Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I welcome Carmel Gates, Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance (NIPSA) general secretary, and Denise Crilly, trade union side secretary. Carmel, thank you for being here. I invite you to make an opening statement.

Ms Carmel Gates (NIPSA): Thank you, Matthew and Committee members, for agreeing to hear from NIPSA. It is vital that you do, because the trade unions here have a very important voice.

I was a civil servant for 37 years, and I left the Civil Service to join NIPSA, first as deputy general secretary and then as general secretary. However, I am still very closely connected to the Civil Service, and I still negotiate with it. Denise has been a civil servant for 18 years and works in NIPSA as the trade union side secretary of Whitley, which is the process by which we negotiate with the Civil Service. Between us, we have about 70 years of experience of the Civil Service.

It is important to set that out, because some of what you hear at the Committee comes from people who are looking at the Civil Service from the outside, rather than from the inside, and see something very different from what we see. There is an old saying in Ireland that, if you want to get to there, you would not start from here. To be perfectly honest with you, if the Civil Service had a choice in how to get to where it needs to be, it would not have started from here. A lot of what the Civil Service is dealing with currently is not of its making or of its choice. Some of the things that have happened over the past while are the result of decisions that are outside its control.

The Civil Service is probably one of the most investigated and scrutinised employers in this part of the world. I am not saying that that is a bad thing. Civil servants themselves will accept that it is appropriate that their work is scrutinised, because of the importance of the work that they do for government. There is no difficulty with that, and I am not here to make any apologies for civil servants. I am here to ensure that there is fairness in the commentary and the criticism, so that civil servants are not given a hard time.

There have been dozens of different reports. There have been Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee reports and studies of the Civil Service done by think tanks. There has been a host of stuff, some of which has been welcome and some less welcome. Some of it has been contradictory. Some of the evidence from the think tanks has been presented here, but even some of those studies have presented contradictory viewpoints. I know that Committee members have picked up on some of that. Some points stick out more than most. One of the points that Brian Kingston picked up from one of the think tanks was the conclusion that civil servants who were in post too long become staid and need to move about. Another conclusion was that, if they are not in post long enough, they do not know what they are doing. You begin to think that they cannot do right for doing wrong.

Changes have come about as a result of scrutiny; for example, in the case of the renewable heat incentive (RHI). We hear now, "Oh, civil servants are too risk-averse". Well, one of the reasons for civil servants becoming more risk-averse was the scrutiny and criticism that they faced because of RHI. We need to put a lot of that stuff in context. We have to remember that civil servants do what they are told. They often do not have a choice in what they are asked to do or what they are tasked with. They can give advice and guidance to Ministers and politicians, but, ultimately, they are not in control of decisions. Often, senior civil servants are under scrutiny for decisions that were taken before their time. Most of the time, when senior civil servants go before the Public Accounts Committee, they are answering for their predecessors rather than for themselves.

Civil servants have had to sit through a lot of scrutiny. Nobody objects to this Committee's scrutiny of the Civil Service, but civil servants often have to sit through a lot of criticism and take it on the chin. I do not know exactly what they are thinking when they sit here taking criticism, but I know that, if it was me, I would be thinking, "Would you just leave me alone and let me do my damn job?". Often, they do not get a chance to do that, because they are being scrutinised for what they are doing.

There has been a lot of criticism of the size of the Civil Service; that it is too big and all that. It is important to put that into context. Since 2016, the Civil Service in Scotland has increased in size by over 70%, and in Wales by nearly 10%. Across Britain as a whole, the Civil Service has increased by 31%, whereas the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) has increased by only 2·8%. The other areas have increased in size due to the tasks faced because of what is happening in the world, not least the EU exit. It is also important to remember that the Civil Service's approval ratings are higher here than in any other region of these islands, and the Committee and the public should bear that in mind. Let us be honest, the press — it is not just politicians — often gives civil servants a hard time, and they do not deserve it. For example, civil servants are often attacked for their sickness absences.

I will put some of the figures for sickness absence in context. The Committee has heard that people are mostly off sick because of mental health issues, and that cannot be a surprise when you see the number of vacancies, agency staff and temporary promotions — all the things that were highlighted in the Audit Office's report. Those things are all true — nobody denies that — and take their toll on people. It also needs to be borne in mind that the NICS has one of the most punitive sickness absence policies of any employer here: there is no doubt about that. If you take sick leave in the Civil Service, you are not left to your own devices. After three sick absences, you get a warning, and that applies to short-term absences. If you are off for 20 days, you get a warning. Those are the triggers. If you reach further triggers, there will be a final written warning, and you can be considered for dismissal.

As we know, long-term sickness, mental health issues, stress and the pressures of work are often the reasons for people being off on sick leave, and sometimes people need adjustments in order to get back to work. Something that has not been taken account of is the fact that the occupational health service (OHS) that assists people in getting back to work was recently in a crisis for a few years — it is coming out of that crisis now — because it was unable to recruit the medical staff that it needs to see people and to make the adjustments and give the recommendations that are needed to get people back to work. The Civil Service had to bring in a private company, Blackwell Associates, to assist with the backlog of cases. Those things must absolutely be borne in mind, as must the fact that the Civil Service has more than double the number of people aged over 50 than is the case in the workforce at large. The Civil Service has an ageing workforce not by design but because of the moratorium on recruitment that existed for a number of years after the voluntary exit scheme (VES).

