All shall have prizes

There are various reasons why the “12 Days of Christmas” went down like a lead balloon.  Central Bank board member David Begg seems to have settled on blaming the media.  But among the explanations is also that the government and the unions were promising to deliver something that people thought had already been promised — and declared delivered — under the benchmarking and social partnership pay increases.  A bit of digging around government websites establishes that there is something called the Civil Service Performance Verification Group, which has been in existence since the original Sustaining Progress 2003 pay increases.

The most recent documents on the website cover the since suspended 2.5% pay increase from 1 September 2008 and in particular the documents submitted by each department to show that they were in a process of continuous organisational improvement to merit the increase.  Remarkably, every single department was in such a process and every department got the necessary sign-off on their pay increase.  Let’s take a look at the very first thing that the Department of Finance listed under its own “Modernisation, Flexibility, Organisational Change” –

- [Action] decentralisation to  Tullamore.  [Target] October 2006. [Progress] Complete. Official opening performed by the Minister for Finance on 5 October, 2006.  [Performance Indicator] Effective functioning of Tullamore-based Business Units.

Who was that minister again?