Sir Courtney: Start at the top
Friday April 01 2011 | 05:03 AM

Serious public sector reform is urgently needed in Barbados.

And according to former Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, Sir Courtney Blackman, this must start at the top -- with the Cabinet.

In an interview with Barbados TODAY this morning, Sir Courtney stressed that with clear indications Barbados' public sector was operating as much as 30 years behind some of its competitors, there was no time to be wasted, particularly given the nature of the Barbados economy, the time it would take to emerge from recession and the need for changes to cushion the impact of future economic challenges.

He said while the private sector had made tremendous strides in the area of reform and modernisation of management, the same could not be said for the public service.

"I think corporate management has improved quite significantly but we have not done very much to try to improve the efficiency of the public sector," Sir Courtney said.

"We have been talking about public sector reform for years now, 30 to 40 years, and we've done nothing about it. As a matter of fact, in the last National Strategic Plan prepared by the last Government ... They talked about it and they said that we were 30 years behind -- our systems that we're using in government are 30 years behind...

"I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister [Freundel Stuart] say that public sector reform is on his agenda... My advice to him is to act on it, don't just put it on the agenda... A lot of what needs to be done doesn't take money, it just needs thinking about it and making a decision..."

The former Barbados ambassador in Washington added: "Our public sector reform has to come from the top... That means it has to come from the Cabinet, so that means we have to start looking at the operations of the Cabinet.

"Everything goes to Cabinet; every little thing... You can stop that, you only have to make a decision to bring in a consultant to look at what you're doing. If a clerk from a ministry is to go to Trinidad for training, that has to go to Cabinet..."

He described the rule being followed by civil servants as having been put in place by "colonisers on the assumption that we were inferior to them in our thoughts, in intelligence, and therefore needed to be controlled because we're not very smart, but Barbadians are just as smart as the British, or the Americans, the Germans but not if we continue to follow what we've been doing for 40 years..."

Noting that the cabinet in Britain did not meet to decide "whether a clerk in the civil service is going to travel on a trade mission from London to wherever", he added: "It meets on strategic and serious matters. We have to stop what we are doing."

"The cabinet of the US very rarely meets. I don't think it meets a dozen times a year...," he added.

"We have to decentralise decision making in the civil service. Every department should have its own financial operation which can easily be controlled by the Ministry of Finance because they can get into the accounts of every department on a real-time basis. So you could have people sitting down in the Ministry of Finance monitoring every piece of expenditure by every other department because they can see it in real time on their computer screens.

"Every department should have its own so that all the late payments to this body and [next], various business people and so on, those things should not go on because the process allows you to do them immediately, and you can check."

The former Central Bank boss also made it clear no meaningful reform could occur without Government taking the reports and directives of the Auditor-General seriously.

"The Auditor-General comes and says 'I've found this and I've found that' but then he says the same thing year after year. The Auditor-General should be a very key office and we should take action on his recommendations."