BY Trinidad & Tobago Express

The Prime Minister proposes to establish a unit in his office to monitor and evaluate the performance of the various ministries. In his view, there is need for such continuous surveillance. "If things go off (wrong), the Prime Minister must know, and he is then in a position to take corrective actions before things get out of control."

Mr Dookeran and others regard this as further evidence of the Prime Minister's dictatorial tendency. The Prime Minister, they say, wants to control everything. Mr Manning may or may not have dictatorial tendencies, but if he does have them, this particular proposal is not clinching evidence to establish the claim. One was in fact surprised that there is no such agency in place now.

In today's world, prime ministers can no longer operate like amateurs as was the case in the age of horse and buggy politics when the state only provided law and order. No. 10 Downing Street now strives to fill the power vacuum which has developed at the top of the political pyramid by establishing a well-staffed power house which tries to ensure that all and sundry are on message, singing from the same page from the same hymn book.

The same applies to the US where the Chief of Staff and other advisers to the president monitor what is taking place on a sustained basis (24/7, as they say). "Spin" is the name of the "political" game. President Sarkozy of France has recently announced that he too proposes to hire a firm to monitor what departments of state do on a tri-monthly basis. Nothing is now being left to chance. When the elections are over, the electoral cycle begins all over again.

Notwithstanding this attempt at sustained surveillance, things frequently go wrong in the imperial executive mansions. Inevitably, questions arise as to who is accountable when things do go wrong. If the Prime Minister or the President seeks to maintain policy hegemony and even operational control over line departments, who is accountable?

Are ministers still "responsible" or is that a fiction that is a hold-over from the days when ministers really ran their departments and prime ministers were merely primus inter pares? What of civil servants and policy advisers on contract? Where does the buck stop? Who falls on his or her sword? Who resigns if resignation is called for? Why should the Minister of National Security, for example, resign if several persons and agencies are responsible for what is happening in respect of crime as the Commissioner of Police argues? Is it that there must always be a scapegoat who bears the collective shame of the group?

These problems were raised by a study of Whitehall that was recently undertaken by the Institute of Policy Research (IPR) in Great Britain. The study (Whitehall's Black Box: Performance and Accountability in the Senior Public Service) observes that Whitehall is staggeringly poor at service delivery and accountability. "There is no price to be paid for failure in Whitehall, no price whatever."

As one IPR Director explained, "lines of accountability in Whitehall are ill-defined, and too often responsibility falls between the cracks. Politicians and civil servants duck and dive behind each other and no one takes clear responsibility for driving improvement. The Civil service will never achieve consistently high performance without external accountability and effective performance management."

The study also complains that "too much Whitehall activity is undermined by its inability to work effectively across departmental boundaries." It also refers to the "accountability fudge" which protects both ministers and officials. "Ministers can say, not me, guv, while officials hide behind the minister." It goes on to argue that the governing arrangements and conventions as to how the service works are anachronistic and obsolete. Much of what is said about the UK's Whitehall is true of the Trinidad and Tobago public service.

The authors of the IPR study recommended the creation of a new central body headed by a strong executive which, in consultation with the Prime Minister and individual ministers, would appoint and line-manage permanent secretaries. The authority would have the power to scrutinise and assess the performance of departments, reward high performers and remove underperformers in the same way as obtains in the private sector. It would also assess departmental capacity and coordinate government policy and policy development.

The new body will also be responsible for appointing the head of the civil service, the strategic management of its core corporate functions and services like human resources, knowledge management, information communication technology, financial management, and laying out the strategic direction of the service. In this proposed new system, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility would be recast. Ministers would be responsible to Parliament and ultimately to the electorate. They will retain the power to veto senior public service appointments and would also determine policy. Permanent secretaries and departmental heads would however be responsible for operations.

The recommendations made in respect of the UK are somewhat different from that being proposed for Trinidad and Tobago by the Prime Minister which will centralise the policy monitoring and evaluating function in his office (with corresponding units embedded in the ministries as well). The human resource management function is now exercised in a fragmented and unsatisfactory way by the Public Service Commission and the Ministry of Public Administration.

Both proposals however make clear that there is a perceived need for some agency external to the various ministries to deal with the prevailing duck and dive mentality and assume responsibility for driving the entire system, coordinating what requires coordination, and accounting to parliament and the electorate for what is done or not done. What is also clear is that some of the problems involved in getting our public service to perform effectively and responsibly are similar to those to be found in countries which we characterise as being "developed" and choose as models to be imitated.

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