get criticised for not presenting alternatives. A 20 second sound bite on TV is never going to be enough to give a considered view on a given issue. For me that has come through with the latest round public sector cuts proposed by National. It was good that the issues were covered in the mainstream media, but there are lots of issues to consider. One way we can get longer messages out is through opinion pieces. However it seems the mainstream media are reluctant to run them from politicians.
So, if you are interested, here is 550 words from me on what I think is the basis of how we should look at the future of public services in NZ. A bit long for a blog I know, but let me know what you think.
Future of Public Services Needs Better than an Ad-Hoc Approach
Grant Robertson, Labour State Services Spokesperson
The latest round of restructuring proposals from the National Government is a continuation of their ad-hoc and piecemeal approach to the future of the public service. There does not seem to be a plan, but rather a desire to be seen to be “cutting costs” and ‘back office staff’, regardless of how the actual agencies are performing. This is a short-sighted approach that will not deliver New Zealanders more effective and responsive services.
Everyone wants more efficient public services. There is no doubt room for improvement in a number of Ministries and Departments. As members of the public we have all experienced frustration with government agencies from time to time. For individuals and families who have complex needs the system does not always respond in a comprehensive or flexible manner. For many public servants a culture of risk aversion surrounds their work, even though they have many innovative ideas.
The solution to these problems is not going to come from simply ordering more and more indiscriminate funding cuts or from shuffling and merging small departments. The Prime Minister himself noted before the election that “few problems are solved by significant reorganisations – in fact, many more tend to be created. It is easy to underestimate the amount of energy and inspiration soaked up by institutional change, as well as the loss of personal and institutional knowledge.”
To get more efficiency and responsiveness in the public sector we need to re-examine the legislative framework that governs it. The State Sector Act and the Public Finance Act have now passed their 21st birthday. They are the products of an era of thinking that saw public service agencies as competing business units. Enormous power has been invested in individuals Chief Executives, and a silo mentality has grown up as a result. We need to ensure legislation supports a collaborative and integrated approach to delivering public services. This approach as former Government Statistician Len Cook has said could involve “broadening governance structures and practices to encompass sector wide solutions to outcomes”. In other words let’s start by focusing on what we want public services to achieve and build our framework around that.
It is also important to talk to those who deliver and receive the services about how they can be made more effective and responsive. We have some of the sharpest minds in New Zealand working in the public sector. We need to harness those capabilities to create innovation. They need to be supported to take risks. We also have to get alongside communities, businesses and individuals to see what works for them, and what is needed in their area. This might mean a mixture of central government provision of services and devolved provision, and it will mean that the public service has to adapt and change. Better use of technology will be a key part of this.
The approach to continuing to provide and improve public services should be one of investment, inclusion and innovation. Instead what we are seeing from the current government is a desire to be seen to be cutting back spending based on an artificial distinction between the frontline and back office, and inflated claims about the growth of the sector in recent years. New Zealanders expect and deserve high quality and efficient public services. The government needs to stop undermining them through indiscriminate cuts and start investing in our future.
Good work Grant.
Whats the details for your Radio NZ meeting again please? If I’m not busy studying I’ll try and make it along.
Grant – as well as considering those who deliver and receive the services it’s also necessary to consider those who pay for them.
The former are, of course, important stakeholders, but so too are the latter and so often this seems to be missed by Labour.
As the ‘Tax Explained By Beer’ analogy shows – if you don’t have empathy with the guy who’s paying for it all at the end of the day you could end up with nothing.
Labour were dumped at the last election, at least in part, because the funders got hacked off with what they were being asked to pay for services they didn’t necessarily agree with. If Labour is to regain the treasury benches it needs to truly reconnect with these people and find out what they believe is fair. Too often the Labour response to such folks is to taunt them for being selfish or greedy, which is not the way to win back their votes.
Grant – you do not mention the use of the private sector to deliver public services. Public services do not need to be delivered by public bodies to be effective (both in standards and cost). e.g our rubbish collection is handled beautifully for our local council but by a private provider.
The whole public versus private is yesterdays conversation. The answer is really both/and . If you can move past the current perceived Labour aversion to ‘private sector’ involvement then I am very keen to converse with you about public services.
In my experience, the best way to drive innovation is to start limiting resources. This tends to elicit behaviour that is focused on doing more for less. When you don’t have the cash or resources to throw at a problem you are forced to think of a different way of working. This applies to any organisation type.
I agree about the risk aversion. It must be hellish living with the fear that screw ups will be exposed in Parliament.
Next time you encounter a situation that has arisen due to well meant ‘innovation’, how about you do your bit by refusing to pedal the story despite the political upside?
You do that, and you will win a legion of fans!
Hi Grant. Interesting blog. I don’t profess to understand or even know all the academics behind what makes the Public Service tick, but being a former public servant who worked in the sector for 7 years and became a reasonably highly paid public servant, I definitely have a good idea about what I was not happy with. So here are my “thoughts”:
For me it is about delivering maximum services with minimum, if not zero waste. The public service does really need to try and function more along the lines of the private sector in order to be efficient.
