The Public Service has “extraordinary professionals” but the workforce is “stressed” and must be reinforced with new hires. The efforts made in recent years, with record public job offers, have not been enough. This is the message that the Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, José Luis Escrivá, conveyed today in the presentation of the general lines for the administration in the Congress of Deputies. To this end, the Government is preparing a recruitment plan for new officials, both through hiring processes and recruiting senior profiles in the private sector.
Escrivá explained that the staff of the General State Administration (AGE), their responsibility, are showing wear and tear due to the efforts they have had to make in recent years due to the pandemic and the deployment of the Recovery Plan. At this time, the number of AGE personnel is just over 520,000, according to data from the Central Personnel Registry offered today by the minister, which is 10% less than in the years prior to the financial crisis. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 they exceeded 580,000 employees.
The Public Service also needs a generational change. As Escrivá explained, around 60% of the AGE staff will retire in the next decade, which will reduce the teams by around 300,000 personnel.
The ministry speaks of a “permacrisis” in the labor field. More data that Escrivá has offered: between 2013 and 1018 there were more than three times as many departures as incorporations in public squads. Since 2021, this trend has reversed and the additions exceed the terminations, although the total workforce has not yet recovered.
Today, Spain also has one of the oldest public workforces in the OECD. Almost half of central employees were 55 years old or older, 20 points more than the average for the most developed countries.
Faced with this situation, the Government designs a plan to attract and retain talent in the Public Service. It is about strengthening staff with “more agile” selection processes and finding new, more senior professionals in the private sector, with whom the public competes. “Public professionals need a motivating career perspective,” explained Minister Escrivá, despite the drawback of the worst salaries in the case of specialized profiles.
Starting a hiring plan does not mean that the administration has to have the same number of personnel as before the crisis, Escrivá explained. Taking into account that there is a threshold that must not be reached so as not to harm the provision of services, the ministry is working on a project to evaluate how many new public employees are needed taking into account the impact of digitalization and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, which the Government also wants to promote in the public sphere. The objective set by Escrivá is to launch a “strategic planning” process to calculate the aforementioned number of troops that will be needed in the coming years.
The Government will also end the staff replacement rate, a recurring demand of the unions, since it is “a model that is based on the vegetative growth of the workforce.” The objective is to start negotiations to implement a new public worker renewal system in the 2025 Budgets.
Regarding citizen service, Escrivá has set the goal of ending the mandatory prior appointment to interact with public administrations or reinforcing the 060 citizen service telephone number. However, he has also pointed out that in-person care has no substitute, especially for certain profiles of citizens such as the elderly or dependents.
The minister has confirmed the Government’s commitment to raise the salary of public employees by a fixed 2% in 2024. The intention is to include the revaluation in the Budget bill that the Treasury is preparing. If the public accounts end up shipwrecked, the Executive will look for other ways to comply with the agreement.