The Civil Service is currently addressing a lot of the problems that it has faced, but those things take time. In an organisation the size of the Civil Service, it is a bit like turning a supertanker; it does not happen right away. However, I believe that the problems are being addressed. It has taken time to address some of them, and there are good reasons for that. Sometimes, the decisions that have been taken in the past have hampered the Civil Service from doing a good job.

HR Connect was the result of privatising the HR services in the Civil Service. HR Connect came about as a private company in 2007. That was at a time when the thinking was that — some people still have the notion — "public" is bad and "private" is good, the public service here is too big, and we should privatise everything that is not nailed down. As a result, the Civil Service's HR services were privatised, and that led almost immediately to delays in recruitment, in grievance and disciplinary procedures and in normal, day-to-day personnel issues.

The Integr8 programme, which you will have heard of, will be the reversal of that. It will undo the damage that was done by privatising those services. As you will know, Integr8 was stalled by the collapse of this place. It should already have been rolled out. If that had happened, some of the problems currently being dealt with may have been addressed at an earlier stage. It was due to roll out in 2024-25, if things had gone smoothly and this place had still been running. It will probably be 2027-28 before it is fully integrated. All those things have to be taken account of in the context of the scrutiny that you are engaged in at the moment.

The Civil Service has been in a state of flux — I suppose that every organisation can be in a state of flux, but they are probably not in the same state of flux as the Civil Service — from the review of public administration (RPA) in 2002 through to privatisation. In 2015-16 — I have set this out in the letter — we had the Stormont House Agreement and the Fresh Start Agreement. We had the voluntary exit scheme when the Assembly got the authority to borrow £700 million to get rid of 20,000 public-service jobs. That did not happen across the public service, but it happened in the Civil Service. In the Civil Service, there was an 11% reduction in an 18-month period, whereas a reduction of that size in Britain took 10 years. Numbers in both services are on the increase again, because of what has happened politically since then. When the voluntary exit scheme happened, the losses were absolutely random, because they let go of the people who were the cheapest to make redundant. Gaps in experience and so on therefore opened up at that time. At the same time, the number of Departments was reduced from 12 to nine, and the service was reorganised. At the same time, we had the establishment of NICS HR. I do not think that any of the senior civil servants who are there now were there when any of those things happened. They are trying to fix something that they did not break, to be perfectly honest with you.

The Committee has heard a number of times about siloing. Siloing has happened because of Departments, politics and ministerial responsibilities, but I believe that siloing has also happened because of NICS HR. I go back to the days when I negotiated with the then Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) in Royston House. We sat at weekly meetings talking about policies issues, and around the table with us were all the HR directors from all the Departments, who had a say in what was happening, were invested in what was happening and could explain what impact a policy might have on a Department, such as a Department that had more technical staff than another Department. They were able to feed into and own the policies. With the arrival of NICS HR, which resulted in policies being negotiated centrally and all the personnel departments and the corporate services in all the Departments being done away with, they almost automatically became siloed and became less invested in the central policies and central negotiations. As well as that, there was a huge loss of talented people with personnel and HR experience.

After that, we had the scrutiny of the RHI scheme and the collapse of the Assembly from 2017 until 2020. The Assembly got back up and running in 2020, and then COVID hit. As someone who was negotiating weekly and, sometimes, daily with senior staff in the Civil Service, I have to say that a huge amount of work was done to work out not just how the Civil Service was going to work through COVID but how the rest of the country was going to work through COVID. That was a hugely difficult time for everybody involved. After we got used to COVID and things partially got back to normal, the Assembly collapsed again in 2022, and there was no Government until 2024. During that time when there was no Government, we experienced, in 2022, the worst cost-of-living crisis recorded. Staff have suffered pay cuts. Since 2016, there has been a real-term cut of over 20% to their salary. We have had budget cuts and proven underfunding, as you know. You will have heard about the level of need here and that we are funded below need, whereas some other regions are funded above their level of need. You will have heard of the Holtham report. You have heard about all those things. Budget cuts and proven underfunding have meant that the Civil Service has been crippled. For a long while, civil servants have been putting themselves at the end of their own queue — Denise and I have raised this with them — and money has gone elsewhere rather than to the Civil Service. Fearing criticism, civil servants did not invest in civil servants or, often, Civil Service pay. As a result of that and all that had gone before it, morale hit rock bottom.

To be really blunt and honest, morale is beginning to pick up only now, and that is because of the work that is being done. The kicking that civil servants get in the press and, sometimes, from politicians does not help, but we are turning a corner, and things are changing. There is more collegial working, and there are ongoing discussions with us through the Whitley structures. To be brutally honest, there are some things that the Civil Service was not able to do as fast as it would have liked, partly because we, as a trade union, held it up. We do that if we believe that something is not in the best interests of members or we need to talk something through to ensure that the Civil Service can take staff with it on it and that there are enough staff to do what needs to be done. We have held things back not for negative reasons, therefore, but to ensure that there are enough staff and resources and so on.

