Head Civil Serpent Peter Ong say sinkie Pubic Service wants to up its game

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Public service wants to up its game



By Robin Chan
Singapolitics
Sunday, May 26, 2013

In an interview to mark Public Service Week, Civil Service Head Peter Ong invites Singaporeans to join hands with civil servants to take Singapore forward, discusses public sector talent and salaries and government transparency. Below are excerpts of the interview.

Q: In your various speeches earlier, you spoke about formulating policies from citizens' perspective rather than from the agencies which implement them. Tell us more.

A: All over the world, change is going on - same macro forces. Of course we have our uniquely Singapore drivers and factors, but across the world you can see, across different political systems, this change that's I think a great opportunity for citizens to also rise up to play their part. And I think we'll be a more resilient society and nation as a result of being able to work well together.

Q: Tell us more about the challenges that the Civil Service now faces.

A: First, let me just say that the governance landscape has changed significantly over the last say two and a half years that I've been in Civil Service. I would say that pace of change is much faster than any time I've seen in my career. And I'm truly humbled but energised, and share a deep sense of urgency as I look at all the changes that are happening.

And I would say that the changes are happening in a few aspects: economic change. We've moved, you've seen our economic strategy move from one that's maybe a little bit more input-driven to one now that's productivity-led, innovation-led. We want to move that way and in the process of economic restructuring over the last few years, it's already started, gathered pace and will have to continue. We're doing that even as there are deep-seated structural problems in developed countries and navigating that shift. It will be quite challenging.

On the societal front, our people have become more diverse - their needs, their preferences, their profiles. They are more educated and their expectations of what they want the Government and their desire to participate in the things that affect their lives. I think that has certainly changed.

On the technological front, the ubiquity of social media, citizens being able to interact with one another and with the Government in a way that's more intense than ever before. Then also, disruptive technologies, 3D printing is here and manufacturing almost anything; you talk about artificial intelligence, you talk about synthetic biology, you talk about robotics. Some of these technologies obviously are further out afield but 3D printing, robotics are all upon us. And what will they mean for us? Tremendous implications.

I would say that these challenges are not just challenges of any normal growing city but besides being a city, we are also a city-state and balancing that, it adds to the complexity.

Q: So then what does it mean for the Civil Service, given these major changes?

A: Well, I think that if I can come back to this theme for this week's Public Service Week. We're saying One Public Service With Citizens At The Centre. I see three areas where we need to do things differently. One is a more relational government where we move from government to the people, where you know we are providing services, providing policies and measures; government for the people, we are there for them and making sure their needs are met; to one where it's government with the people, where we look at ways in which we can have a different relationship between government and the people, where they are also a part of working at solutions for the country together - a relationship based on mutual trust and respect, a greater sense of collaboration between citizens and government.

One very practical example, Do The Mozzie Wipeout. In the past, we will just send out troops of National Environment Agency enforcement officers and go: who is breeding, having stagnant water in the garden and checking on homes. We will continue to do that but beyond a point, you recognise that better outcomes can come about when you actually involve the community. So it was a few weeks ago when it was launched across Singapore where we actually say that while Government obviously will play its part, the community, individual households, how you behave, how you deal with water and how you store water and how you look after your garden makes a difference not just for whether you're breeding mosquitos but whether your neighbours' behaviour can affect you, your household. So I think this is a more sustainable solution, it's a more inclusive solution.

The second area will be say one where the Public Service will need to get a better sense and understanding of the ground, you know. That's important because of the changing profile of the population. Policies cannot be implemented simply for the average Singaporean or the median Singaporean because the distribution matters, and the distribution is much wider right now, across a whole range of policy issues. And so, a lot of my colleagues will actually find out how things are happening on the ground. For eg, we send our officers down to the Community Development Councils so they understand the average Singaporean, the whole full range, not just the average Singaporeans who come to ask for social assistance.

We're also doing, trying to up our game on policy design and service delivery. Putting citizens at the centre of what we do and that's very important. Sometimes we tend to implement programmes and policies from the perspective of our schemes and our programme.

We had this Help Centre where Subordinate Courts and Legal Aid Bureau were helping people and they even won a UN Gold Award. But we were not satisfied with that. We say that's not enough. We want to go upstream because for litigants in person, they usually have some social problem when they come up against problems with the law. So we brought in Ministry of Social and Family Development, we brought in VWOs, and then we also brought in the private sector, law firms who were prepared to provide pro bono legal services, and also philanthropic foundations. So we went upstream and we took a more inclusive approach and we put that together and say this is the full offering, comprehensive and integrated offering that these litigants, accused persons would need: free counselling, legal counselling, even social assistance.

We will try and do that, up our game on making the citizen the centre of how we design our policies and how we design our service delivery.

Q: There are a lot of policies under review right now. But are there any issues that haven't been addressed yet that need to be?

A: I think almost all Cabinet ministers have been out there talking to people, hearing the views, exploring options. I get quite amused throughout the course of my career when members of the media call us and ask: "Is it true that the Government is reviewing this thing?"

I'm very tempted to tell them, actually, you know, this Government, this public service, it's part of our DNA to always take things and review and see how we can do better. And a lot of it is never made public, a lot of it will never sometimes see the light of day. But we think we owe it to ourselves to keep reviewing and to keep studying how we can do better.

Q: As National Day approaches, we're going to have quite a few major policy changes in the works because of the Singapore Conversation. How is the Civil Service gearing up for all these major reviews?

