Mixed results in first year of drive to reform Commission

Date: 07/09/00

In the 12 months since the new Commission took office, Vice-President Neil Kinnock has had to perform a careful balancing act as he strives to modernise the institution without antagonising its staff. Simon Taylor reports

ONE year after the Prodi Commission took office with its bold promises to modernise the institution's working practices and personnel policy, it is hard to see at first glance what the president and his reform lieutenant Neil Kinnock have done to live up to their promises to transform the administration.

But it would be wrong to assume that little has changed in the past 12 months. Since March, when the grand plan for internal reform was published, Kinnock has likened himself to a swan, saying: "On the surface it is all quiet and serene but beneath the surface it is paddling like crazy."

Although there have been delays in the timetable for implementing some of the reform ideas set out in Kinnock's blueprint, most notably in the politically sensitive area of financial controls, major steps have been taken to stamp out the cases of fraud and mismanagement of public funds which have so tarnished the Commission's reputation in the past.

The EU executive has already complied with one of the key recommendations of the committee of independent experts by setting up a new centralised internal audit service, although it will be some time before the department is up to full strength. Effective steps have also been taken to speed up the delivery of aid for overseas projects by cutting down the number of stages in the procedure for getting funding approved.

But while some successes have already been scored in the field of financial controls, progress in the tricky area of staff policy has been minimal.

In one sense, this has been an inevitable result of Kinnock's chosen strategy for ensuring that this reform - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity resulting from the demise of the Santer administration - is a success. Whereas his predecessor Erkki Liikanen provoked one of the biggest strikes in the Commission's history with only a draft reform plan, Kinnock wasted no time when he took up his new duties in reassuring staff that he would fight to protect their pay and conditions against attempts by governments to cut the institution's wages and pensions' bill.

By asking member states to delay negotiations on new pay structures for two years, Kinnock has managed to postpone the most bruising aspect of the reform process and avoided a real showdown with the unions, for now at least. As he said at a recent press conference: "There can be few bosses in the world who, when they start changing an institution, say that they value their staff and that there should be no deterioration in staff pay and conditions."

Even though the unions have recently stepped up their attacks on the way changes are being made, largely because precise details of reforms in the most sensitive areas of personnel policy have not been spelt out, opposition to the changes is more rhetorical than substantial.

This is not to ignore the fact that some of the ideas floated by the Commission hierarchy have antagonised even those unions most sympathetic to Kinnock's reform project. Plans to appoint an external candidate to head the staff disciplinary committee were described by two of the biggest unions as the "first real attack on the staff regulations". The largest and generally most supportive of Kinnock's approach, Union Syndicale, said: "Decisions abound which are patchy, incomprehensible and even incoherent."

Following an acrimonious staff general assembly meeting in July, the six associations issued a joint statement accusing Kinnock of asking personnel to carry out "politically farcical operations" and warning that they would "mobilise" if their concerns were not addressed. But despite the rhetoric, the unions appear to recognise that they would command little support if a strike were called now.

Insiders point out that the general assembly meeting was attended by only 300 of the Commission's 21,000 staff, and just 20% of personnel belong to unions. They do, however, enjoy strong support among officials in the lower C and D grades who perform the jobs which are the prime candidates for 'contracting out', such as drivers, post-room staff and filing clerks. But while these groups feel highly vulnerable to any cost-cutting programmes, insiders doubt that other staff - particularly those in the policy-making higher grades who feel more secure in their positions - would join their colleagues in any strike against reform. "Most people in the Commission are strongly in favour of reform even if they do not agree with everything that Kinnock is doing," said one official working on the reform plans.

Insiders argue that many aspects of the Commissioner's blueprint are very attractive to younger staff, who want to see an end to the tradition of time-servers being promoted over the heads of those who perform best in their posts. "Anyone with any ambition realises that things like the early retirement package and the linear career structure are a good thing," said one.

Signs that Kinnock was making progress in his battle for hearts and minds came with the results of the peer review exercise in July. After asking Commissioners and directors-general to identify which activities could be abandoned if resources were cut, Romano Prodi demanded funds from member governments for more than 300 extra posts. He warned that if they did not come up with the goods, the Commission would have to stop managing a range of programmes due to a lack of personnel.

Prodi's stance won considerable plaudits from staff convinced that the Commission's problems over the past five years result simply from not having enough people to perform the tasks entrusted to it - a point which the 'wise men' emphasised in their report. The call for more officials also helped repair some of the damage caused to Prodi's reputation by the president's decision to appoint his friend and former spokesman Ricardo Levi to head the Commission's forward planning unit.

The move is being challenged by the FFPE staff union, which claims it was "in violation of all rules and flew in the face of legality" because the post was not open to all applicants, and says the Prodi administration has dashed staff hopes that would be "free of the favouritism and of the taint of chicanery that existed in the past".

But despite the bad smell created by the Levi affair, Kinnock and his team will be working hard over the next six months to ensure staff remain supportive of the reforms. To do this, they will have to ensure that the changes in personnel policy are seen to reward officials for performance and commitment.

While the chances of strike action by the increasingly fractious unions look slim, Kinnock will have to play his hand very carefully if he is to retain the backing he still enjoys among the majority of staff for the reform process.

Major feature. In the 12 months since the new Commission took office, Vice-President Neil Kinnock has had to perform a careful balancing act as he strives to modernise the institution without antagonising its staff.