Go-ahead for decentralisation plan

Date: 25/09/1997

INDIVIDUAL Commission departments are to be given greater responsibility for handling their own day-to-day affairs under a rolling programme which will gradually come into force from January.

The first phase of the three-part plan, which received the full Commission's formal approval yesterday (24 September), will involve a considerable amount of decentralisation as the Directorate-General for personnel (DGIX) sheds many of the routine administrative tasks it has carried out for the whole institution for 40 years.

The package of measures - many of them purely technical - is designed to ease officials' workloads and speed up procedures, particularly those governing the filling of vacant posts and making payments.

These will be followed by other changes over the next two years aimed at improving personnel policy and modernising an administrative structure which has remained largely unreformed since the earliest days of the Union.

“Modernisation is like peace. It is not an event, but a process. What we are starting here is a process. The next phase should be to empower individuals and to delegate power to them. This will involve looking at recruitment, training and staff mobility,” said one senior official.