Fixing the Public Service means fixing Government

Above: Image by kikkerdirk/DepositPhotos.

BitDepth#1377 for October 24, 2022

At the third session of the Senate on October 13, Public Administration Minister Allyson West commented on the budget and responded to calls for a work-from-home policy for public servants.

In that speech, the minister made several assertions, some of which are reasonable, while others transcend hard facts that do not allow for bold and sweeping statements.

However, West is right to note that a WFH policy does not start here and today, it must return to the foundation of public service operations.

A properly functioning public service receives directives from ministers. These policies can be influenced and guided by public servants, mainly Permanent Secretaries, but the Cabinet has the final say on policy.

Civil servants implement cabinet policy, reporting to the Permanent Secretary, who discusses policy implementation with the line minister.

In her contribution to the Senate, West suggests that the government has limited control over the public service, but this is not true.

The Constitution of Trinidad and Tobago, as established in 1962 and in the 1976 version, states in section 85, part one, “Whenever any Minister is assigned charge of any department of the Government, he shall exercise general direction and control on that department; and, subject to such direction and control, the department shall be under the supervision of a Permanent Secretary, whose office shall be a public office.”

The key to understanding how this sentence affects the functioning of the public service is the authority of the minister for “general direction and control” and that of the permanent secretary, who is assigned to “supervision”.

The constitution assigns no one managerial responsibility in relation to the public service, and efforts to change the role of the permanent secretary from oversight to management have been ignored for decades.

Why? Because there is a risk of stiffening the backbone of the cadre of permanent secretaries and thus limiting the control exercised by ministers, which has sometimes gone into micromanagement.

What happens when permanent secretaries try to run the public service as it was designed to work?

In 1975, Prime Minister Eric Williams launched a sweeping rhetoric against an attempt by Doddridge Alleyne, Frank Rampersad and Eugenio Moore to build what he saw as a powerful public service of qualified technocrats.

These were the leading permanent secretaries of their time, and public opposition led to a general retreat from leadership initiatives among permanent secretaries that continues to this day.

It was here that the death knell of professional meritocracy and public service as the home of the young qualified professional was heard.

So the minister can calmly announce that, “There is no position called Head of Public Service”, without challenge, while promising rather ominously to “deal with these anomalies”.

From 1962, the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office was retained as Head of the Public Service and the appointments acknowledged the seniority of this role.

No recent permanent secretary in that role has acted in that capacity or acted with that implicit authority, so the role has degraded to the point that West seems confident she can castrate it entirely.
This would only further exacerbate the authority of the Permanent Secretaries, whose relationship with ministers she describes as an “artificial and illogical reality”.

In this she is right, but fails to mention that the situation is a political invention, not a circumstance of the system’s intended architecture.

The Minister promises to reactivate the National Council for Strategic Human Resources Management, a coalition of the Ministry of Public Administration, the Department of Personnel and Service Commissions.

The council was originally convened by the People’s Partnership government and disbanded by the incoming PNM administration in 2015.

As a planning body, it notably does not include stakeholders from the public labor service or the trade unions that represent them.

It is not the first attempt to address public service issues.
The Public Service Reform Task Force collapsed in 1990 after the coup attempt.

Gordon Draper worked to rethink the public service as a human resource between 1991 and 1995, but this effort ended with the incoming UNC government.

It is easy enough to talk about the modernization of the public service.
A 2017 public service workshop suggested creating a “central human resources agency separate from ministries with an independent organization to provide oversight”. This idea lived and died in this event.

The report of a committee convened by the Cabinet recommended, in 2017, the creation of the post of Permanent Secretary to the Prime Minister and Head of the Public Service.

Nothing will happen, neither WFH nor improved customer service, until the government accepts its role as much as it expects from the public service.

The government’s difficulty working from home has nothing to do with technology or even performance. It is about what is really needed to transform the public service, rationalize its workforce and create a culture of accountability and functional delivery.

The public service’s tainted adoption of IHRIS, its digital human resource management tool, is not just the result of a lack of public servant enthusiasm.

Widespread use of IHRIS, for example, would reveal the reality of the public service, which is much smaller than we think, revealing all the vacancies that are not for real work and remain unfunded budget after budget for political reasons.

This is not the job of the Ministry of Public Administration, even if the West seems to think it is.

It is a collective project for the cabinet, which must undo the mess of responsibilities dating back to this country’s first independent constitution.

And it should do this in consultation with public servants, civil society and the private sector.