John O’Dowd has offered some excellent reasons to keep Northern Ireland’s network of state-run MOT centres.
As the Sinn Féin infrastructure minister has pointed out, the use of private garages for MOT testing in Britain is more expensive for motorists, more open to fraud and error, and still requires a major effort by government to regulate and police. Setting such a system up from scratch would take years.
It is a no-brainer to keep our test centres and simply double their capacity by moving to biennial testing, as the SDLP proposed in the assembly on Monday. All parties backed a review into the proposal.
However, O’Dowd also offered one terrible reason to stick with our current approach.
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In a statement issued through his department on Sunday, the minister said “privatisation of MOT services” would mean “taking work and jobs away from our valued public servants – I will never support that approach”.
Motorists applying for MOT tests are facing waits of several months for an appointment (Liam McBurney/PA)
Public services do not exist to employ their staff. Those staff and their work may be valued but their jobs should never be justified as a taxpayer-funded employment scheme. If moving to biennial testing means MOT centres have too much capacity and some jobs become surplus to requirements, that would be nothing to celebrate – but headcount should still be cut down to an appropriate size.
O’Dowd’s objection to privatisation was a red herring in this respect. Even a socialist government is not supposed to keep workers on the public payroll for the sake of it. In reality, all governments baulk at laying people off and all public services are captured by their staff to some degree – ‘producer capture’ is the economic term.
What is most remarkable about O’Dowd’s statement is that he has blatantly admitted it.
Infrastructure Minister John O’Dowd said privatisation of MOT services would mean “taking work and jobs away from our valued public servants – I will never support that approach” (Rebecca Black/PA)
This view, doubtless shared by other parties, reveals a fundamental problem for the new executive. If it will not raise revenue or reduce giveaways – the stance taken so far by Sinn Féin and the DUP – then Stormont’s finances can only be managed through ruthless control of costs. Staffing is the dominant cost in any public service, often 80 per cent or more of the total and rarely less than half. There is no chance of Stormont balancing the budget if one of its priorities is ‘providing jobs to our valued public servants’.
Sinn Féin and the DUP have been better than this in the past. The 2015 Fresh Start agreement and the one-year, two-party executive that followed cut civil service numbers by 10 per cent under a programme described as ‘rebalancing the economy’. There were additional staff reductions across the wider public sector. Assembly members even reduced their own headcount, from 108 to 90.
To go forwards, the Northern Ireland Executive should be building on the success of Fresh Start while learning from its mistakes (Kelvin Boyes/Press Eye/Kelvin Boyes/Press Eye/PA Wire)
Now the executive appears to be going backwards, with no vision for delivering public services more efficiently.
To go forwards, it should be building on the success of Fresh Start while learning from its mistakes.
Civil service numbers were cut through a recruitment freeze and a voluntary redundancy scheme. This caused too many of the wrong people to leave, creating shortages of expertise and experience in key areas.
Public services do not exist to employ their staff. Those staff and their work may be valued but their jobs should never be justified as a taxpayer-funded employment scheme
O’Dowd’s Department for Infrastructure is a perfect illustration. It has 3,000 staff, yet also a shortage of specialist staff, which is widely believed to be holding up vital decisions on transport, energy and planning. Other bodies that have to deal with the department joke bleakly that its officials are useless so it needs more of them, but this is not necessarily a paradox. The department needs more specialists and less complicated decision-making, which might require fewer administrators.
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Management consultants should be crawling all over it and the rest of Northern Ireland’s public sector to see how processes could be improved. Instead, consultants are usually brought in to plug gaps in staffing or justify elaborate decision-making, so they end up entrenching these problems rather than fixing them. It is a tall order to expect managers to hire consultants so both can work themselves out of a job. Such a policy needs to be pushed through by a minister.
‘Workforce planning’ is a fashionable phrase in the executive, although only for healthcare, because it is politically painless to talk about planning for more doctors and nurses. Planning for fewer workers almost everywhere else, to preserve public services and healthcare in particular, is the real test ahead – and one Stormont already seems to be failing.
Can Stormont pass the test of planning for fewer public workers?
30
1
14.03.2024
John O’Dowd has offered some excellent reasons to keep Northern Ireland’s network of state-run MOT centres.
As the Sinn Féin infrastructure minister has pointed out, the use of private garages for MOT testing in Britain is more expensive for motorists, more open to fraud and error, and still requires a major effort by government to regulate and police. Setting such a system up from scratch would take years.
It is a no-brainer to keep our test centres and simply double their capacity by moving to biennial testing, as the SDLP proposed in the assembly on Monday. All parties backed a review into the proposal.
However, O’Dowd also offered one terrible reason to stick with our current approach.
Kneecap’s Gaza SXSW boycott shows Ireland’s politicians what to do on St Patrick’s Day in the White House - The Irish News view
By going to Washington DC this St Patrick’s Day, I’m choosing to engage – Patricia O’Lynn
In a statement issued through his department on Sunday, the minister said “privatisation of MOT services” would mean “taking work and jobs away from our valued public servants – I will never support that approach”.
Motorists applying for MOT tests are facing waits of several months for an appointment (Liam McBurney/PA) Public services do not exist to employ their staff. Those staff and their work may be valued........
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