 It's a pleasure to be here and we welcome discussions of this type of forum because part of the new leadership of the civil service, we've made a conscious decision of being out more and trying to explain what we're doing and to hear back on how well we're doing or how badly we're doing as the case might be. So it's delighted to be here, I'm always delighted to be in the institute. So reform, as I was saying to people earlier, when you go around at the moment to walk around town or cycling around town, all these posters and all this election hearing and everybody's in favour of change and reform. But it's very hard to get a sense of change to what, reform to what, what does it actually mean, what do they look, they want more accountability, they want more transparency, they want lower taxes or higher taxes or more spending. So we tried to explain reform and in terms of what we mean by reform in the public sector is that we do more with less. It's about productivity, it's about improving outcomes in health education, labour market and it's also about openness and accountability and transparency. Issues which are more to the fore again given things that have happened over the last few months are particularly affecting the Department of Justice. So that's our sense of reform. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've been doing and where we're going to go. So management consultants always talk about the burning platform. So we've had a really, we've had a fabulously, fabulously little platform for some time now. Fiscal crisis, economic crisis need to cut spending, increase demand for services. They need to do all this while retaining industrial peace. And also I think a very important issue which is not necessarily related to fiscal issues or economic issues or probably to the public service, but rebuilding trust. How can we rebuild trust and rebuild the connection between institutions of the state, the civil service and the people that we purport at to serve. And I'm the first to admit and Brendan Howell, if he was here, would agree that there's an awful lot more that needs to be done in order to rebuild trust. And it's obviously a fracture which we need to work on. I want to talk a little bit about consolidation very briefly and I have a few graphs. Reform has been essential for us to reduce spending and reduce the deficit. And it's interesting. I hope everybody can see this. I just got these graphics this morning to look at how much consolidation we've done. And this is trends in the primary balance, so that the balance excluding interest payments, which is a good way of measuring it. And we're the green line, of course. And we've reduced that by 9 percentage points. This is GDP within a five year period, which is quite a significant rate of consolidation. And that's required an awful lot of decisions, an awful lot of spending decisions, tax decisions and reformers as you can see other countries what they've done. And I think even probably a better measure, and I won't go through this in detail, but people can see it in the pack, is to look at trends in the primary balance adjusting for the economic cycle. Because things have moved against us in a way which have increased and demand the pressures for more services. So to get even this measure of consolidation is even more useful. And you can see in this measure we've taken a down about 11 percentage points of GDP. This is unprecedented for our country. And I think apart from one or two examples of other developed economies, it's without precedent. But this has been an enormous achievement. And you can see on this measure, for 2014, we're down to a primary balance, which is a significant achievement and very important terms of debt dynamics and where we go in terms of future policy. So we've done this in two ways. We've increased taxes and charges everybody knows. And we've also reduced spending quite dramatically. One of the things we've tried to do, and this speaks of the reform agenda, is to focus on reducing unit costs and drive efficiency as opposed to reducing the volume of services where possible. And you can see right over on the left-hand side, public sector pay. A big chunk of the fall has been due to public sector pay. Pay cuts, pension levy, numbers reductions. People have retired from the system and pensions have gone up. That was a democrat and I see some of our colleagues here. So we're still paying the pensions from that particular superannuation vote. I'm glad to hear it's costing us more. That's why they're here. Great to see. More people unemployed have increased the cost of the live register. But interestingly enough, I think this feeds into the debate. If you look at health non-pay and education non-pay, very modest if any reductions in health and education spending outside of core pay rates and pay bill. So in terms of the volume, we haven't really cut back, and I'll talk a bit about the improvements, the volume of some of these key services in health and education, despite much of the debate out there. But this other category here at 3.4 billion, if you look at everything outside of social welfare, education, health has been absolutely decimated on the current side. So everything else the state does, all the remainder, there's been enormous reductions in spending and enormous efficiencies. So I would argue that the consolidation linked to reform has done it the right way around, focused on unit costs, tried to protect core social welfare rates, the core and core services in health and education, and everything else has taken a significant hit. And there's also a significant reduction in capital spending compared to where we thought we would be and compared to where we were five or six years ago. Now there's a debate about has that gone too far? Will we start seeing bottlenecks now in infrastructure unless we can ramp up investment? Are we spending the money on the right project? So there's a debate to be had about, we're now spending around 2% of GMP, just over 3 billion on capital spending. Is that enough given our demographic profile? Anyway, that's the debate that we're having at the moment. But it's