Civil Service pay rise must be linked to administrative reform

8.16.35am UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 4th Nov 2005

North Down Alliance Councillor Ian James Parsley has called for Civil Service pay to be directly linked to administrative reform making Civil Servants directly accountable for costly mistakes.

Cllr Parsley stated: "The public service union NIPSA's calls for a Civil Service pay rise above inflation may well have a degree of legitimacy, but they will ring rather hollow with those whose lives have been frankly ruined by Civil Servants failing to do their job.

"Only in these past two days we have seen a disastrous failure to allocate the correct money to the correct schools, which almost certainly led to redundancies in under-funded establishments, and then half a billion pounds meant for training being mostly lost on fraud and inefficiencies. Civil Servants have to face the fact that those inadequacies resulted in people losing their jobs and their future, as well as costing the taxpayer millions. Many will wonder how Civil Servants have the nerve to demand a pay rise for delivering such incompetence.

"Yet will so much as a single Civil Servant face even so much as a fine for such disastrous series of basic errors? I think we all know the answer to that.

"In any other walk of life, people who fail to perform in this way pay the price for it. Civil Servants are quite justified in demanding fair pay, but the public they serve is also quite justified in demanding accountable service - and that means heads rolling when things go wrong."

ENDS