Now more than ever, we need a strong Public Service Commission

How oddly different New Zealand "guides" its public service

Last week I commented on the new Public Service Commissioners interview in which he laid out what needed addressing in the public service. His new tenure and the strategic broadness of his responses mean it’s too early to tell where the ship may be steering – though some buzzwords raised red flags to me. It’s only fair that I not just comment like a grumpy backseat driver, but speak more to the direction that I’d like to see us going into. In that, I keep coming back to one thing: the Public Service Commission and what it’s set up to do.

It’s a bit of a risky affair because I never worked there myself and though I know a few people who have, I can’t speak to the theory vs. practice comparisons that the Commission might work with, and that are often central to my narratives. I’m going off of how the PSC presents itself and what I’ve learned about its counterparts in similar public services overseas. It’s this comparison that gave me a few double-take moments, and that I can’t think past now when it comes to the levers that I think might do plenty good for Aotearoa’s public service, given where it is.

So let’s look at the role of the PSC: on their web presence the first sentence to describe their role is:

“We ensure that the Public Service system is focused on delivering the outcomes and services that New Zealanders want, need and expect while maintaining high levels of trust and confidence.”

One word stands out to me: “ensure”. It may be my most hated business-jargon because it tends to be used as a connector when you can’t really say what you mean. Like “enable”, or “empower”. When you want to say you have some kind of responsibility, but you can’t actually call it something more serious like administer, regulate, oversee, control. I reckon someone who “ensures” always over-promises, at least in government speak.

The most concrete that its own description of its role gets is:

“The Commission appoints Public Service secretaries and chief executives, sets the standards of conduct and integrity expected of public servants, and investigates breaches of the code of conduct. We administer guidance on principles that underpin the work of the Public Service, such as political neutrality, free and frank advice, merit-based appointments, open government and stewardship.”

So in other words, the Public Service Commissioner is officially the line manager of the highest public service leaders, and the commission writes guidance and investigates complaints.

That’s clearly needed, no doubt.

Early in my PhD research on internal restructuring in our public service, the PSC website was one of the first sources I turned too. I wanted to find out what the commission’s guidance and standards were for restructuring, and I found this. This is a guide for structural changes at the institutional level – if you propose to establish, disestablish or merge an entire entity and involves parliamentary support. There is no guidance or standards for internal restructuring, as a PSC staffer confirmed later.

A quick google took me to several published guides for organisational restructuring from the government of New South Wales, like this and this – amongst others. I think this advice is reductive in the face of more recent organisational change approaches, but it exists – that’s more than can be said for NZ. And I might have a special bee in my bonnet about this because it is my subject area, but it feels odd that given the PSC’s mission, a guide to one of the most impactful organisational events that public servants experience is amiss.

I interpret this as an indicator for what is valued and what is permitted from our PSC: restructuring is touchy, it’s inflammatory, it lives in the neighbourhood of legal processes.

I read this either as a signifier of a timid disposition of the commission towards the power structures for whom it “sets the standards”, or as a signifier that it does not consider internal goings-on like restructures worth their while. Leave it to the managers - let the managers manage.

That’s guides for you. But do guides “ensure” that something happens?

Generic stock image for ‘empower’, Photo by Murat Onder

My thinking on this has shifted quite a bit over the last years when I learned more about how other administrations are running things.

Take the UK for example: around the same time as “Better Public Services” ran in New Zealand, the UK established their “Government Digital Service” (GDS) function with somewhat similar goals as the PSC for the digital space specifically. They set a service standard, which applies to all digital services that any other public service institution and their online services. New Zealand also has such a digital service standard - which in my eyes are excellent.

The big difference is, however, that the UK service standard is an ACTUAL standard - it's a requirement that has to be met by public service institutions and it is tied to funding.

So whenever a government agency wants to spend any money in the digital space they need to conclusively demonstrate that they meet the service standard. And the GDS also provides resources, training and advice for teams to meet those standards – it’s the full package.

That is not the same for New Zealand. Our standards exist, and a lot of people do what they can to meet them. The Digital Services team at the DIA also offers advice and “web standards clinics” (which I highly recommend to anyone in this field) - but at the end of the day, our standards are entirely reliant on the goodwill of public servants, and nothing negative happens if you don't meet them.

Plus, this is digital services, there are many fields of the public sectors where we have no shared resources, forums or thought-leadership. Each organisation is sort of mucking on their own, trying their best.

