Election 2024: Yes minister, there are ways to end wanton waste in public spending
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Can Ireland’s culture of waste be overturned? It’s the million-dollar question. For starters, it helps to understand why the problem exists in the first place.
Ireland’s public service, much like Britain’s, exists between elected ministers and civil servants.
There are good politicians and not so good ones, but chief on most of their minds, by necessity, is staying elected — which often means a focus on short-termist and populist thinking than the greater good.
Civil servants, meanwhile, occupy a very different space to those working in the private sector. Barring gross misconduct, they have job security for life and a decent pension balanced against inflation.
Accountability is provided via Oireachtas committees, themselves staffed by politicians who are generally more concerned with local politics or their own party’s concerns than the bigger picture. There are exceptions, but not as many as you would like.
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To negotiate this system, something of a Faustian bargain has been made between ministers and senior civil servants, with both sides able to hide in each others’ shadow to their mutual betterment, and to the detriment of the State as a whole.
In this milieu, value for money in public spending is often an afterthought, there is little or no accountability in terms of public policy decisions, short-term thinking reigns supreme, and cynicism is fostered in junior civil servants, for whom it’s made clear fudging answers to a committee is more important than laying problems bare.
The Housing Assistance Payment and Rental Accommodation Scheme (HAP and RAS) are a good example of this problematic situation.
First introduced as stopgap measures to aid those who qualified for social housing support amid a dearth of State-owned housing in 2014, the measures are not only still active, but had a budget in 2022 of €654m between them.
The payments see the State subsidising rental payments to private landlords, making tenancies more affordable.
The problem is the money is essentially falling into a black hole of private ownership, with no return to the State, and no home ownership for the tenants.
And as things stand in 2024, the short-term solution has become the only show in town, never mind that it basically amounts to throwing good money after bad.
Asked in late 2023 at the Public Accounts Committee about what could be done to remove the ongoing dependency on HAP and RAS, secretary general of the Department of Housing, Graham Doyle, acknowledged that the payments represent poor value for the Exchequer, but that the alternative would be to spend billions acquiring the properties outright.
“Many people have been critical of the acquisitions of social housing” by the State, leading to the practice being scaled back, he added.
In this scenario, HAP is clearly something that needs to be done away with. But there is no apparent benefit to the civil service to push for its removal. And no politician is willing to commit electoral or party suicide by demanding billions to purchase thousands of houses.
The essential problem is that doing what’s needed for the greater good essentially often means being willing to be unpopular. A perceived disaster for a politician. An unnecessary action for the civil service.
Take the example of the infamous €336,000 Leinster House bike shelter. In the wake of that story the Minister for the OPW when it was commissioned Patrick O’Donovan scrambled to say he had no oversight of the deal, nor should he have had, as he was reliant on his officials.
The simple fact is that money was approved because no one told the OPW not to spend a lot of money on the project. And while there has been a deal of bad press over the matter, that will fade. It always has in the past.
Another uncomfortable fact of life at the higher echelons of the civil service is that there is precious little true expertise at the top ranks when it comes to making considered decisions on technical subjects.
The OPW exemplifies this, in that, despite a range of experts and professionals at middle management level, no one on the board — as has been the case for years — has a professional property qualification.
As Allen Morgan, the OPW’s former head valuer, put it:
"Why would you expect anything different when making property decisions costing millions? You want an expert in such a situation, not someone without insight.”
So what can be done to change a culture of wanton waste?
You could take responsibility for enormous infrastructure decisions out of the hands of politicians and civil servants and place them in the hands of newly-formed, semi-State specialist bodies, run on a commercial basis and remunerated at private sector rates.
It might sound like hard work, but it would lead to actual savings (and many unpopular decisions) in the long run. And if not, then those in authority could lose their jobs.
Or you could source visionaries, or trailblazers, in fields where the State lacks direction, pay them accordingly, and give them carte blanche to revitalise the status quo, immune from the effects of unpopular decisions.
Housing and health are two obvious examples where ingrained problems like homelessness and waiting lists never seem to improve.
Much of Ireland’s progress in its early years as a nation was based on the vision of individuals — the rejuvenation and mass construction of housing in Dublin under architect Herbert Simms in the 1930s, for example.
Such decisions, however, require enormous moral courage, so maybe don’t hold your breath for imminent change.
You don’t see too many politicians falling on their swords voluntarily in Dáil Eireann.