just always interesting to set out what's actually happened and I've summarised it here, 16% reduction in cash terms and I've mentioned the areas where the ax has fallen. This is a voted spending current and capital, so it's overall spending of the state excluding interest payments on the debt and the interest payments on the debt has been over now a significant 5% of income and due to go up a little bit more before they start coming down. But voted spending, so the spending on social services, on goods and services, capital has fallen by about 10 percentage points over this period. So significant progress has been made and based on the likely spending profile for the next three years and as GMP and GDP, the denominator improves, we're going to see further falls in that and of course the big political economy debate which we'll have particularly in 18 months, two years time if that's when the next election takes place or that time period a big debate about where is the size of the state and what that means for tax and what that means for social provision. But we're back down to where we were in 2008 and based on current policy, the state as a percentage of our income will be back down to 2004-2005 levels within the next 18 months, two years. So a fairly significant correction has, in my view, the correct approach, but a very significant adjustment has taken place. When we talk to people in the private sector, they always say to me, oh, we've cut spending dramatically during the recession. And I say, yeah, because the demand for what you do has fallen in a lot of cases, but in a recession the opposite happens for the government of course, because we provide a social safety net, we still have to provide more people with medical cards, with the increase in the number of medical cards and with demographic pressures that we have to deal with. So we've been downsizing and reforming when the demand for what we do is increasing and increasing in some cases quite dramatically and I've just outlined some of the numbers. The number of people of pensionable age is going up around one and a half, two percent each year. That's going to continue for some time. We've had a number of births has been very high with more people staying full time. So the demand's place on us has been going up as we've been trying to reduce spending. Reform, so there are three strands to reform. I have a few slides here, I won't go through all of them, but just to give you a flavour, political administrative strategic and the operational. The strategic in 2011, thankfully the date is there so I can remember, November 2011, we set out our reform plan. And one of the failings in the past was that we produced these glossy publications about what we're going to do, how we're going to reform the civil service, the public sector, without specifying the actions, who's responsible for delivering, and by when. So we deliberately moved to a less sexy, less glossy approach, which actually had an implementation plan. I mean a lot of resistance in the system to actually having this implementation plan. So we published this report in 2011, which set out this is what we're going to do, and we broadly delivered I think about 89% of that. And we've now refreshed this for a new plan and I think we have copies today which sets out our vision for the future. A key part of all this has been the operational environment, which was Crow Park and then Haddington Road. So you need the strategic, you need the political support, which also need an operational framework within which we can work and deliver the changes. So significant achievements, and I'll talk about some of these in detail about what we've done. Strength and spending controls, lower spending, Haddington Road agreement, deployment of shared services, we're embarking on a very significant shared services, consolidation across the civil service and outside, outsourcing of non-core work, consolidation of procurement, which I'll talk about in a moment. Property action plan, where reducing our footprint to the public sector is getting smaller, we don't need the same number of offices and buildings and we're downsizing there. Better use of ICT in online services and the public service card, which I'll talk about in a moment, and a number of cross government appointments. A key element of what we're trying to do is to look at the system more in a unified way. So to consolidate procurement, to consolidate how we're doing ICT, shared services. So rather than having pockets doing various things and silos on policy to try and really move towards what we call a unified civil service. Productivity improvements, key part of what we're doing, I won't go through all of this, but you can see some of the changes brought about by Haddington Road in particular. Haddington Road is an incredible productivity deal, 15 million more hours worked along with a whole variety of changes, changes which we've been seeking for 20, 30 years in work practices, demarcation issues, rostering and so on. And you can see some of the impact of these changes and how it's impacted on productivity in different sectors. Very significant improvements. And this environment, this environment of reform and reform based on a consensual approach with the trade union movement, we believe has been very important in terms of embedding stability and enable us to get through the difficult austerity of the last number of years and enabling us to exit from the tricor programme. So we think all those different elements are very important in terms of what we've been doing. And people were amazed that despite the difficult cuts and the difficult retrenchment that we have managed to keep people with us. Stability, and particularly now that we have this stability, people don't seem to value it as much when we have it. But I think we need to think about what the counterfactual could have been. And we don't have to go too far to look at some other countries who have gone through very difficult austerity and had a lot of social unrest and I all promise about what the counterfactual could have been for us. So I would put a great value on the benefits of