What next for the reform of the public sector |
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With the agreement of the Croke Park deal, the Irish Government has put in place the structures required to help deliver cost reduction and reform of the public sector. However, they now face the critical next step - delivering the savings to ensure we benefit from a lower cost public sector while providing high quality public services.
Harry Goddard, partner in charge of public sector services, highlights that over the past eighteen months the Irish Government has taken a necessary top-down approach to cost reduction. This has included the pay and pension changes, as well as the McCarthy Report and the Transforming Public Services Report. These reports provide value in identifying the size of the cost reduction opportunity and offering a wide range of solutions to support achieving the cost reduction target. Critically however, they do not provide a roadmap for the civil service to consider in order to take on the implementation of cost reduction.
In this whitepaper, the second in our series addressing Public Sector Reform, we highlight that the root of the problem in Ireland is the massive fiscal imbalance between expected revenues and promised expenditures, and outlines three steps with which to close this gap.
