The Commissioner for Standards in Public Life, George Hyzler, has published a well-researched report about the practice of giving parliamentary backbenchers consultancy roles and appointments with parastatal authorities. He concluded that it is “fundamentally wrong”.
The reasons for this conclusion are clear enough – providing backbenchers with such appointments makes them beholden to the Prime Minister or minister appointing them, and therefore less likely to be as zealous in scrutinising the behaviour of whoever appointed them. The result is that the citizen loses out on MPs’ loyalty.
The Prime Minister has now instructed the Principal Permanent Secretary Mario Cutajar to coordinate the analysis of the report and present some sort of response to it. I suspect that the findings will include the need to increase the salary of Members of Parliament, which is a handy pretext for heaping appointments upon them.
I don’t see why an analysis shouldn’t be made about the widespread practice of appointing persons of trust and dishing out crazily lucrative consultancies beyond the parliamentary sphere. I’ve always held that the slapdash appointment of persons of trust is in contravention of Article 110 of the Constitution.
This states that the recruitment to public offices from outside the public service shall either be made after a public examination advertised in the Government Gazette, or else only through an employment service provided out of public funds (such as Jobsplus) which ensures that no distinction, exclusion or preference is made or given in favour or against any person by reason of his political opinion and which provides opportunity for employment solely in the best interests of the public service and of the nation generally.
It is shameful how the government continues not to give an account of how public money is being spent without any transparency nor accountability- Helena Dalli, 2008
As you can see, these requirements are constantly ignored as the public service is stuffed with political appointees with no public exam or Jobsplus involvement.
And yes, there were appointments of persons of trust and consultants under the Nationalist administration. And it was equally condemnable.
In fact, I came across a very solid critique of precisely why these appointments are wrong. It dates back to 2008 and it was made by Helena Dalli, now a minister.
As the then Labour opposition’s main spokeswoman for the public sector and public investments, Dalli said the 2008 report by the Auditor General confirmed that the government was being wasteful with public money, especially in the engagement of its consultants.
The report mentioned how certain government consultants were being paid more than the amount stipulated in their respective contracts. “Moreover, the manner in which these consultants were employed was definitely not serious and transparent,” Dalli insisted. She said there were cases where consultants were employed without any terms of reference, therefore these consultants cannot be held accountable for their work.
The Auditor General also highlighted the fact that after having engaged these consultants, ministers did not monitor their work. “In certain cases, they were not giving out the value of the money that they were being paid. And nobody was drawing their attention to this,” Dalli explained. She noted that the Auditor General noted that the public sector’s top management was not in a position to know the number of hours that these consultants were actually working.
Dalli said the fact that certain ministries did not even answer to the questionnaire sent by the Auditor General to examine the manner in which consultants worked in the respective ministries was a demonstration of the government’s “sheer arrogance”.
She explained that in certain cases, the consultants’ contracts were not even sent to the Auditor General’s office as requested.
Out of those contracts that were sent to the Auditor General, some of them did not even have a date on them, while in others, the name of the contract did not match with the name of the consultant, she observed.
“It is shameful how the government continues not to give an account of how public money is being spent without any transparency nor accountability, while at the same time continues to be parsimonious with the public in serious matters such as the payment on medicines,” Dalli insisted.
The annual report by the National Audit Office had found an increase in ad hoc consultants and advisers appointed with various ministers, without being backed up by proper contracts.
According to the report, in 2007 there were 43 consultants employed on a part-time basis with 11 ministries. From the 24 out of 38 contracts surveyed (63 per cent), it was noted that duties were not specified in detail in the contracts, which the NAO said would not render the ministry able to hold the consultant directly accountable.
Payments to six consultants included amounts in excess of those specified in their contracts. Extra payments were made related to bonuses and weekly allowances, cost of living allowance and other allowances.
Eleven years down the line from that blast from the past we’re still grappling with issues of accountability and transparency as consultants suckle greedily from the public teat.
What does it take to change things?