Furthermore, lingering problems at the Tax and Customs Administration, misses by the UWV in the control of benefits and the CBR that could hardly issue driving licenses. In recent years, things have been going wrong at government implementing organizations and the Lower House is now investigating why. Civil servants think they know: they are not listened to enough when making policy.
Trade union CNV conducted a survey among more than 450 employees of the Tax and Customs Administration, UWV and other implementing organizations. Two-thirds (68 percent of the respondents) say they are rarely or never involved in the development of policy or rules. If that were to happen, many mistakes could be avoided, officials we speak to think.
Although a majority is quite satisfied in several areas, there is also a significant proportion of civil servants that are sending strong signals. A quarter of the employees surveyed feel unsafe in their own service or organization. And more than a third call themselves “frustrated” because they are not being taken seriously.
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Say ‘no’ to The Hague more often
The civil servants feel they have not been heard, according to the survey and the stories of (former) employees of government organizations who News hour has spoken. They feel that politicians in The Hague make rules without looking closely at whether the new policy in the workplace is actually workable.
And if the shop floor indicates to the managers that new policy cannot be implemented in practice, those managers often do not pass this on to The Hague, it sounds. In the survey, three quarters of the civil servants recommend that they dare to say ‘no’ to politicians more often when The Hague comes up with new policy or rules.
“The people who carry out the work know better than anyone how it should be done”, says Huub van Bijsterveld, until recently a civil servant at the Tax and Customs Administration. That is why he does not understand that the workplace is no longer involved. He cites the ‘Bulgarians fraud’ as an example. “Those Bulgarians were able to remove the allowances with their pass from the wall, without taking a step in the Netherlands.”
According to Van Bijsterveld, this was the result of “that politicians in essence believed that if you applied for a supplement in the morning, it should be in your account in the afternoon”. The shop floor’s warning that the system would not work was ignored.
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Many civil servants have the idea: people don’t listen to me, I am an expert and I am not heard.
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Bob Bouwhuis enjoyed working for the UWV for many years, but became so frustrated by all the new rules that he stopped. He felt that due to digitization he could no longer do his work properly: the ‘human dimension’ disappeared. He no longer saw the people he had to help find work and he spent hours justifying what he was doing that day.
Bouwhuis also saw that signals from the workplace did not get through to policymakers. For example, when he had to control more strictly the export of benefits to countries such as Poland. “At the same time, we were not allowed to do anything. Look at Facebook where someone was not even allowed, due to privacy rules. We indicated that some rules were in our way, but nothing was done about them.”
The CNV trade union finds it worrying that many civil servants do not feel that they have been heard. “Many civil servants have the idea: they do not listen to me, I am an expert and I am not heard. That is precisely what we want to draw attention to: have an eye for the knowledge of that civil servant”, says Loek Schueler of the union.
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Chamber needs to look more closely at what is workable
The House of Representatives is working in a special committee led by VVD member André Bosman to investigate what is going wrong at the implementing organizations. People have already been heard behind the scenes, the public hearings will start in the autumn. Trade union CNV also hopes to be heard there.
The cabinet itself also has investigations carried out into the recurring mistakes at implementing organizations. Yesterday it presented another study in which it is said that legislation and regulations must indeed pay more attention to feasibility.
In the House of Representatives, a hand is partly put into their own bosom when parliamentarians are confronted with the stories of civil servants. Yes, they need to look more closely at what is workable, they say. But the MPs also say that it is often made difficult for them by ministries to know what is really going on in the workplace.
For example, civil servants are not allowed to speak directly with MPs if they do not have permission to do so. CDA, SP and ChristenUnie say they would like to change that in order to exercise better control.
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