I've heard similar stories from other countries: a DCE from a French ministry explained at a public management conference that they have established a substantial improvement fund that any public service organisation in France can drawn from, as long as it submits clear business cases on how their idea will save the public service money in the long run - and if they can't demonstrate that their plans came to pass in actual facts and figures, then they have to pay back the investment.

A Dutch academic researcher explained that in the Netherlands, public managers have to get their plans for any internal restructuring signed off by the local treasury. Because restructuring is considered a substantial and risky financial investment, that is equally tided to targets that are required to be met.

For full transparency, it's difficult to research this area: these stories are things I have heard first-hand from people working in these areas, but you can't really google them or even find them in papers.

Because this is the kind of knowledge that you need from within a system, and that a system doesn't seem to explain to the outside.

Most public administrations around the world present themselves in the same bland commonplace language in their online presences. How they actually work is difficult to ascertain. And that’s why these examples I’m giving likely also come with snags and issues in practice.

The picture that is coming together for me though, is that:

Many public administrations “ensure” that their institutions work as their strategies intend by tying their standards to funding, and by requiring a higher level of monitoring, research and metrics.

THIS, to me, is the big difference to what I have observed in New Zealand. We do a lot of similar things, we set standards, we write guides, and business cases follow the same arguments: public value, saving money, focus on the citizen/customer. But monitoring that this actually survives all the way into the frontline? Well the project is red/amber/green. Post-assessments? We’re busy elsewhere. Check that standards are met? We trust people to do the right thing.

I’ve said this in my conclusion of Better Public Services also – we had all the same intentions and strategic goals as those overseas examples.

But we had no leverage, we have no way of making the “participating” agencies come up to the line.

We did our best to sell, charm and enthuse anyone we could pin down long enough into doing the things we knew were necessary to meet the goals set by the government. But it didn’t “stick”. There was no way for us to “ensure” that the government got what it set us up to do. And more than 10 years on we still don’t have that.

New Zealand has the strangest attitude, where it relies to a high degree on good faith personal relationships, and for people to just do the right thing. It’s probably because we’re a “high trust” society, and genuinely, that’s one of my favourite things about this country - one that deserves protecting. But in a system like the public service where the rules must be reliably and consistent for all, a high-trust society breeds some issues: the perpetuation of the interests and preferences of those people who are already in the halls of power, to name just one.

I think we need to have a serious chat with ourselves about our relationship to authority and – dare I say it – accountability.

Guides and standards are all good and well, but if there’s no authority behind them, no negative consequence for non-compliance, then they’re not worth the pixels they’re displayed on.

So why did I say I want a strong Public Service Commission?

Someone needs to be resourced and outfitted with the necessary authority to deal with this systemic issues. We need to agree on where we have guides (= should be followed), where we have standards (= must be followed), how we expect things to be tracked (red, amber and green is NOT enough), and where there are consequences to straying from what is expected.

I think the PSC is the logical choice for such an authority. It’s the only institution we have who is concerned with the ‘how’ of public service. And I wish its remit and resource was expanded to meet the challenges that so many are frustrated by (I do believe I’m not the only one). In late 2024 the PSC had 162 staff (down from 200 in 2023) – so that’s just to show how much the currently do with a bare-bones team. It might well assign the authority and oversight elsewhere, but the helicopter perspective and the datasets that the PSC have is a good starting place.

In future I’ll write more on this, but I’ll leave this here as a teaser: It might be crazy, but we could even ask why it is that all government agencies continuously need to turn to private sector consultancies in order to get advice and support on their strategies, organisational change and (all) external reviews? Why do we not have an actual public service institution that has a good gang of experienced public servants who know their stuff and who can be called into other organsations to provide advice, reviews and training for their leaders? Doing so, they might be able to resolve a lot of the issues that each organisation seems to wrestle with on their own right now, and potentially also uphold standards as they work. Crazy stuff, I know...

Regulation is a scary thing and I’ll write about the unstoppable expansion of bureucracy another time, no doubt. But the international comparisons should show us how strange our path of high-trust, low-accountability is in these impactful areas – and it shouldn’t be obscene to ask that funding and procurement need to be linked to countable standards and the monitoring of outcomes. That should be the way to “ensure” the public services that New Zealanders want, need and expect, in the actual meaning of the word.