In the private sector productivity is essential in order to get the desired profits.
While of course the public sector can not possibly work along the exact same lines as a company whose main priority is a big fat pay check, it should still be striving to get the maximum “bang for its buck”. However, because it doesn’t have the same profit margins to strive for it seems to be allowed to often just tick along with minimal accountability.
For the most part I personally think the biggest departments do in fact deliver what they should. However, there are some key areas that need to be addressed in these departments which I think are the primary reasons why there is the perception of it being a “bloated public service” such as:
**Too many people are doing the same job and the right hand often barely knows what the left hand is doing.
**Politics plays far too big a role in the public service when compared to private – so much so that you will have departments exaggerating the need for various roles in order to retain the allocated funding & resources that came with those roles. This is very common in the politics that goes on between regional (who are responsible for frontline staff) offices and National Office.
** The sheer number of secondments is a joke. Politics again is often what determines who gets where, not skill hence the inevitable impact on productivity. This is especially evident in the level projects that are ‘created’ whereby various project and communications advisors are seconded who often do very little. Even when the project managers realise that the scope of the project is not as big as what they anticipated or some secondees are a re waste of space, they still keep them on & continue to pay them a higher duties allowance.
** There is this huge culture of taking the mickey where people get training sessions after training sessions, free morning teas, free courses (which even if they only have the remotely relevant to your job, still get approved & paid for), meetings about meetings, team building activities skivving off for various personal appointments, low productivity in terms of work output etc. While some of these things are understandable and to a degree necessary, it’s the frequency of these things that I had issues with.
There is a huge difference between those that work on the frontline and those that work in the regional & national offices. The former can only dream of having the leeway that the latter get.
With regards to the smaller government departments, well to be honest, I like National’s proposed merges as each department has to have a higher paying National Manager so if they can find a way where the merging of 2 departments that are essentially doing the same or very similar job is appropriate then I am all for it. While the savings may be few, the improvement in terms of perception will no doubt be huge.
Hope this is along the lines of what you are after….
NACTS theory on public service efficiency seems to go like this:
Step 1.) Don’t fund them
Step 2.) Magic
Step 3.) …
Step 4.) Profit
The latter do actually have to pay for them though. NACT seem to be of the belief that these essential services are free.
Yes they do. Publicly provided will always be cost price whereas privately provided will always be cost plus the dead weight loss of profit.
HAHAHAHAHA
Amount of waste in the public service found by NACTS highly paid consultants (paid for by the taxpayer) was zero. So, no already running at close to maximum efficiency. This doesn’t mean that improvements can’t be made but they’re going to be incremental and take time.
Decreasing wages work as well although it’s kinda rough on the workers who find that they can no longer afford to live… Oh, wait, that’s what NACT are doing.
This is true in all large organisations and there’s very little that can be done about it. More communication takes more time and resources and, at some point, it becomes infeasible to do any more.
BS. See above about waste.
Draco just because overpaid consultants (who are no doubt contracted to the public service in their day job) failed to find any waste, doesn’t mean to say there isn’t any! I had 7 YEARS of seeing it first hand in both the frontline when I first started out & the back office which is where I remained until I eventually resigned. I was high enough up the food chain to see enough politics & people taking advantage of the loose rules to last me a life time.
And yes, I agree with Just Right as quite frankly, where the public service & their back office is concerned, people start to mind their p’s & q’s a little more when the unlimited resources suddenly become limited. Sure, departments tightened their belts a little so that they could be seen as doing the right thing at the end of Labour’s term etc, but they most certainly have a long way to go.
But, as you are so quick to label my opinion & experience as BS, pray do share – what experience do you have to back up your views? I hope that it has not come from working in the public service as unless you’re on leave, coming on here at 3pm means you would be doing the very thing I am talking about….
Grant, the mantra suggests ‘private good, public bad’ but I think efficiency and effectiveness and value for money is simply a function of size. There are plenty of examples of chronic waste and over expenditure in the private corporate sector, but it is all hidden from the shareholders, the private sector equivalent of the taxpayers. There’s no private sector OIA or any genuine media examination. Seems to me that in order to have a constructive public conversation about the public sector, there first needs to be a constructive public conversation about the ‘public bad, private good’ myth.
Jennifer you make a great point. From the small time that I have worked in the private sector though I have found the general accountability to be that much greater.
Perhaps though it comes down to the size of the organisation rather than the fact that they are private or public.
IRD & the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) for example employ thousands & thousands of people – for MSD I think this figure is around 8000 staff. That is a huge number of people to keep an eye on and now obviously with the merger with CYFs it is even bigger. Mergers can increase efficiency but I am not sure that particular merger under Labour was the best thing to do. CYFs still seem to be struggling like they always have.
Possibly one answer is to reward efficiency – where those of a department deliver productivity gains (more efficient delivery of services), this is quantified and the “profit” dispersed. The gain to the government, but some shared back to the department (new resources) and staff (reward).
SPC I agree.
Currently though in my personal experience is that reward is determined by where you worked. When I worked in National Office and had achieved excellence I was always appropriately rewarded by way of a bonus for getting 100% rating in my performance appraisals.