Things are turning around now, but this comes at a time when the curve is just being turned, so, to be really honest, it is the wrong time for this type of scrutiny. Civil servants are finally beginning to feel valued. They see the people strategy as sending things in a good direction. The people survey has shown positive results. I know that we want to keep this short, so, with my final words, I say to politicians and the press who love to have to a dig, particularly at senior staff, "Leave them alone, and let them get on with it". For the past 10 years, they have been, in a phrase used by one of the senior civil servants whom we negotiate with, flying the plane while trying to build, rebuild and reform it. Let them get on with the job, and take account of the context and what they have endured to get where they are now. A corner is finally being turned.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Thank you, Carmel; I really appreciate that. It is important to hear the voice of unions in this, and the point is well made that, particularly over the past decade, starting with the voluntary exit scheme, although you could go back even further than that, the context has been extremely difficult. On this Committee, certainly, our scrutiny is not to demonise the Civil Service but to ensure that it is properly led and that civil servants are valued and properly managed and all that, so that is why it is essential to hear from you.

I have a few questions. As always, members — a few have indicated — particularly those who are online, who, I presume, can hear me, should you wish to ask a question, indicate that.

A few things came out of that comprehensive insight, Carmel, that I will ask about. You mentioned the 2015-16 voluntary exit scheme. Will you elaborate on what went wrong and how that damaged Civil Service performance? There are a few things to say, one of which is that people who have served longer have more of an incentive to take voluntary redundancy, because they get a better payout: that is human nature. Some people were then re-employed as consultants, which was maybe an example of spending money to reduce headcount but, by bringing people back in on a consultancy basis because their expertise is needed, ending up spending a bit more money than would otherwise have been spent. What were the specific downsides of the scheme? I know that it was not initiated by the Executive but part of an agreement with the UK Government. What were the negative consequences of the way in which the scheme was managed?

Ms Gates: The first thing is that it should not —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): If there were any positives, what were they?

Ms Gates: There were no positives to the VES scheme.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That bit is concise anyway.

Ms Gates: It was nice for the people who got out, I suppose. It was not nice for anybody else. It should not have happened. It was an artificial reduction of public services, and good civil servants led by example and reduced the Civil Service. It did not happen in other areas because people realised that the notion was daft. Not only did it lead to a reduction that should not have happened, there was a moratorium afterwards and recruitment could not happen, even when the gaps opened up and the service could not properly function. Politicians could not admit that they had made a mistake and allow the Civil Service to start recruiting again. That would have been daft, because they would have been throwing good money after bad, so to speak.

When it comes to the people who got out, it was totally random. It was the cheapest people who got out, and it meant that, in some cases, it opened up huge experience gaps that could not be filled immediately. It was a disaster. It was completely random. There was no way that it could have been handled in a good manner. There is no such thing as a good way to handle a VES. It would have led to internal conflict if different criteria had been set for who could go and so on. It was probably managed as well as it could have been, but the whole notion was a disaster, and we have been reaping the rewards of that since, because we have not been able to get back some of the experience that left. As you said, we have had to buy in temporary experience through consultancies and so on, which has probably cost more the long run.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): One of the issues that pops up — you have already alluded to it — is the fact that people will say that NICS is relatively overstaffed. I am not saying that, but that is what people say. It is not all of what we are looking at in this inquiry. In fact, it is only a tangential part; the inquiry is more about performance. People will, for example, point to relative staffing levels here versus those across the water. It is important to say that, when doing that, people exclude the fact that the Civil Service here does lots of things —

Ms Gates: It is a different beast.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): — that local government does in England.

Ms Gates: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Do you have an overall view on whether the Civil Service is overstaffed or understaffed, or do you think that it is about right? You said that more recruitment is happening and that it has grown again in recent years after the VES years. Do you think that the levels are about right, should be smaller or larger overall or should be differently assigned?

Ms Gates: I think that the service is still too small. The number of vacancies is real. There are huge numbers of vacancies. They have been scrutinised and re-scrutinised over a number of years, because there is not enough money in the budget to recruit all the staff. Technically, they are listed as vacancies, but there is not enough money to recruit to them. Each Department has been asked to look at what it needs line by line, so the vacancies that are still on the books are seen as ones that are absolutely needed. We also have huge numbers of posts covered by agency staff. We want to see that gone. Sorry, we do not want to see the agency staff gone.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Employed permanently.

Ms Gates: We want to see the agency staff, who are doing a fabulous job, in permanent roles. If there was enough money in the budget and there were no constraints, the Civil Service would be bigger, but that would be the right size. The fact that we see so much sick absence is because we are under-resourced for the work that we are expected to do. There has not been the exponential increase that other areas have seen, particularly following EU exit and all the additional work. We have the additional stuff through the Windsor framework — all that necessary work — and all the things that it has created since then. We now have people who are seconded from across the water because of the work that is required, but it really should be Northern Ireland civil servants doing all that. I still do not believe that the Civil Service is the right size, and, if there were no budget constraints, it would be bigger, as it should be.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK. One of the things that we have heard is that NICS HR is a centralised function but does not operate HR in a departmental sense. People have said that that is a contradiction because you have NICS HR and the people strategy being developed in the Department of Finance but lots of HR policy and practice is implemented at an individual departmental level. If I understand the NIPSA position, it is that you would rather that more of that was departmental and, as it were, NICS HR was less —.

Ms Gates: No, not quite.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK.