stability and the consensual approach to us actually getting through what we've got through. So the new reform plan, and I'll go through this quickly. So just to focus on five issues, five priorities of where we think we should go now. And Minister Howland is always very keen when we do plans to have an iterative process of engagement. And we've gone to dog committees, gone to other groups and we said, well, this is our view. This is our plan of where we should go for the public service and civil service. But we'd like to hear, and this afternoon we'd certainly like to hear what people think about the priorities on what we're doing. So there are five themes, innovation in how we deliver services. Well, to look at how we deliver services, I think are there new models or the new ways of service delivery. We had a particular approach. Does that work? Are there other models out there? Digital government, how we engage with citizens. Increasingly, we get more complaints from people saying that they like to interact with us the same way as they do with Ryanair or our language in terms of booking, as opposed to people complaining that we've closed down that traditional channel. It's very interesting when you think about it. The political resistance historically will be, I want to talk to somebody, I want to go and visit that office. So when we move to digital, you get a bit of that, but increasingly we have people saying, we're just frustrated that the system isn't as savvy, our access isn't as easy as it is how we access services in the private sector. So digital government, further cost reduction, openness and accountability. So we need to improve performance through improving accountability and we need a much more open system and engage more in how we do our business. I'm going to talk a little bit about the civil service renewal process. So innovation service delivery. We're providing more services externally than ever before. The local property tax centre was outsourced. Driving license, third level grants, the SUSE, which despite some early glitches is turning into a fantastic and effective service delivered mainly externally. And we're now looking at a whole variety of projects which will be delivered externally or in partnership with private providers and I've listed some of them there. But in effect, what we're doing in terms of how we look, the way we look at public services, we say, OK, the traditional approach would have been that we provide a grant to a body and that grant is there forevermore unless somebody decides that we're not happy with the outcomes of our value from money. So we would like to move to a situation where rather than service, the default position that services are provided by public servants in a traditional public sector setting, that we look at different models and they could be an outsource model to a private sector or they could be engagement community groups or voluntary groups. But the key thing from our perspective is to try and move to more of a commissioning model, to try and move away from block grants to more outcomes. So we commissioned for outcomes and we have a more contestable market and we have much more evidence backing up policy and more commissioning. And this in effect is our view in terms of the trends in service. Now I know this could be controversial and there's a lot of resistance to it in some part, but looking at different ways of service delivery because we know that traditional monopoly monolith public services aren't necessarily the best terms that have been innovative or responsive or efficient. So to look at different ways of service delivery is a key part and hooking up with organisations like Genio, Centre for Effective Service, which some people here will be familiar with, we think is a very fruitful way for us to go. Digital government, there's two ways of looking at this. It's how people engage with us, so people want to engage with us through digital platform, so they prefer to do it themselves at their own time, pay their own property tax. It's interesting that people of course hate the property tax, but we've received so many confidence about how efficient it is to pay it. It's most unusual to say, oh yeah, it's really easy to pay that tax even though we don't like it. So it's interesting how people look at these things. So people want to engage with us and they want to pay their tax or do their business on their own time, their own space in an efficient way. A big challenge for us, so to the extent, that's not easy but it's the simpler part of us providing a discrete service in that way. The real trick for us is to have a more integrated approach to how we deliver services, and this requires national data infrastructure, requires the PPS number, a unique identifier, it needs single customer view, it needs a public service card, it needs in effect the infrastructure. So at the moment if you access service, we'll ask you for various information which we hold, we'll ask you for your data birth, we'll ask you for evidence of a utility bill and so on and so forth. In the future we want this national data infrastructure and public service card to be a passport to services in a much more efficient way. So we won't have to ask you for your data birth because we know the data birth of everybody here. We also know your PPS number and we know where you live, that sounds very threatening but we know unless you've moved the last three months we have a good fix on where you live if you pay tax or you access it. So why would you just ask for your name, your PPS number and your address and the future we want a situation where that's all we ask from you if you're going to access the service. So let's say you're going to renew your driver licence or renew your passport, we have photographs of everybody. So rather than asking you for a new photograph we'll drag down your existing photograph, it's been taken within the last 10 years, unlike most of the election posters of course as everybody knows, there seem to be very old photographs out there but anyway. So a relatively recent photograph, so rather than the engagements being clunky with paper we