Sir Brian Roche spells out what’s wrong with the public service

Sir Brian Roche says there is a concern about the level of analysis given to Treaty "breaches." Photo / Marty Melville

• New Public Service Commissioner Brian Roche has been in the job for 73 days.
• Chief executives kept asking him what he thought wasn’t working, so he told them in a letter.
• He is setting up a select group of chief executives to address the problems.

There are too many meetings in the public service, too many layers of management, too much duplication, not enough clarity about its role and not enough focus on outcomes, new Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche told chief executives in a letter ahead of their first meeting.

He said improvements in efficiency, decision-making, and responsiveness were needed.

He is in the process of setting up a small group of chief executives to come up with ways to address the most glaring problems.

He says its membership is likely to include former Police Commissioner Andy Coster who is now head of the Social Investment Agency, Commissioner of Inland Revenue Peter Mersi, Comptroller of Customs Christine Stevenson, Secretary for Justice Andrew Kibblewhite, and a smaller agency leader, such as Gerardine Clifford-Lidstone, the Secretary for Pacific Peoples.

He said the chief executives had not been defensive about his list of problems, and he believed his view was shared by many of them.

Roche expected changes to be aimed at operating systems rather than structural changes.

The system was not fundamentally broken but it was no longer fit for purpose.

“I’m still mindful of the Roger Douglas experience where you throw everything up and you hope something lands well,” he told the Herald this week.

“Society and business need the public administration system to work all the time. You don’t a get a year or two off while you reinvent it.

“Let’s optimise what we’ve got while we think about maybe something different.”

He said the observation about too many meetings might apply beyond the public sector.

“We do seem to live in a very high-touch model — lots of meetings, lots of consultation. The question is ‘Do we need to do all this, are we improving the quality and timeliness of our decision-making and support to the Government, question mark.”

In his letter to about 40 chief executives in December, Roche said the existing model no longer served its needs in the context of a rapidly changing operating environment, the fiscal position, the required focus on growth, and the need to improve the quality and timeliness of decision-making.

The system was overly complicated and needed to be simplified. It was not reflective of modern business models.

Among the problems he cited were a lack of data use in decision-making, and assumptions being made about the Treaty of Waitangi.

“We are not using enough data to improve the quality and timeliness of decision-making,” the letter said.

“A lot of what we try in terms of policy is impeded by assumptions (rather than analysis) that ‘this will breach the Treaty.’”

The public sector also needed to be more responsive.

“There is a perception we are not listening to what ministers need [or] want.”

There was a lack of innovation and/or real-time modification for better delivery and outcomes.

“It is increasingly clear to me that something is getting lost in translation between ministers and the system and we ignore that at our collective peril — we need to address it.”

Roche, a fix-it man for all Governments in the past 40 years, took up his appointment in November for a term expiring in June 2027.

Sir Brian Roche said he would impose change if necessary. Photo / Marty Melville

He told the chief executives that his overriding brief was to improve performance of the system and ‘we need to reach an understanding of what that means’.

“Despite rumours you might have heard, I do not have any other secret brief or terms of reference.”

The letter was written about a month after Roche had started and ahead of the first meeting with chief executives on December 13 in Wellington after many of them had asked him what he thought. It set out what he considered the public service inefficiencies to be.

“There is a lack of clarity on what our core business is,” he wrote.

“There is fragmented decision-making and investment (eg technology) because we think we are special [or] unique, which impedes productivity and alignment.

“There are too many layers of management and too many meetings, resulting in inefficiencies, confused accountabilities and high transaction costs.”

He said there was too much focus on doing business with one another and not enough on outcomes.

There was duplication between agencies in terms of consultation “and we are captured by the slowest participant”.

Asked by the Herald to expand on concerns about the Treaty of Waitangi, he said conclusions that certain actions would be a breach of the Treaty needed to be “well-founded on legal principles and precedent; it’s not just some as it were low-level official saying ‘Oh this looks like a Treaty breach’.’”

He formed his view after speaking to many chief executives, ministers and people responsible for public service delivery in visits to Dunedin, Auckland and Hawke’s Bay.

Every time something needed to be done, there was a strong emphasis on the Treaty — “as there should be because that is the nature of the public sector work.”

“But there was an emerging sense that officials were using the Treaty breach as a mechanism to not actually necessarily take everything forward that should be taken forward.

“It’s being seen by some as one of the first flags that goes up without necessarily having considered it to the extent that you would expect before you could make that statement [a Treaty breach] with authority.”

Roche said with advances in technology and AI, capturing and using information would become a real asset of the public sector “and we need to think laterally about how we use that information”.

“We are one system. We are funded by one source of money — and that is the taxpayer — and we should use it as one system… we need to try to simplify and streamline, not fragment and complicate.”

Roche said he wanted the chief executives themselves to come up with options to address the problems.

“I don’t want to impose it on them — but I will impose it if we don’t make progress,” he said.

“I don’t mean that as a threat but we have a genuine opportunity and a genuine need here to reinvent some of this stuff.”

The Prime Minister and Minister of Finance had encouraged bold approaches in the public sector and did not want them to be too risk-averse.

“Risk is a fact of life and we are never going to be imprudent and negligent,” Roche said. “But let’s just keep risk in balance and not become mesmerised by it.”