I would like to make the following points.
1.
Accountability is essential but it has a cost. An internal survey in the Department of Justice in
2005 indicated that if you excluded processing 30% to 40% of Departmental activity related to
accounting for itself or staff through answering Parliamentary Questions, Dail Debates, Dail
committees, Press queries, judicial review, Freedom of Information requests as well as internal
management reviews of staff performance.
It should be very clear who is accounting for what, to whom and why.
2.
The level of accountability in the civil service is more extensive than the private sector. ( It may
also be more diffuse and less performance oriented.) If we take the example of a limited company,
senior managers are accountable to their immediate superiors and to the Chief Executive. In a very
limited number of cases they may have some dealings and accountability to the Board. In no
circumstances are they accountable to the shareholders or to the media/general public. Only the
members of the Board and the Chief Executive have any accountability to shareholders. The Public
Appointments Service have indicated that one of the reasons for the low number of applicants from
the private sector for senior posts in the Civil Service is the level of public criticism and interrogation
of named senior civil servants.
3.
The senior civil service operates in a political environment. It is in the political interest of the
opposition members to use any accountability mechanism to imply the Government is failing in some
way. Frequently the main purpose of interrogating civil servants is to collect ammunition to attack
their Minister.
As senior civil servants our accountability is to the Secretary General and Minister. In very rare cases,
we may have to point out to a Minister that we cannot implement a direction from him because of
legal reasons or point the disadvantages of a particular course of action but generally we work directly
on his or behalf. This relationship requires a level of trust - in particular trust that senior civil servants:
- will not only not criticise the Minister or his/her policies or refer to potential problems but
will defend such policy to the best of their ability;
- will refer back to the Minister for decision any issue that is likely to have significant
political implications for him/her;
- will carry out their tasks fairly and efficiently in the interest of the public.
There is no difficultly in senior civil servants accounting fully to the Minister or Secretary General in
the context of explaining what was done, what was successful and what had failed.
If there has been a failure by an individual civil servant, it is open to Minister's to state that it was the
fault of a specific individual. In such circumstances, my understanding is that it is not the general
practice to name the individual, possibly for a number of reasons;
(i) for constitutional reasons, it would not be appropriate to name a person until there had
been a formal inquiry or disciplinary proceeding carried out with due process;
(ii) public outing of an individual for a failure is not conducive to improving performance within
an organisation and would certainly encourage a risk adverse culture to the extent of possible
paralysis;
(iii) individual civil servants are not normally credited with either their successes or failures;
(iv) in reality there is normally a chain of people (including possibly the Minister and
Secretary General) who bear a portion of the responsibility.
It is open to the Minister to ask the Secretary General to initiate disciplinary action against the
individual.
If instead of being accountable to one's immediate superiors and the Minister, civil servants are to be
accountable to a Dail committee or to some form of public committee, then clearly it will be in the
interest of any civil servant being questioned to pass as much responsibility for failure to the Minister
of the day. Both the opposition and the media will have a greater interest in attributing responsibility
to a Minister than to a civil servant. It is difficult to see how the necessary trust can be maintained
between higher civil servants and Minister if civil servants are made accountable to an outside public
or political body.
4.
Research Your attention has probably already been drawn to Research Paper No 12 January
2014 "Civil Service Accountability: Challenge and Change" produced by the Institute of Public
Administration. I am not sure that restricting examination to looking at "Westminster" based models
is particularly beneficial. The size of the British Civil Service and the political culture in the UK are very
different. In my experience, the Danes have very similar issues to ourselves and are comparable in
scale and their model may be worth examining or other similar countries.
Jimmy Martin