Opinion: The uncomfortable spectre and fear of redundancy is beginning to blow coolly through the public service, as various departments strive to meet the Government’s expenditure reduction targets. In the last week alone, significant redundancies have been foreshadowed for the Ministries of Health, Pacific Peoples, and Ethnic Communities. They come on top of staff reductions already announced in other areas.
Meanwhile, ministers remain at pains to say no cuts in frontline services are being contemplated, and that any job cuts will be in back-office areas only. But, as departments announce their reductions, that is becoming an increasingly difficult fine line to maintain. Because of the requirement for a 7 percent cut in spending across all agencies and departments, regardless of their size or scope, the staffing reductions being made will inevitably be arbitrary.
In large part, the problems departments face in meeting the Government’s requirements lie with the way the public service had been allowed to develop under the previous Labour-led government. One of its earliest actions on coming to office in 2017 was to abolish the preceding government’s Better Public Services programme, with its 10 key result areas and specific departmental performance targets. Labour’s argument was that the pursuit of performance targets was a narrow distraction, forcing departments to focus their activities on tick-box solutions, over a more basic and sensitive approach to meeting the diverse needs of individual citizens.
After the pandemic restrictions were lifted, Labour used the country’s relatively favourable debt-to-GDP ratio to borrow an additional $53 billion to fund the economic and social recovery. This move was widely supported by the public, with warnings that the dramatic increase in debt would come home to roost in coming years being dismissed as no more than cheap and nasty political shots.
But rather than use this funding to strengthen critical health infrastructure that had struggled to cope during the pandemic, or to rebuild the education system which had been turned upside down during lockdowns, Labour prioritised additional spending on many short-term subsidy or relief programmes, or other pet projects only tangentially related at best to pandemic recovery. Given the government’s overarching objection to public sector performance targets, no clear objectives were set for any of these programmes. Consequently, now the additional funding has come to an end, it is extremely difficult to evaluate the impact of the post-Covid recovery expenditure, and whether it provided value for money.
But one measurable fact that did emerge was that the number of public servants increased substantially in this time. When Labour came to power the number of public servants was approximately 50,000, having been capped at that number by the previous government. By the time Labour left office in 2023, and particularly in the post-pandemic period, that number had increased sharply – by nearly 16,000 to just under 66,000, a rise of about a third in less than six years.
During last year’s election campaign, National and Act talked about bringing the size of the public service back to pre-pandemic levels. They planned to get rid of the additional public servants taken on during the pandemic, whose services they argued were no longer required. However, given the lack of proper evaluation of the effectiveness of the various short-term Covid recovery programmes, it was not that straightforward to do so, without threatening the frontline services the Government has pledged not to touch.
For that reason, ministers have deemed it prudent to leave it to their respective departmental chief executives to determine where and how the blanket 7 percent expenditure reduction the Minister of Finance requires is achieved. That has led to what now look like sweeping and arbitrary staffing reductions, which in turn stretch the credibility of the Government’s claim that it is not putting frontline services at risk. (Of course, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that officials are putting worst-case scenarios before ministers to give them some wriggle-room for softening some of the proposals before final decisions are reached.)
Were public sector performance being measured on the extent to which specified targets and outcomes were being met, it would have been much easier to determine objectively which programmes and staffing should be retained, and which should be terminated. The Government’s commitment in its just-released quarterly action plan to the end of June, to reintroduce specific targets for improving public services such as health and education will enable better and more transparent measurement of the effectiveness of future government actions, and for those to be adjusted as necessary to ensure the public need is always being met.
This would be a step towards re-establishing a flexible and nimble public service, able to assist the Government deliver its key policies while maintaining the provision of high-quality services to the public. But it will also require ministers to set clear objectives for their departments, along with equally clear accountability mechanisms to measure and evaluate performance.
Under Labour, the public service appeared to lose its way, proving unable to translate many of the government’s key policies into workable programmes. Ministers seemed incapable of imposing their will on departments, with the net result often being stalemate and an overall lack of delivery. National has to avoid falling into the same hole.
In the absence of a clear set of overall performance objectives for the public sector, the coalition’s cuts in public service staffing levels risk looking aimless and consequently brutal. The reintroduction of performance targets for the beleaguered health and education sectors is a welcome start, but there need to be equivalent targets across the whole of government.
The Prime Minister says his quarterly action plans are about delivering government policies in “bite-size chunks” so progress can be easily measured. Adopting the same approach to the way government departments deliver core public services is an equally important priority, and should be the Government’s next step.
Performance targets are not a lot of use if departments abandon collecting the data needed to monitor progress (or lack of it). Stats NZ’s dropping of the groundbreaking Living in Aotearoa survey means there’ll no longer be any half-adequate measure of child poverty.
It’s impossible to accurately judge the expansion of public service under labour given that it had been arbitrarily capped under previous government and therefore the natural growth rate had been curtailed and then there was a major pandemic requiring extreme levels of government intervention.
has anyone projected the hiring rates from pre the cap to after to see if a rise of 16,000 would be above the norm?
I totally agree Peter.
“Ministers seemed incapable of imposing their will on departments, with the net result often being stalemate and an overall lack of delivery.”
Could someone tell me how ministers impose their will on their department’s given that few of them know very much about what each of theirs do and how they work.
Further for any given policy or objective a minister may be delivered the “possible solutions” and timeframes too, generated by members of that department themselves.
Bearing in mind that no departments work independently but rely on support and cooperation from many others it would seem rather miraculous to me that we get any changes in direction and performance from our public servants.
Clearly reliable data collection is paramount for both planning and monitoring purposes and our government tells us will be the basis of all their decision making.
Let’s see what happens.