Ms Gates: When I first came in, DFP, as was, had overall responsibility, but it developed policy in conjunction with the other Departments. They had a seat at the table and a say in policy so that they had ownership. You could say that, at the moment, policy is developed by the people and organisational development (P&OD) directorate and NICS HR and then implemented in Departments. However, I believe that that needs to be more joined up. Jayne Brady and the board are working towards more collegiate working than has been the case for some time. NICS HR brought about more siloed working and did away with individual corporate services and HR in each Department. Most Departments no longer have the HR function or corporate services that would have allowed them to have policies of their own. That is what happened. Those HR functions and that experience in those Departments disappeared. What the Civil Service is attempting to do now, even though NICS HR is in existence, is to try to redevelop that better collegiate working that was, to be perfectly honest, destroyed with the advent of NICS HR.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK, that is useful. It is always useful to get direct opinions as well, and I can always trust you, Carmel, to give me yours. I appreciate that.

Ms Gates: I never mince my words, Matthew. [Laughter.]

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is exactly right. It saves us reading the tea leaves.

Ms Forsythe: Thanks very much, Carmel, for joining us for our inquiry. You represent quite a lot of individual civil servants across the board. As a union, you represent people who are experiencing issues and challenges, and you take those forward. I want to ask you about HR management, which has been touched on a little. We talked about how that is a centralised function, but we see that there are pockets where there are higher levels of sick leave and, potentially, higher levels of temporary promotions (TPs), more pressures on staff and issues such as bullying and other allegations, followed by complaints and investigations. In your experience, when people find themselves in a variety of challenging circumstances, how are they managed within the Department and by the HR function? I am keen to understand that. There is just so much going on here, and it is so multifaceted. When people come to you as their representative, what challenges and difficulties do they face in accessing that HR function?

Ms Gates: That is a good question, Diane, in that it goes back to what I said about HR Connect. All HR services were taken out of Departments, including bullying investigations and discipline and grievance procedures, and handed to Capita, which is a private company. They were taken out of the hands of civil servants. Capita became the decision-maker, and it did the reports and got those back to the Departments. Despite the fact that some of those investigations and reports were taking months or even years longer than they should have, there was very little control by civil servants because the process had been handed over. The decision to privatise the function was not theirs. I hope that Integr8 and the reorganisation that is being attempted at the moment can undo some of that.

There are pockets where there are higher absence rates. Sometimes, that is to do with project work. It can be down to poor management, but there is poor management in every organisation. Occasionally, line managers make mistakes. However, that is not helped by the fact that we have externalised and privatised a function that we used to do internally.

To be honest, civil servants and, on occasion, ex-civil servants were called in if assistance was needed for investigations, grievances and disciplinary procedures, because they knew what they were doing and had worked in the Civil Service. I have often sat with someone from HR Connect who has literally walked straight out of university, has never worked and is trying to investigate a workplace incident. I am not criticising graduates — we have all been there — but in order to understand and investigate problems with sick absence or bullying, you need to have an understanding of the world of work to begin with.

Ms Forsythe: I agree with you and feel quite strongly about that. When everything is centralised, it is hard to get to the bottom of what is going on. My constituents have told me that there is no personal touch and that they have no access. If your case is handed to a stranger, they will not know your personal circumstances, the working environment and the history of the tasks. You are saying that that is still how the HR function operates. When people have HR- and personnel-related issues, they are still handled externally, but we are working at moving away from that and towards the Integr8 programme. Is that the current status?

Ms Denise Crilly (NIPSA): As Carmel said, the introduction of HR Connect elongated the process for sick absences and for conduct and discipline cases. The function of gathering evidence and information was given to HR Connect, and the time that it took to do the investigation and return its finding made it a long-drawn-out process for anyone involved. We are now in the process of looking at the policies. The sick absence policy is being renamed, I think, as the support and attendance policy, and it contains better language. It is more personal and does not have defined trigger points and all of that. In contrast, with HR Connect, when someone reaches the trigger point, that starts the process, and there is no leeway. We agree with a lot of the new sick absence policy that we have been given.

Conduct and discipline issues are different. There is a feeling that those decisions should move down to become a line management responsibility, but there are a lot of different line managers out there, and we have found that one could produce a completely different outcome from another. We need a common thread from a central perspective so that we do not have a situation where someone from one Department gets a warning but someone in another Department does not. We need that oversight and that consistent thread so that there is someone there who can say that all the decisions are fair and that we have the right balance.

Ms Forsythe: I appreciate your evidence in light of the real examples where people have come forward. The outsourcing of issues has elongated the process. Quite often, a lot of the sick leave figures are due to mental health and work-related stress. I can understand how an outsourced function will feed into that cycle, so it is good to see that we are moving forward on that. The Committee's inquiry is reviewing the Civil Service's structures, including HR policies. The Civil Service is moving towards implementing Integr8. Do you want to flag anything for the Committee to recommend? With the Civil Service moving to a new system, it is a good time for the Committee to be doing an inquiry, and we want our recommendations to be meaningful and helpful. Can you see anything that has not been flagged in the move from HR Connect to Integr8?

Ms Gates: No. We welcome the fact that the Civil Service is taking back control of its issues, which means that it can change as it goes. The Civil Service is working with us on that, and we have regular discussions. As far as I know, all the issues that we have flagged are being addressed.