want it to be easy so that if you've given the information to us before we're not going to ask you for it again. An example of it in practical terms would be the SUSE application applying for a third level grant. So again we need to know your means, we need to have details on family composition and so on. We have all that information part of the system, so linking it together so we don't ask you for your P60 or we don't ask you for a statement of social welfare. We ask your basic information to have an identity card with your ID, from then we can assess very quickly whether you're eligible for the third level grant, whether you're eligible for a medical card or whatever it happens to be. So this data infrastructure, this is the real integration piece around data sharing and integrated government and service region, which is really, really key. And a key part of what we're trying to do is look at the top transactional services, so the big transactional services that people engage with us, how can we make it easier? So the top 20 services account for about 80-85% of the transactions. So to focus on those driver license renewal, passport, engagement revenue, social protection, so those big areas and that's really a key part of what we're trying to do. Also open data, this is an area where we're really only exploring the potential, all the data that we have to put it out there. So put the data out there and let people in the private sector commercialise if it has value and to try to figure out what the protocol around that. So these are some of the things Chairman were doing on the digital, but I think it's very exciting and over time can have a big impact. I won't talk too much more about how we've spoken about it. A lot of changes in work practice, a lot of changes in structures and we're getting cooperation with these changes. And it's a function obviously of the difficult environment within which we operate and the austerity period and so on. But we get at this stage fantastic cooperation with change and reform. And issues which would have led to disputes and would have ended up in the labour court, we're now able to resolve and deal with very quickly. So the IR environment, the change environment is much more accommodating than it would have been in the past. Talk about shared services very briefly. Within the civil service, just take civil service for the moment, we have 35,000 staff, we have 18 payroll centres. So we have 18 different entities paying the wages of 35,000 employees. It's absolutely, it's crazy that we don't have a consolidated approach which can save us. So we've planned to move from 18 to 3. Within the civil service in terms of transactional HR, we had 48 bodies doing their own transactional HR, their own time in attendance, sick leave, all that. And that's now been consolidated in PeoplePoint, a shared service transactional service in Clonski, which now serve 24,000 customers and will have 35,000 by next year. And we're doing consolidation of finance functions and a whole variety of issues in civil service. So in effect, the vision of civil service departments, and this is important, improving outcomes and policy, civil service and departments in the future won't be doing their own procurement, won't be doing their own payroll HR pension administration. All those things will be taken out and consolidated and delivered essentially. So we want departments to focus in terms of HR on strategic HR, we want them to focus on policy, on foresight, on supporting ministers. So taking out those non-core functions and shared services is a big part of it. So we're doing it for the civil service and we also have plans then within the health system and local government to do comparable types of consolidation. This stuff is not very sexy or exciting, but it can lead to very significant cost savings and can lead to improvements in how we function. The Curement, again, not the most exciting topic, we spend nine billion on the current side of your buying goods and services. And we didn't exercise about 80 months, two years ago, and we discovered that whole range of different entities and bodies across the public sector were buying the same good or same service from the same supplier for different terms, different prices, different conditions. So our monopsony power, as economists would call it, was not being utilized. So we're now consolidating more and more of the spending. So if we're buying chairs, tables, printers, certain types of professional services, a whole variety of different goods and services, it's been consolidated in a new office of government procurement and we're professionalizing it. And I think this is a theme throughout the reform that the civil service went too much in the direction of the generous model and moved away from the specialized model. And we need to respecialize and rescale in a variety of areas, HR, economics, accounting, auditing law, and in procurement, because as people know, procurement is itself a very specialized activity. And it's also governed by a very difficult legal framework, a lot of litigation. So we have smaller bodies, smaller departments who have part-time, very well-intended, very good people, but part-time procurers and it's not a very efficient approach and we're not getting value for money. So this exercise here, in itself, is an enormous reform to effect government departments and bodies that previously were procuring won't be in the future and it'll be centralized in the office of government procurement. And we have now staff, we have about 80 staff specialists, I mean we have about 250 people who will be buying 6, 7 billion worth of goods and services across the public sector. As I mentioned earlier, a key part of the work of our department, obviously spending reductions reform, but also to try to rebuild trust in the public sector and in the civil service. And we admit that there's a lot to do in recent events, I think, have once again damaged people, the brand damaged people's perceptions of how we do our business. So there's a variety of reforms here, introduction of lobbying regulation, so people who lobby us, it's going to be