Northern Ireland’s Finance Minister Simon Hamilton MLA has outlined the extensive progress made to date on advancing public sector reform.
Mr Hamilton told the Confederation of British Industry at a members lunch held in Barclays Bank in Belfast that a year after setting his focus on reform, he remains positive that Northern Ireland can create an innovative public sector capable of addressing the challenges Northern Ireland faces in the future.
The Minister described how much of the last year has been spent constructing what he called the ‘architecture of reform’. He outlined a number of public sector reform initiatives the Department have been involved in during the last 12 months including:
- the creation of the Public Sector Reform Division with DFP
- a modern, IT driven staff innovation scheme called ‘Ideas Engine’ which gives staff the chance to be involved in service redesign and be rewarded for their ideas that work
- the launch of the Northern Ireland Public Sector Innovation Laboratory with the inaugural lab examining the effectiveness of the regulatory impact assessment process was reviewed and other labs looking at dementia and innovation in procurement in planning
- the publication of the first ever Northern Ireland wellbeing data as the beginning of a better focus on outcomes
- Executive agreement to engage with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to conduct the first ever sub-national public governance review with the OECD providing a strategic underpinning for Northern Ireland’s reform agenda
Minister Hamilton said: “I am proud of the ongoing success of our shared services with savings of over £15million on rent, rates and service charges delivered by Properties Division and Account NI achieving 90% of payments to suppliers within 10 days. We’ve witnessed an expansion in our e-government with more services including SpatialNI and GeNI launched this year and more to come. An ambitious asset management strategy which will pursue potential savings of over £50million by 2022 has been agreed. And in procurement, we’ve begun to realise significant savings through collaborative procurement across government, we’re using technology to simplify the procurement process through the introduction of the new eTendersNI system and I’ve outlined my plans for a centralised procurement and delivery service for major infrastructure projects.”