Ms Crilly: We are still very much in the middle of the process of discussing Integr8, and we have a timetable to go through all the policies. All the policies are in the mix, and that is probably why it sometimes takes a wee bit of time. We have to go through each policy line by line, making sure that there is no detriment to staff and that it is the best policy that we could have. We are in the middle of working through the job families framework and the recruitment process, because we do not want to lose good internal people who can move to higher grades in the Civil Service. It is good to have people come in from outside — I am not saying that it is not — but, internally, we also have people who would be good in those jobs. It is about striking a balance between the two.

As I said, we are still in the middle of negotiating all the policies. The recruitment, strategic workforce planning and supporting attendance strategies and the job families framework will all mean massive changes in how the Civil Service is run, so we are in a big state of flux. The Public Accounts Committee made recommendations, the Audit Office made recommendations and we now have this inquiry, but we are in a state of flux. It will get better once all that comes back in-house and we have settled on it.

Ms Gates: One thing that we do not see eye to eye on with senior civil servants is having entirely external recruitment. As Denise said, we are not entirely opposed to all external recruitment, but we believe that the Civil Service here is a very different beast from what is across the water. When Matthew was in the Civil Service, he worked alongside a lot of people who went into it for the experience of working in government so that they could get a better job somewhere else — I do not know how he ended up here, but there you go.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I did get a better job somewhere else. [Laughter.]

Ms Gates: Across the water, people come in and out of the Civil Service, using it as a stopgap or as a way of getting experience to move on to better things, and some move into politics. However, the Civil Service here is very different. People see themselves as career civil servants. They are not in it for the short term but because they want to serve the public. We feel that internal staff are often — it is not that they are overlooked, because it is a fair process, but the more people you bring in from outside, the harder it is for internal people to get promotion. That is the one thing that we do not see eye to eye on with the board and senior civil servants. They are inclined to see it as being better to look outside, and they want to bring in fresh blood. We are not opposed to —.

Ms Forsythe: Carmel, I want to develop that, because my final question was about capacity and capability. We keep seeing that huge sections of the Civil Service in Northern Ireland cannot fill certain specialist roles. How do we fill those roles? You are talking about civil servants not seeing opportunities. Should there be more of a drive towards offering retraining for roles in areas where there are huge gaps? Is there an appetite for that? I know that some of the areas — veterinary services is one; procurement is another that comes to mind from things that I have worked on recently — are technically specific. When it comes to the huge areas where we seem to have capability and capacity gaps, is enough being done to look at what we have and to provide retraining to fill those gaps? Is that being looked at?

Ms Gates: You have hit the nail on the head, Diane. We believe that more should be done to grow our own. We used do more of that. We used to grow our own accountants, for example. We absolutely believe that more should be done internally, but one of the difficulties that we have in recruiting specialists is that the Civil Service does not pay enough any more — that is across the piece. The introduction of the recruitment and retention allowance for some grades was an ad hoc attempt to fix a problem that is more widespread. Civil Service salaries in comparison with those in other areas have fallen, as I said, by more than 20% over the past 10 years, so it is now difficult to get people into roles at those specialist grades, because they earn more in the private sector. Vets can move across the border and double their salary or they can move to Scotland or Wales. They are doing so, at least, the younger ones are; it is harder when you are established and have a mortgage and so on.

We therefore need to address salary levels, first and foremost, if we want to get those specialist grades. I would also love to see more work being done on growing our own, because, if you educate an auditor or an accountant or if you train a vet, they are more likely to stay here and repay that investment than to go somewhere else. However, it has to come with better salaries. As I said, because of the salary levels, morale in the Civil Service is at rock bottom.

Ms Forsythe: Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. You have given us some really insightful answers and good, valuable recommendations to build on. Thank you.

Ms Crilly: May I add one point on the training that is paid for by the Civil Service? There is a very small budget for assistance to study. I know that there is an anomaly at the minute with accountants who hit a certain level and need an exam. When they apply for assistance to study, it gives them only half the amount that they need to pay to do the exam. However, if they leave and work in the private sector, a private company will pay them to get that exam. We have been raising that issue. It is about the financing of training. The Civil Service has a good catalogue, but it is limited to the budget of each Department.

Ms Gates: It has also been hit by the overall Budget. It is one of the areas that has suffered because there just is not enough money to stretch to everything that is needed.

Mr Harvey: Denise and Carmel, you said that you have 70 years' experience between you. You must have started working when you were about 12.

Ms Gates: Aye. Thanks, Harry.

Mr Harvey: You said that the Civil Service is more understaffed than overstaffed. Do you think that under-resourcing has led to some of the sickness absences? Sometimes, when people are in a job, they can end up doing two or three jobs. Is that a factor?

Ms Gates: Absolutely. Work-related stress is a huge issue. You are supposed to do only a 37-hour week, but people in the Civil Service regularly do way above that. Often, that is because those public servants and civil servants see the requirement to do it. We have told our members not to do it and to stop doing it, but it is falling on deaf ears; they are doing it anyway. It is fine, and you can keep going when you know that you are valued. To some degree, you can put up with doing a job and a half or two jobs, but the longer that goes on, especially if you are not being valued and appreciated, the more it starts to take its toll, and people ask, "What am I doing it for?", or they end up getting ill. You are right: under-resourcing leads to stress and pressure.

Mr Harvey: You talked about sickness warnings and said that people are taken aside after two or three absences. It that a new policy?

Ms Gates: No. That has been in place for years.