However, when I did a brief stint in the frontline office (I was seconded in as part of a regional shake up for a particular office) and was receiving payment under the Regional Office, I found out that even if you achieved 100% in excellence (that is, you are seen to be an expert) you could not actually be rated as such on your performance appraisal. The Regional Office refused to sign off on 100% performance appraisals. There were staff who had been employed in the public service for 20 years whose knowledge was so incredibly vast and their work ethic of the highest standard yet they had never received a full bonus.
It is this kind of thing that completely undermines the public sector as those who are the public face of the department and are providing excellent service, have the least incentive to do so.
Staff performance of their own jobs is probably the easiest to evaluate, the thing is to bring in the concept of system change – where staff can identify efficiency gains that could be made by practice change. In the private sector there has been the move to involve employees in improving productivity and this needs to become part of public service culture.
SPC I agree. Being respected, validated and treated like you’re part of the big picture is always going to improve productivity and overall efficiency of any organisation.
The problem with the public service is that there is still MANY left from the old school, people who have been there for 20-30 years who will never accept this kind of approach; they are the kind of people that would ignore you if you were screaming fire as you had say told the Operations Manager first instead of your Service Manager!!!
I cannot say about the public service today, my experience in advocating for system change within that sector was back in the 70’s. Surprisingly you might find – once someone up above agreed and supported the advocacy things did change. Around that time, there was the move to bring in financial accountability – cost services along with the sinking lid. So there was cause to find efficiency gain.
Cut health budgets and they become more efficient by offering the public less.
Cut the DHBs & put the money back into funding staff costs so the public actually manages to get free health care when they need it! I have a couple of mates who are doctors who work the most extraordinary hours & are thinking of becoming locums because the pay is better. And I have a few friends who have been nurses for at least 10 years and are to this day still doing the work of sometimes 3-5 nurses (depending of course on the number of patients that have to provide full physical care for) and any time they are on leave they get called into work (unless they manage to actually use their leave & escape overseas). It’s a mess and seems to be getting worse. Then you see things like the closure to that youth health clinic in CHCH. We’re going to hell in a hand basket I tell you. Again it’s a personal view without perhaps much academic basis…..
It does seem strange that a country with only just over 4M people needs so many DHBs, each with its own support services (finance, HR, IT etc). There surely must be potential savings here. 4M in the big world isn’t even a decent sized city.
The DHB’s do provide some public accountability and that is their purpose.
As to the idea of centralisation, the problem is that there are advantages that occur from allowing different management strategy, and good ideas are discovered – the ones that deliver the best results. What is needed is performance accountability and systems which allow other DHB’s to follow the best practice of the best DHB in that field.
Only in some areas are their cost efficiency gains from centralisation, and the advantages from this can be lost if any trend in that direction goes too far (the risk of applying a flawed policy across the whole system – with no reference to a more effective approach so it is changed asap).
What SPC said
SPC – I agree with your comments about centralisation in once sense. On the other I can not fathom that a small country like ours needs 22 DHB. If I was the ‘Health System Architect’ I would have 4 total… just think how much you could increase the wages of Nurses & Docs with the savings in replicated services.
Mate of mine is Surgeon. Every week he gets together with his team for a bite to eat & discuss their various patients etc. Just recently Management told them they were allowed to spend $4.93 (YES, that is the actual figure) on lunch each. But during those same lunches they get to perscribe $40K per annum of drugs for a person.
Sorry, but if there is a person who is focusing on $4.93 for the DHB then they should not be there!
Maybe the DHB is starved for money, hey the docs don’t have to starve, they just have to pay for it themselves. I do take the tightwad point though.
thanks for all the comments. It might just be a question of language but when I say “the users of services” I do actually mean all of us.
Labour did actually promote a number of initiatives that saw public services delivered in partnership with community and private interests. I think this needs to be handled carefully as the introduction of a profit motive into the delivery of important services can limit access, and see corners cut. But the bottom line is we do need to be flexible as to the best way to meet community needs.
I am in favour of a productivity commission like the Australian model, so long as we get the definition of productivity right. Efficiency can come in many guises. In the case of Archives NZ we have a very efficient small agency, providing better services than when it was part of a bigger bureaucracy.
No, it really does mean that there’s none to be found. One even had enough of a conscience to refuse to be paid. And, no, they weren’t part of the public service in their day jobs – they were external and independent.
Oh, I’ve been all over the show from large public service to large corporations. I’ve seen comparable waste in all of them.
That would equate with the experience that I’ve had. Small bureaucracies tend to be more aware of what’s happening but that doesn’t mean that you should go out and make all large public organisations into lots of small ones as you rapidly hit diminishing returns.
They should never have been under the impression that resources were unlimited but that is not the same as cutting resources. They do, after all, need enough resources to do the job.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. I told them to eff off as, although they wanted my ideas, they didn’t want to pay for them.
But, other than that, I actually do think it’s a good idea.
Size is not the only means for judgement. Sometimes it is the particular nature of the job. You mention Archives, Grant. They are tiny, but for specialist reasons and constitutional ones, they should remain separate