Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): The session will be recorded by Hansard. We have an annual progress report that, I
think, Brian touched on earlier. It is nicely designed and quite swish.

The Committee Clerk: There is no hard copy, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is not the end of the world. At page 108 of members' packs, there is correspondence from the head of the Civil Service, then there is a long paper. I do not know whether members have had the time to look at that paper. It is interesting. There are some pieces in it that are immediately comprehensible to me and other things that are a little less so. It is a mix of a brochure and a report. I would not say that there is a huge number of hard metrics in it.

The Committee Clerk: Chair, it could do with a red/amber/green (RAG) analysis. That would probably make it an awful lot easier.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Yeah. Looking through it, there is not a huge amount of —. In a sense, however, that is our job and the job of our report.

Mr Kingston: I was making that point to David. It is for us to evaluate where progress has been made. The report gives an overview of key achievements and priorities, but we want to be able to ask intelligent and probing questions so that we can play our role in driving it forward. We have no witnesses in on this agenda item today, so I feel that we are only noting the report. In due course, however —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): You are more than welcome to make any comment that you wish now.

Mr Kingston: I would be interested to know more about the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) job families, because, to me —.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Those have come up a lot. People have talked about the job families being an answer to a lot of things, both —.

Mr Kingston: Yeah, it is that idea. Hopefully that will improve flexibility between Departments. We have talked about the fact that, yes, there is value to having people with years of experience and knowledge of historical developments, but any modern workforce needs flexibility and for people to be deployed where they are needed. At times, not so many people will be needed for certain tasks. It is necessary, therefore, to have flexibility to be able to move people around and keep everybody busy and productive. I would be interested to know how the job families are going and how that model is improving the ability to deploy people to different Departments and where they are needed.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Yes, that is fair. We may be able to ask about that at a future evidence session. We have a few upcoming evidence sessions on our inquiry into the Civil Service.

My major takeaway from looking at this document is that I still do not see very many clear metrics in it, even if the Department is not RAG-rating itself. For example, certain milestones and achievements on page 7 of the progress report, which is at page 115 of the Committee pack, such as "NICS PEOPLE STRATEGY 2026-2030 LAUNCHED", are clear, solid things. That strategy is a real document that has been launched and that we can view. The progress report also states that an administrative officer (AO):

which has happened. Other milestones are more amorphous, such as those that are included in — I say this for those who are looking at the document — the yellow section. My describing that — for the three people watching — is like the old football commentators saying, "For people watching in black and white". That section includes things such as:

as a disembodied statement, without further stating, "By this date we will have brought HR services back in-house, which will have saved us x amount of money, and it will have been dealt with by Integr8". That is the kind of thing into which we would, I guess, need to drill down. There is another statement:

We also need that to be crystallised in a firmer, clearer output, rather than in a disembodied statement or aspiration.

The Committee Clerk: Chair, part of the reason that we have this document is to get members' feedback on exactly how well it works or does not work. We can then feed that back to Jill Minne and Catherine Shannon. As I said, we will have them in. We are kind of doing double duty with it. We assess this, but it also folds into the wider questions in the inquiry, so, when we bring Jill and Catherine in, we will look at both. Part of today is about getting members to give a sense of what they think of it.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Yes. It is clear that things that they are saying that they have done in year 1 — for example, as I said, the AO recruitment pilot — are tangible things. I am just not completely clear from this document what the precise deliverables and metrics are for the next period. Maybe I am being unfair; it will probably be written down elsewhere.

The Committee Clerk: Chair, may I venture an opinion?

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Yes.

The Committee Clerk: The document has sought to be accessible in a way that perhaps takes the edge off the kind of analysis that would be useful for the Committee. It is not set out in a way that the Committee is used to seeing with other datasets and so on.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): To be fair, not everything has to be —.

The Committee Clerk: It is very attractive.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I appreciate that we are not the only audience for this document, and it is an attractive document. I presume that it is also for internal audiences who want to get a general sense of the direction of travel and see what different Civil Service leaders and trade unions are saying about it. There is nothing wrong with any of that, but we also need to constantly drill down and ask about key outputs.

The Committee Clerk: That is helpful.

Mr Kingston: The document is well presented when it comes to highlighting things. When they are doing a presentation for us, they could focus on the main highlights, because you could talk about it for days. They need to make it punchy for us. There is one — it looks good — that says:

That is the sort of thing that we want to hear about. Previously, if people were waiting for 18 months to start a job, they would be away. If they have delivered that 12-week pilot, that is the sort of thing that we want to hear about.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is right. When their metrics address a specific target that they have set in the people strategy —. There is a question about how specific the people strategy is. The feedback that we got from Jill and Catherine was that that is not necessarily the purpose of the people strategy. OK, but we still need to understand some sense of metrics. For example, where there is specific progress and improvement on some of the numbers that are in the —.

Mr Kingston: Sickness absence.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is one, yes. The Audit Office report, I think that is —. There are specific metrics and challenges that we want to see improved, but anyway, we have made the point. We can pursue this with —.

The Committee Clerk: We can go back to them with that, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): We will make those general points to them. We will have them in front of us for the inquiry.