Mr Harvey: There is no change in that.

Ms Gates: As Denise said, we are in the process of negotiating a new policy that, we hope, will be better for our members and less punitive. Everything that happened has had consequences. The publication of sickness absence figures and so on has led to a more punitive attitude to dealing with sickness absence, which can sometimes drive up sickness absence. We have had situations where short-term absence has bled into long-term absence. Staff get a warning after three absences, so they think, "I was going to take a day, but I may as well take two or three days or a week, because I will get a warning for it anyway". Sometimes, a punitive policy can have a negative impact. As I say, senior civil servants get hammered for what they are doing about sickness absence, but I can assure you that it is not for want of a policy. They have been trying to address it. It is essentially about issues outside their control, such as lack of resources, which you mentioned; lack of budget; morale issues; lack of appreciation; underpayment; and the pressures of government. Let us be honest: whether you are in Child Maintenance Service, (CMS), as Denise used to be, and dealing with the pressure of taking a call from a father who is not paying his child maintenance, or a senior civil servant trying to get a new policy through, the pressure is there. It is a different kind of pressure from that which exists in an awful lot of areas, because you cannot walk away or tell people who are giving you a hard time on the phone to eff off. You have to sit and take it.

Ms Crilly: As Carmel said, my background is in child maintenance. I, for my sins, spent 14 years there. DFC is the biggest Department, and CMS is probably one of the most challenging areas. With the job families framework coming in, recruitment in that area might become a bit more targeted, and we might get people who have the skill sets to work in that type of environment. We have seen that people who have been put there via a general service list or because of a promotion were not really suited to that area but would be suited to somewhere else. We are not opposed to the job families framework and more targeted recruitment.

You also talked about sick absence, and CMS is one of the areas with high sick absence. There are a lot of agency workers there. Although they do not have any job stability, some agency workers have been in those roles for coming up to 10 years, which is not exactly temporary. I know that there are current administrative officer (AO) competitions in the north-west and in Belfast and that NICS hopes to resolve the agency worker situation with the resulting lists, but I also have concerns about that, in that it will be a case of having a new bum on a seat. New people will have to learn their trades and learn through experience, and it will fall to long-term, substantive staff there to not only pick up the slack but help to train them. The way it works is that staff train each other. We have reserved our opinion on just replacing all those agency people with substantive people from the lists, because the huge swathe of experience of people who have been there for eight to 10 years would be lost. We have made approaches to —

Ms Gates: Yes, we have made approaches to see whether we can streamline the process —

Ms Crilly: — see whether we could get —.

Ms Gates: — by getting agency people in as permanent.

Ms Crilly: We keep hitting a brick wall.

Ms Gates: However, that might mean making a change, so I will meet the Civil Service commissioners next week to see whether I can persuade them that there might be a different way to do this.

Ms Crilly: Being in a job for 10 years is not exactly temporary. They have proved their worth and are still there. It is very easy to get rid of an agency worker who is not performing, but they are still there, and we value the fact that they have been there and have worked to keep us going.

Mr Harvey: May I ask one more question, Chair?

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Go ahead.

Mr Harvey: You mentioned that the Civil Service has, you feel, turned a corner, a curve or whatever. Would you say that, at present, everything is on the right track and that it will just take more time? How long?

Ms Gates: That is a good question. I described it earlier as a supertanker, but it is a super-supertanker. In an organisation of this size, it takes time, but I think that it is on the right track. It has taken a while, but we are bringing stuff back in-house, developing policies and we have the people strategy. It has taken a while because of the context that I set out earlier, but we are heading in the right direction. Senior staff are getting a hammering. None of them are responsible. None of them were here when the things that caused the problems were put in place. I think that they are trying to fix it, and we are working with them. We now have a very good working relationship with most of the Senior Civil Service, if only it can be left alone to do it and can work with us.

Mr Harvey: Thank you.

Mr Kingston: I have to go shortly. I will ask my questions but, if you do not mind, I might have to leave before they have all been answered.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Do not worry: they will be on the record.

Ms Crilly: We will try to answer them quickly.

Mr Kingston: My first question is about agility in the workforce. In a small organisation, it may be possible to create a task force to bring people together for a particular short-term task. Is there a way by which there could be more of that in a large organisation such as the Civil Service?

On recruitment issues, we hear about the length of time that it takes to recruit: it is sometimes eight months before somebody can commence a job. Clearly, some people never start, because they get another job. Do you have views on how we could speed up recruitment processes? We hear a lot about the use of temporary promotions and agency workers and the carrying of unfilled vacancies. What are the pros and cons of those approaches? I imagine that there are more cons. What are your views on all those matters?

Ms Gates: The Civil Service is fairly agile in coming together on projects in each of its areas. It has to be agile because of how volatile the political situation is at any given time and because of all the challenges. It is a big organisation, but, as it works in divisions and so on, it is fairly agile in each of its areas.

The length of time that it takes to recruit has been a bugbear of ours for a while. That stems from problems associated with HR Connect, when the Civil Service did not have control over its own recruitment. Budget problems have also caused issues, such as the process of having to guarantee that there is funding before a vacancy can be advertised. Sometimes a vacancy is advertised only when there is a vacancy, because there is not the money needed to have any overlap or to have somebody in reserve. You are right in saying that often, by the time that somebody is offered a post, they have gone somewhere else. The external nature of recruitment has lengthened the process. When we had internal recruitment, we could fill vacancies much more quickly. All those things have added to the length of time and led to the high number of temporary promotions and agency staff.

