The head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service has insisted that progress is being made with recruitment issues that were laid bare in a recent report from a public spending watchdog.
Jayne Brady assured members of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Finance Comittee that they can expect reductions in the number of temporary promotions and levels of agency staff at NICS – both of which are usually a result of vacancies.
However it emerged at yesterday’s hearing that the number of NICS officials currently acting up under “TP” arrangements has increased to 3,700 since January – when the Northern Ireland Audit Office quoted a figure of 3,192. The figure is more than 13% of the NICS’s total headcount.
The Northern Ireland Audit Office’s report also pointed to a vacant-posts count of 5,486 as of April last year, up from 1,420 in April 2019, and a significant increase in the number of agency workers over the same period.
Brady said at Wednesday’s session that the NICS has “strengthened oversight” of vacancy management and workforce controls as part of its People Strategy, and that new “volume recruitment” pilots were speeding up appointment processes.
The NICS head said she recently wrote to all departmental accounting officers setting out measures intended to apply a “consistent grip” on workforce decisions across the service, with particular relation to recruitment.
“The principles to this approach are [that] vacancies should not be filled automatically on a like-for-like basis,” she said. “Departments should be able to demonstrate that affordability and essential utility have been tested, and alternatives to recruitment considered. Decisions should be evidence-based drawing on existing workforce plans, dashboards and management information.”
Brady said her advice also made clear that solutions such as temporary promotions should be time-limited and kept under review. “In short, no new recruitment will be launched in the Northern Ireland Civil Service without this process being followed,” she said.
She added that NICS HR is providing each department with a list of its live cases and asking for a “simple confirmation” from an accounting officer that each vacancy “remains affordable and prioritised” – or else it should be “paused or withdrawn”.
Brady said a People Strategy masterplan is due to be completed by the end of next month that is designed to “embed delivery discipline” across the system.
The NICS head told Finance Committee members that she was keen for there to be no temporary promotions within the senior civil service by the end of the year – unless there were “strategic reasons” for such an approach.
She acknowledged that vacancy rates in NICS were depicted as in the region of 5,000 as of late February, but said the number did not reflect the real situation.
She said 1,600 of those roles were posts that would be fully funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, and that the real figure would be more in line with the number of staff currently on temporary promotion.
She added that recent pilots for “volume competitions”, in which hundreds of staff are recruited via a single drive, had showed that appointment times for roles could be significantly reduced – from several months to a matter of weeks.
Brady said she expected recent volume competitions to create a supply of officials that would result in a “substantive reduction” in NICS’s reliance on agency staff.