transparent. So it's fine to lobby, it's allowed, people need to influence government, influence policy, but it'll be a register, a public register. So when Brennan comes to talk to me about something, whatever it happens to be, we'll have a great chat, but it'll be put in a register. And then we can see then that we had a conversation and broad content of what we spoke about. And that'll be important, that legislation will be passed by the end of the year. We've reformed FOI, broadened FOI, repealed and affected in 2003 Act, a much more open regime in terms of FOI, protected disclosures. And again whistleblowers in common parlans, topical issues, last few months were at committee stage with a very robust piece of legislation which provides protections, very vigorous protections for people who make acquisitions or who bring to life malpractice and problems, and that'll be enacted by end of June. We're participating open government partnership, we're developing a new ethical framework for officers in public service and modernised that whole approach to ethics. And we're engaged now in a very significant consultation process around accountability and performance, and some people may have seen the paper that we produced on this. And we think this is key because we don't believe that we can drive performance unless we have different accountability approaches. Unless we publish our objectives and people are called to account for those objectives. And my own view, not just the Secretary General of the Department, but right down to middle manners, what we call the top thousand. So from PO upwards there are a thousand people and we believe they should be more accountable for delivery of particular projects, particular programmes and they should have to account in a public way for how they're performing. But this, for us to drive performance, will be better accountability, but also we need a more mature debate in our committee in the media about failings, about things that don't go right. So rather than turning into a witch hunt, the gotcha culture, we need to move to accountability culture which involves learning. So it's not just about firing that person or whatever happens to me, but it's about learning from the mistakes about how can we do better about figuring out how we can improve things for the future. So this is a really important aspect of driving performance, how do we get better accountability mechanisms. And the challenge that we face here are very similar to other countries in terms of. So finally then, civil service renewal and this is linked to a lot of what I've been talking about. So we've made lots of progress in the civil service over the last few years. People can have their own judgements as to the extent to which we could have done better or the areas where we need to improve. But we've increased productivity, we've standardised annual leave sick leave, we now have senior public service leadership across the civil, much more mobility, we're investing more in learning and development, open recruitment and so on. So we've done a lot, but now the challenge for us is in terms of the next phase of where we go. So what's the vision, what's the 2020 vision for the Irish civil service? What are we going to look like? Where should we go? What do we need to modernise? So how can we hold on to the good values, the hard work commitment to the state, impartiality, independence, objectivity? How can we hold on to those good values while driving improvement and being better in terms of supporting government, in terms of policy advice or improving service? So some of the issues that we need to look at, grades and spans of control, we've too many grades, too hierarchical, so we need to empower people by reducing the number of grades. We need to do more open recruitment, we need to have much more mobility, we need to move people around. We'd like a situation where, in any given management board, which would be assistance equity upwards in a government department, that a large minority or maybe majority of people would have spent a good part of their career outside of that department. And we think that's very important in terms of changing the culture and encouraging innovation. Training and Development, Martin Fraser, who's people know as SecGian and Theatrix, was a foot of a dog committee. And they were criticising for 100,000 euros he was spending on training and development. And I was listening to the debate and his budget would be his pay bill would be about 20 million, he's about 250 staff. And I wasn't clear from watching this on the monitor, I wasn't clear that Martin was being criticised for spending too much or too little. And it turned out that they thought it was outrageous to spend money on training and development. That was the criticism. So I texted Martin and said, you've got to wait lightly because you should be spending 300, 400,000 each year on training and development. Because this is the human capital, we know human capital over time, decline, degrade, things move on. So we need as a system to invest much more. We're in the civil service as a whole. So our pay bill is about 1.7 billion and we're spending I think only 20, 25 million each year on training, development and private sector people here will tell me how low that is compared to what we show. So we need to invest more in our people. We need to strengthen cross-demand learning and leading and working. So more and more the challenges we face, the re-difficult policy challenge where there's climate change, communities that aren't working, issues around unemployment, it's cross-cutting. So it doesn't fit into a neat department. So how do we deliver across the system? And this is leading to a unified civil service, a much more of a unified approach to how we've got our business and critical building organisation capacity and capability. So I'll finish, I don't know how I'm doing for time, but I'll finish by saying we've made significant progress, we're about halfway through I think the journey that we hope to be on. And this is the agenda that we've set out for the next while. So we look forward to engaging with some debate.