Some of the agency staff came in to do DWP work when we were working on a contract with DWP. That was not permanent work here; it was Child Maintenance Service (CMS) work and things like that. Now that those contracts can be made permanent, we believe that there has to be a speedier way in which to bring in agency people who have worked, as Denise said, for maybe five, six or seven years, so that their experience is not lost. Some of them apply for permanent jobs and do not get through the selection criteria. Sometimes, random selection of applicants would be a better process than the stuff that we go through. We have people jump through hoops: sometimes, I do not know that the hoops that we ask them to jump through are valid in the sense that they actually get us the best people, or that they are valid in respect of the nature of the job that we then ask them to do.

There are probably quicker recruitment processes, but, up to now, we have sometimes been hampered by the way in which the recruitment process has been run. Yes, I think that there are speedier ways in which we could do it, and we are raising that with the Senior Civil Service. Temporary promotions are a stopgap. There are far too many temporary promotions, but that is often because, if people do not get through the promotion process as a job has gone to somebody from the outside, a line manager needs somebody who understands the work, and the easiest way to get that person may be to temporarily promote somebody who has been doing the —.

Mr Kingston: Apologies: I have to go. If you have further information to add, please do. Apologies for being rude.

Ms Gates: No problem.

Mr Kingston: I will try to get back a wee bit later. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Thank you, Brian. We may be done by then. All the best. I will bring in Dr Aiken.

Dr Aiken: Sorry about that; I am just getting some updates on what is going on around here.

Thanks very much for taking up our invitation, Carmel. We asked the Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, who thinks that she leads the Northern Ireland Civil Service but does not seem to be quite sure, what her main priorities are, and, from the response, it seems that Integr8 will solve all the problems. A couple of weeks after that, we heard evidence from the head of the Department of Finance, Neil Gibson, whom we know well. When I asked him how Integr8 was going, he answered that, in a traffic-light system, it would be on amber, occasionally flashing red. What are your views on Integr8, given that it has been touted as the saviour of everything?

Ms Gates: It will not necessary be the saviour of everything, but it will give civil servants better control over levers that they do not control at the moment. It will bring back in-house some of the things that they need to control, such as management of recruitment and other day-to-day issues. The reason for its being amber or whatever is the delays that there have been, partly for budgetary reasons. There not being politicians to agree things as the process was going on led to delays. We welcome Integr8 without a shadow of a doubt. As Denise said, we are still working through all the policies that will make sure that it runs smoothly. There will be snags along the way, but it is working.

Ms Crilly: The system itself is way over my head — it is very technical — but we get updates every month on the system build. As we update all the policies and put in procedures — with any policy that we agree comes a set of procedures — those procedures are meant to be linked with Integr8 so that people will get prompts to tell them to do stuff efficiently. From what we are being told and how we think that it will work in interaction with the policies —. It is meant to speed up recruitment, because you will have the post information there, and, with strategic workforce planning, you will know how many staff you need. From what is being said, it is meant to speed up that process. With HR Connect, there was a cost to everything. If you wanted to change the system or to do anything outside the norm, there was a cost, and it took a while to be integrated into the system, whereas Integr8 is being built in such a way as to allow you —

Ms Gates: You can be flexible.

Ms Crilly: — to make and facilitate the change. In the same way, implementation of changes in pay or other policies will be able to be done a lot more quickly with Integr8 than it was with HR Connect. From what we are being told and what we understand about Integr8, it seems to be better all round. Linked with the upgrade and our reviewing the policies and putting the procedures in place, things will be a lot more streamlined — I hope.

Dr Aiken: It feels as though there is a wee bit of nervousness about it, because you kept referring to what you have been told.

Ms Crilly: It is very technical.

Dr Aiken: Have you actually seen it?

Ms Gates: We have seen demonstrations of bits of Integr8, but it is still being built. There is no reason for us not to take at face value, Steve, the things that we are being told by the experts who run it. I think that we can —.

Dr Aiken: If my friend Mr Carroll was online, he would start talking about IT systems, Fujitsu and all the problems that we have had. I have a concern that nobody who has full confidence in Integr8 has seen it up and running. When we asked what plan B was, the answer was that there is no plan B and that it is about making sure that Integ8 delivers. I put that out there as a concern because of what has happened with every such system in Wales, England, Scotland or wherever else. Government is not very good at IT systems, and it is definitely not very good at full-scale administration systems.

My second question is about occupational therapy (OT). I have represented a lot of prison officers who have real concerns about how the Civil Service has delivered OT support — and HR support, full stop. It seems to be a tick-box exercise that shows no real understanding of the people who are affected by return-to-work issues. What is the union's perspective on that?

Ms Gates: For a long time, the OHS was not fit for purpose because the Civil Service could not recruit the medical practitioners that it needed. It was not paying enough, and there had to be a regrading exercise in order for it to be able to recruit the medical practitioners who could assist people in coming back to work, making reasonable adjustments and all of that. We have come through those teething problems and are on the other side now. The waiting-list backlog for occupational health, which was months at one stage, is now down to weeks. There is more help for the people who need it, particularly those who were injured in the course of their work. There is a better support process now than there has been for some time.

