A white flag on public sector reform

Reform of the public service, as we might have hoped it would turn out, is dead. However, P&R insists, ‘long live public sector reform!'

But this is in a format which carries more jargon than a David Brent ‘how to’ manual, seeming to say everyone can have a part to play in something that might happen further down the line.

The P&R president says there is change going on in the public sector. People are ‘working their socks off’. Some areas are very, very stretched. But no-one, politician or public, is seeing the results, the savings that were hoped for, indeed, were promised.

200 jobs were going to go? Not any longer. Apparently 100 have been lost – not that anyone particularly noticed – but any more would cut into front line services.

Work programmes, Deputy Ferbrache told the States, were ‘too complex, too ambitious, simply not deliverable’. A previous chief executive went because he was judged as failing to deliver on them. Current savings expectations are ‘pathetic’.

So instead, two sides of A4 from the P&R president were read to the States yesterday which, conveniently, fit together to form a white flag on public sector reform and significant savings for the taxpayer, or a redirection of taxes into priority areas.

Our new solution sees a jumble of ‘senior expertise’ working with ‘subject matter experts’ to ‘identify core challenges’. There will be a ‘smaller list of actions’ allowing ‘informed investment decisions to be made based on value for money’.

We’re now definitively told that economies and savings won’t fill that black hole we all know about.

Yes, transformation must get back on track, the States must solve the ‘looming shortfall’, Deputy Ferbrache said, and work with the public sector, the community, and, indeed, deputies with each other, to do it.

It sounds less than convincing, and all signed off with an inevitable dig at the previous regime for peddling an impossible dream.

If you voted for a trimming of the fat from the public sector two years ago, almost to the day, you now know that goose is cooked.