In the next 10 years, 51% of public employees in Spain will retire. Although Catalonia is one of the autonomous communities with the fewest officials per inhabitant, it has a gigantic administrative body, “aged” like that of the rest of the State and governed by an “inefficient, very expensive, obsolete and unsustainable model.” The diagnosis of the Forum for the Reform of Administration (FERA) means that entities and professional associations in Catalonia have activated to demand that the political class take advantage of the situation to undertake “profound changes” that allow for “effectiveness, efficiency, agility and confidence” to the Catalan administration.
Entities such as the Chamber of Commerce, Cecot, Esade, the Taula del Tercer Sector, and professional associations such as Economists or Industrial Engineers, joined together in 2013 around the FERA to pressure the Catalan authorities on this pending issue. The Fòrum has just updated its proposals for the reform of the Catalan public administration, proposals designed 10 years ago and that “have not changed much,” because “no progress has been made since then,” they lament.
“First came the process, then the covid pandemic…”, but now the political situation allows the company to resume, they allege. In fact, the FERA representatives have just met with the Presidency Department of the Government of the Generalitat and with the different political groups of the Parliament –ERC, PSC, Junts and Ciudadanos– to present the new report.
From the meeting with the Executive there was a coincidence in an atrocious diagnosis. “The system is jammed. The administration is no longer incapable of fixing itself, nor doing it in parts; A global plan is necessary. The problem has become so complicated, and the interdependencies are so many, that it cannot be addressed in parts, and doing so completely is enormous,” the Government admits.
The director of the Escola de l’Administració Pública, Ismael Peña López, is committed to a great State pact to reform the administration and, failing that, address the situation at two speeds, with gradual and rapid changes, and long-term transformations .
The Catalan Executive has on the table the new regulatory framework, the public occupation law, where the regulation of the Escola will be integrated and which will be ready in April. The law aims to reform the selection, learning and professional career processes to focus on talent, competence and management. It’s about starting “from the foundations” and “it will be a very brutal change,” they promise.
But the FERA goes further. “Some of our demands are provided for in the regulation, but others are not,” the entity warns, which takes a more transversal approach and ranges from promoting public-private collaboration to “recover trust”; the use of new technologies and digitalization, the elimination of bureaucracy and, of course, reorienting the human resources model.
At this point they consider that the professionalization of the administration involves the promotion of professional public management, that is, meritocracy as a leitmotiv of any selection process, especially in the management field.
In Spain, and therefore in Catalonia, the appointment of senior officials is markedly political in nature. It is done by royal decree and no specific requirements are established for the election. And the officials who occupy management positions are appointed through the system of free appointment, which implies a biased selection of candidates (they are only officials) and the final decision depends on the (political) trust of the senior official. But at FERA they give as an example the transformation that Portugal has carried out in this matter. Our neighboring country began an administrative reform whose great milestone has been to establish a specific plan based on meritocracy for access to the most relevant positions.
“The public manager, with the appropriate training and skills, is the key figure, especially while we do not have a specific law on professional public management,” they point out in the FERA. The Forum proposes that this manager meet demanding conditions: a meritocratic appointment, periodic evaluation, remuneration based on objectives, a contract for a mandate and the possibility of early termination if the objectives are not met. This should be stated in the law of the professional public management that they demand.
But the problems also concern the rest of the lower-level officials, for whom they propose “attractive and competitive remuneration” compared to the private sector, but a “requirement on work that cannot be lower than in the private sector.”
Although the regional governments, including Catalonia, have proposed to solve the progressive aging of civil servants by calling for oppositions, the FERA warns that the demand profile continues to be mainly administrative, instead of “data analysts or evaluators”, which would allow for improved efficiency. In addition, they recommend focusing on constant evaluation.
“We have a model from the 19th century that must respond in the 21st century,” says Miquel Estapé, vice president of the Catalan Association of Public Management. The data supports it. According to the European Quality of Government Index 2021, Catalonia has a very poor quality of government. It is at the bottom of the regions of Spain and Europe, with indicators very far from the Nordic and Central European countries.
But the problem is not only Catalan. Spain occupies 23rd place in Europe in the government efficiency index, at the level of countries such as Cyprus and the Czech Republic, and 43rd in the world, behind Qatar.