Dr Aiken: OK. The Treasury has, at last, submitted the report on the open-book exercise. It quoted figures from the Fiscal Council. In your earlier evidence, you mentioned that the Northern Ireland Civil Service is different from the Home Civil Service and the civil services in Scotland, Wales or wherever. The Treasury quoted a figure of there being 1·83 civil servants in Northern Ireland for every civil servant in the equivalent organisation in England and Wales. Do you have any figures to refute that? Last week, we asked the Minister for Finance if he had any details with which he could refute it. Can you give us any details that would help us to counter that argument?

Ms Gates: If the Treasury counted everything that the Civil Service does, the figure would include the workforce in councils and other areas. It also did not take account of the legacy issues here. The Treasury figures are not accurate. The Treasury said that, if the Civil Service here were the same size, proportionately, as the Civil Service across the water, we would save £400 million. Given that the Civil Service here has shown little growth in comparison with the Civil Service across the water, those figures have to be wrong. A lot of what the Treasury produced in that leaked report — including, even, the figure for what we could raise — does not stand up to scrutiny. The figures that the Treasury gave in respect of what has come out of the Fiscal Council's reports are also not accurate, so it is hard to prove —.

Dr Aiken: How do you prove a negative?

Ms Gates: Yes. It is hard to prove a negative. Given the size of the Civil Service here in comparison with that across the water, we know that the Treasury's figures are wrong. We need to see the Treasury's detail in order to be able to sit down to refute that, but we know that it is wrong.

Dr Aiken: Would the union be able to help with some detailed work on that? From now on, anyone who goes to the Treasury to ask for extra money will have that figure chucked at them. Is there any work that could be done whereby we could say, "The figure is 1·2" or something like that, or do you not want to go down that line of argument?

Ms Gates: If we can easily find the figures, it would be the right thing to do because we need to go back to the Treasury. The Treasury was given all the facts, but it has put them together wrongly. We may ask colleagues in the Public and Commercial Service Union, which represents civil servants across the water, about it. There is work that we might conceivably do, but the Committee, given its research resources, would probably get the answers more quickly. [Inaudible.] [Laughter.]

Ms Gates: Everyone is stretched, and nobody has enough time to dig the stuff out. Clearly, the Treasury is stretched, too, because the report that it produced beggars belief.

Dr Aiken: Carmel, thanks very much. If you want to touch base on anything outside of that, please feel free to get in touch.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): We certainly will interrogate it, as there is a lot of concern about the way in which the Treasury report was published. That is not to say that there are not other legitimate questions to ask.

Thank you very much to both of you for coming today. It has been a useful evidence session. It was really important to get your views on the record. We have your written evidence, Carmel, and it will form an important part of our deliberations. That, along with the transcript of today's session, will go into our report. I hope that your members and, indeed, civil servants who are not union members — in my view, they should be, for their own good — will see our Committee report.

Ms Gates: Matthew, the survey that is part of your scrutiny gives me cause for concern. It is hard to make a scientific survey, but the survey that accompanies this is, potentially, particularly unscientific. I worry that you will get responses from the disgruntled and the begrudging. Evidence of that nature is not always useful. If somebody has left the Civil Service under a cloud and has an axe to grind, their response can skew the results. That is why Denise and I were keen to set out the contexts and so on. We have more experience of the Civil Service than most other people. We need to be sure that we do not skew results by being blown off course.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): It is worth saying, for the record, that we will not present the findings of the survey in that way.

Ms Gates: Good.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): By the way, we have not been overwhelmed with responses, good or bad. If we published the sample size, people would question whether it was scientific. [Laughter.]

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): The survey had a number of purposes. First, in the context of the inquiry, it is best practice for the Committee to communicate with interested parties — the public in general but particularly the workforce involved — and give them the opportunity to give us their views. The second purpose is to identify any specific emerging leads, ideas or themes that will be useful for us. In our report, we will not present survey data as scientifically or statistically gathered polling information about the Civil Service. I can assure you of that. It is more that, in conducting such inquiries, we like to do consultations, almost, that get a sense of the views of the people who are willing to respond. We are not going out, as it were, into the market: we have not employed a market research agency or a polling company to go out and get us a representative sample, so it would be wrong of us to present it as that. Where specific themes emerge, we can communicate those in the report and ask questions that are prompted. We will not present it as anything other than that.

Ms Forsythe: I support what the Chair has said, Carmel. We know, because we have seen it in other consultations, that it will be the people who are most disgruntled or who feel strongest who respond. For example, when we consult on draft legislation, if the majority do not really care about it or feel that everything that is in place is fine, they generally will not respond to say, "Everything's great"; you just get the disgruntled people coming forward. We see that across the board in most surveys and consultations. We appreciate your raising that, but we will definitely not present it as, "95% of respondents said", for example; that is not what we hope to do. We just want to see whether we have missed anything. There are people in the Civil Service who are not in a union, and this was an opportunity for them to have a voice. It is not our intention to misrepresent or, as the Chair said, to do anything scientific with the numbers.

Ms Gates: OK. Thank you. That reassurance is welcome.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Thank you very much. We appreciate your time, your input and your making your way here today.

Ms Gates: Safe home, everybody.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Indeed. Thank you, again, to all NIPSA members and public servants who are dealing with some of the consequences of the past couple of days.