Debate contribution: Northern Ireland Civil Service: Reform

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 3 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

3 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Northern Ireland Civil Service: Reform

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5363152

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Hold on.

You are getting ahead of yourself, Mr Brett. I am concerned about the agenda behind the motion and the politics towards the Civil Service, having listened to him — through the Chair — and other DUP members on the Finance Committee and throughout the Building generally. It starts from the position that the public sector is bloated, is too big and needs to be reduced. We should reject that argument, confront it and challenge it head on. We have a gap of several thousand healthcare workers across the system, and we need to plug that gap and employ more nurses, porters, care workers and every type of healthcare worker, if we are to meet the needs of all communities across the North. The best way to meet the challenges is to fund and increase staff numbers in the public sector more generally and in the Civil Service. It is often repeated in this place and elsewhere that the public sector is too big and bloated. I invite Members to consider how much worse the COVID pandemic would have been — it was a bad pandemic; it was a terrible pandemic — had we not had a publicly funded healthcare system. It did not get everything right, of course, but it responded, for the most part, to lots of people's needs and the healthcare demand that was in place because of the pandemic. The Civil Service or the public sector more generally cannot decide to pick itself up and move to another part of the world to get further or bigger government grants or to further exploit workers in the Global South or wherever else. Quite often, though, private companies do that here. Therefore, I warn against adopting a strategy that sees everything in the private sector as wonderful and glorious, and refrain from a neo-Thatcherite policy that, I would argue, does not meet the needs of our communities more generally or public-sector workers specifically. The word "efficiency" is used in the motion. I am opposed to an approach that uses that word to justify more job losses in the Civil Service or in the public sector more generally. Every job loss, compulsory or not, means extra pressure on Civil Service workers. Many whom you talk to following the redundancy programme of a few years ago talk about having to do two or three jobs because of direct lay-offs and redundancy packages or because people were not replaced when they retired. What impact does that have on people's health? I will also mention the fact that many civil servants have second jobs at weekends or in the evenings, working as taxi drivers or delivery drivers for fast-food companies, because their wages are not high enough. That is not talked about enough. Some at the top end of the Civil Service are paid excessively and too much, but the vast majority of people in the Civil Service — a huge chunk of them at least — can be described as the working poor. If the Members to my right are talking about reducing the spend on agency staff as a way to reduce inefficiency, I would agree with them on that. That was referred to by some in supporting the motion. We are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds being spent by the Department of Finance on agency staff despite platitudes about reducing that spend. That is a colossal waste of money, as it is funnelled to the private sector. Moreover, agency workers are denied their rights. The Minister should therefore end the policy.

Yes.

Not quite, but I am almost speechless.

Mr Deputy Speaker, please check the Member's previous comments for accuracy. I believe that they were very inaccurate. We also need to address the over-focus — I level this at the party to my right and to others, including the Committee for Finance — on leave of absence and sick days for civil servants. That is not driven by concern for workers or their health. There is very little focus on why people are sick for longer periods. I am not a doctor, but I guess that it is because of increased anxiety and depression, the mental health crisis, the housing crisis and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are on health waiting lists. The focus is on productivity, meeting targets and ticking boxes rather than on looking at the complexities of people's lives, at why workers are depressed and at why they are sick and off work. I have already done so in the Finance Committee, but I warn against taking that kind of approach. Mr Frew compared the number of days taken off in the private sector with the number in the public sector. Part of the problem is that people in the private sector generally have fewer rights. There is less union recognition. People are therefore scared to take time off. We should not be encouraging people to go into work if they are sick. We should warn against any idea that the private sector is a panacea. It has huge problems. As I said, people are frightened to take days off.

860 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:30 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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