A: It's very energising. So on specific issues - housing, Minister Khaw Boon Wan after he visited a few Our Singapore Conversation sessions talked about some possibilities. Obviously, my colleagues have been working behind the scenes and seeing what's possible, what's sensible.

Health-care review, I think Minister Gan Kim Yong said that in Parliament, and Education Minister Heng Swee Keat has been talking a lot about how we can look at our current education.

On health care, the other day I had a consultant who came by. He heads a practice in Asia Pacific on health care and I said we're thinking through our health care. Tell me which systems around the world or even in particular in Asia Pacific would you recommend for us to study that's really good? He said seriously Singapore, you've got a very good health-care system. I was glad to hear that validation from someone like him. He studies all the health care systems around the world and recognised that actually we do have many positive features.

I met permanent secretaries from around the world and they say we wished we had Medisave. Many of them have pay as you go systems where current taxpayers pay for the health-care needs of their people. And he says, guard what you have. So I think what we're doing is trying to make sure that we guard the positive features that we have in our system but saying that, as the population profile changes, what are the new things that we need to have. So that's what my colleagues are very busy with right now.

Q: But you will be ready by National Day to make all these changes?

A: Let the Prime Minsiter tell you that. I don't want to steal his thunder.

Q:What about the issue of transparency? A lot of citizens have been saying that they hope to get a lot more information. With the recent announcement by Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean on top civil servants' pay, people are saying that, hey, it is now no longer pegged to a formula and they thought that actually, there's now less transparency.

A: For data and information, we expect going forward we will be sharing a lot more than we have. Right now we have this major initiative called data.gov.sg. You go into the website, I think we have about 8,000 over data sets.

For the whole of government, we have about 62 map layers where we share what we called geospatial data. We intend to put out a lot more and it's got two key benefits. Number one, it makes for a more informed policy discussion in the public domain - universities, think-tanks, researchers can all access more data so that policy discussions will be more important.

Secondly, it helps a lot in service delivery that the private sector can provide. More than a hundred over apps have been created from the various sets that I spoke about, the 8,000 over data sets.

Very simple. I mean if I pull out my handphone now, you have information on where's the nearest carpark, information on how much carparks cost so when I'm driving, I know whether to park in this building rather than that building, where the polyclinics are.

On salaries, actually let me just clarify, what we effectively did recently through our review, we decided not to take a formulaic approach. In the past, we took a formulaic approach because the Administrative Service salaries were pegged to the political office-holder salaries and so there was a very elaborate formula. Right now what we have done is because it's now been delinked and the political service continue to be determined by the formula with a discount, actually what we've done is just take that Admin Service salary determination to be the same as what we do for the rest of the civil service, you know, for all our senior officers like the MXO, lawyers, accountants, economists, we actually do a market-based comparison either thru human resource consultants, the Mercers of this world, they will give us their market benchmark or we use Iras' data and then we say, you know, depends on the competitiveness of that scheme, whether we're going to peg it 90 per cent, 75 per cent cent, 50 per cent, you can peg it to economy and that's how we set our salaries.

So in the past, the Admin Service salaries were pegged to a very formulaic approach, now we just put it back and make it like the rest of the civil service, really no difference. So I would say that while we have not used the formula, it's just as robust. We're going to set it, determine it based on quite extensive surveys and Iras' data so there's a lot of rigour behind how we set salaries.

Q: In terms of recruiting talent, is that becoming increasingly a challenge?

A: Of course. When I first became the head of civil service, I was asked what's the one message you have for the civil servants. I said focus on people and you never go wrong and by that I meant that leaders, up and down the chain, you really ought to make sure that you attract the best people, develop them well, retain them well, give them fulfilling careers so that they would then produce the best for Singaporeans. I still stand by what I said.

It's not just smarts. That's important but people who feel a sense of passion to serve, I think if you are just merely intellectually bright, that's obviously very good. But if you don't have that alignment with our values, if you don't have that passion to make a difference, then I would say that everything else being equal, I would go for someone who obviously shares the same values as we do in an organisation which is attitude to serve, excellence, doing the best, not 50 per cent, always thinking of the future and integrity, and making sure that we are at the end of the day, stewards of national resources, of everything and we got to make sure that we live up to the high standards and the values of this organisation.

Q: What is the process of finding these kinds of people?

A: We have a very robust internship programme and the reason we spend a lot of resources on our internship programme is because for between one to three months, we get to work with interns and they have to work with us. We give them real projects and they get to present to me, my directors and my colleagues, seniormanagement, everyone, and they feel that having spent one or three months, firstly, they get to understand what this organisation is all about. And secondly, we get to observe the guy. Does he share the same kind of passion? Can he or she fit in? And it's only at the end of the internship, we say we offer a position.

I have my own internal guideline to my human resource Dept's, at least 50 per cent of our fresh recruits must come throughour internship so that I know for sure that these are people that we want. It's not just based on paper qualifications. Actually, to be honest, the types of people who apply for jobs, you can't separate them. You just look at their A level results or university results, they all have the same results.

Q: On politics, will it be easy for the Civil Service to support whichever political party comes to power?

A: Our mission remains the same. We work together with the elected government to serve the long-term interest of Singaporeans and Singapore. That we're very clear. And we do that while keeping true to our values of service, integrity and excellence. I think these are our mission and our values and they must always continue to guide us. As for politics, that depends on the people in Singapore. This is a democracy.






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