A new department: Robert Watt

Robert Watt, Secretary General of the new Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, discusses the challenges in setting up a new department and the practicalities of reforming the public sector with Owen McQuade.

Robert Watt has not had the typical trajectory of a civil servant. The man running the department charged with public service reform returned to the Civil Service after working in the private sector through the opening up of senior positions to external competition.

It has been a busy time for Watt. After his previous job as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Finance, overseeing spending policy and co-ordination, he is now charged with managing the department that will control spending and reform of the public service at a time of fiscal crisis. It has been a challenging few months, particularly with “the time that colleagues have had to had to spend on establishing the new department [and], at the same time continuing with their policy role,” he explains. Throughout the change, he tried to “reassure staff that this was an opportunity for them and not to be fearful of the changes that came about.”

The new department is located in the same building as the Department of Finance. “If you think about the budget there’s two sides: the raising of finance, and there’s spending, so in order for that to work efficiently we need colleagues with responsibility for each aspect of that to be working together,” says Watt, adding that the task of relocation would have been onerous whilst trying to remain focused on the policy agenda at this time.

Components

While the Government, and Minister Howlin, have set the policy priorities for reforming the public sector, the practicalities of implementing such changes will fall to Watt and other senior civil servants.

From an implementation view point, the reform agenda has several main components, all under the overarching theme of reducing expenditure and public service numbers whilst trying to provide a good service to the public.

The Croke Park Agreement, as the framework for reform, is working well, he believes, with “excellent co-operation” from the various parties. The challenge now is to accelerate the reforms agreed by Government, particularly those of a cross-cutting nature. He views such reform as very achievable given the new impetus for leadership through the creation of the department and having a Minister solely responsible for this agenda.

Progress is being made on reform of public procurement through the National Procurement Service (established in 2009) but there is ambition to achieve “more aggregation of contracts to benefit from economies of scale.”

Processes for delivering public services and the way they are engineered could be reformed, says Watt, including the management of large transactions, and the possibility of amalgamating or restructuring processes. Within the confines of the Croke Park Agreement, some of these processes could be performed by third parties in the private sector.

Certain activities, which are common to several departments or agencies, such as payments, inspections or the issuing of licenses, could be streamlined and given to a particular agency, he suggests. There are also opportunities in data sharing, an example being the new public service card which the Department of Social Protection is developing.

Redeployment of public servants within and across sectors is another key cross- cutting reform. Watt says the public service “needs to look at redeployment to make sure it works efficiently, and that we’re doing the best we can.” Individual sectors such as local government or education will examine individual initiatives as well.

Implementation

Currently the new department is establishing a dedicated unit to oversee reform and delivery. The position of programme director has been publicly advertised. The director “will have responsibility for delivering on these cross-cutting projects and will also have responsibility for ensuring that we’re delivering both the cross-cutting plans and the plans of departments, and are meeting the milestones.” The person will be responsible for reporting to the Government and Taoiseach on progress and will work with sections of Watt’s department, whilst possibly “bringing in some additional capacity from other parts of the public service or the private sector.”

People with varied skills including project management, will form part of the team within the unit, says Watt, who is determined that implementation is improved. “There is a question mark about our project delivery capacity in certain parts of the system. We need to look at that and we need to improve,” he states.

When asked why he believes there has been an implementation deficit, Watt says: “We didn’t necessarily put enough focus or premium on those project delivery skills for whatever reason, but it’s certainly an issue I think managers across the Civil Service accept that we need to improve on.”

Culture change

At the heart of the new department’s programme is the drive to change the culture and to communicate a message of change.

Watt believes there needs to be a culture “which looks all the time at our structures, our processes and policies and says: ‘Ok, are we really sure this is the best way of doing it?’” The culture, he says, must support those who take sensible risks and be prepared for the occasional mistake which arises from change, balanced against the need to learn from those mistakes and get it right in the future. However, “rather than despairing about that [mistake], focusing a lot of energy on the witch hunt of somebody,” says Watt, the focus should be on learning from it, and to “try and engender across the system a culture of questioning of what we do.”

Embedded in this challenge, the new Secretary General elaborates, is the major task of “trying to get departments and agencies to think of themselves as being part of an integrated, whole government as opposed to being a head or a department, a head or a manager, isolated, not being linked.” The former economics consultant wants departments or agencies to “think of themselves not just as one entity but part of a wider system which is funded ultimately by the taxpayer, and which is providing services to the citizens, who are also the taxpayers.”

The challenges for Watt and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform are immense, but he is also determined to try and get a greater sense of pride back in the public service “because we’ve been subject to a lot of unfair criticism.”

He says: “We need to accept fair criticism in a constructive way, but we do need to start boasting more about what we’re doing and give people a sense of pride about working in the public service, whether it’s in education or health or a civil servant.” Watt cites an EU report on e-government as an example of achievement, which ranked Ireland first in Europe for digitising public services.

Central to the process of change is the need “to keep reminding people that they’re doing a good job, they’re working hard, but we just need to get better, and where we have outdated practices or inefficient ways of doing things we need to fix them,” he remarks. “I think that’s very important.”

Profile: Robert Watt

Robert Watt is from Beaumont, Dublin, and was educated at Ard Scoil Rís, Rathmines College and UCD, where he did a masters in economics. He briefly
worked in the IDA before joining the Department of Finance in 1993 where he worked on labour market issues, structural funds, budgetary and macro-economic issues. He resigned in 2000 and became a consultant for Indecon and London Economics. He returned to the Department of Finance in January 2008 as Assistant Secretary General, where he worked on public expenditure and the budgetary process. In May he was appointed Secretary General of the new department. Outside work he enjoys spending time with his family, GAA and playing golf.