Once the elections on May 12 are held, the new president of the Generalitat will enter his office and the monster will still be there. Although it may not be his first concern – that’s where the problem begins – the head of the Catalan government is, like all of his predecessors, the greatest director of human resources in Catalonia.
If he follows the example of his predecessors, one of his first tasks will be to appoint some 450 senior officials. Other administrations have begun to limit political appointments and have opted for a certain professionalization of public management. Catalonia not yet.
The paradox is that these 450 people decide on the work of 282,000 employees (data from the 2023 budget) at the service of the Generalitat and its extensive galaxy of 208 public or affiliated organizations. These workers, every time the government changes, look up at the office above and wonder who will come to occupy it, although they, the majority, will remain there no matter what. That is the nature of the Administration: it remains, even if democracy changes the political course.
Of these 282,000 employees, about 183,000 are civil servants, another almost 100,000 occupy other categories, including replacements. 80% provide service in the areas of Education, Health, Interior and Justice.
They may seem like huge figures, but as Ismael Peña-López, the current director of the Escola d’Administració Pública de Catalunya, points out, “it is far from the average of the countries with which we can compare ourselves in meeting the needs demanded by its citizens. It is another thing for this structure to work well, and it is clear that we have problems.”
In 2021, with the seal of the European Union, the Government Quality Index was published, the fourth installment of this indicator since 2010, and the Generalitat, which was already lagging behind, was at the bottom of the Spanish autonomous communities and from most of the comparable European regions.
The political scientist Antoni Biarnes is the coordinator of the Forum of Entities for the Reform of the Administration (FERA). In its committee is Cecot, the Chamber, Esade, Iese, the College of Economists or the Third Sector. The Forum’s successive reports are conclusive: the Catalan Administration works poorly. “There is too much bureaucracy, the objectives are not reached; on the contrary, they get in the way and no one evaluates what they are doing. Today a good official has the same incentives as a bad official. There is no direction”.
There are the symptoms: the devastating PISA reports, the waiting lists in healthcare, the farmers’ revolt against the bureaucracy, the ineffective management of investments, social aid and companies… “Political decisions can be good, but their application is not,” summarizes Biarnes.
The Escola d’Administració Pública directed by Peña-López is 111 years old. It was founded by Prat de la Riba, the president of the Commonwealth, anticipating what other countries would later do: train public servants.
Hence “the anthropological optimism” with which Catalonia, in the description of Carles Ramió, professor of Political Science and Administration at the Pompeu Fabra University, began to rebuild the Generalitat in the seventies. “At the beginning, Catalonia and the Basque Country were the model. But as the years went by and the Administration grew, politicians lost interest or ability to right what was not working.”
Already in the last years of the Pujol governments, the first attempts were made to correct some symptoms of corrosion. Then, with the tripartite, a white paper was prepared and the number of senior officials was limited. With Artur Mas, at least two reports were made, partly forced by the policy of cuts. But no one dared to take the big step. The process did nothing but postpone the solution.
“But there is no more time,” Peña-Lopez emphasizes, “in ten years a third of these public servants are going to retire. Will we fill the same vacant positions again? Shouldn’t we first ask ourselves if instead of an administrator we don’t need an AI expert whose position does not exist today? And for that we need someone who has a map of the administration and can answer the question: what do we need to do well what is asked of us?
“We need – says Ramió – a professional public management that is accessed with a meritocratic system, in accordance with the skills and career of the worker.” And there are no excuses. “With State legislation it can be done. It is only necessary to adapt that of the Generalitat itself. “It is still anchored in the last century.”
