Treasury dates for June the new regulation of teleworking in the Administration

The Secretary of State for Public Administration defends the new Evaluation Law as "authentic cultural change" in public management

MADRID, 31 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Secretary of State for Public Function, Lidia Sánchez, has advanced this Tuesday in Congress that "probably" the Government will approve this June the regulation of teleworking in the Administration, a regulation that had been pending since the agreement reached more than a year ago , in April 2021, with the Civil Service unions.

Sánchez, who has gone to Congress to give an account in the Finance Commission of the new bill for the evaluation of public policies, has assured that with the regulation the Government seeks "a model common to the 22 ministries" but "flexible to the circumstances that occur at any given moment".

"We have made a specific advance in the energy saving and efficiency plan, where we intentionally talk about remote work," said Sánchez, who has defended not talking about "telework" because of the "deep respect" that, he said, he professes for this concept, "which is not such if they do not have each and every one of the elements that compose it".

In this sense, he has assured that teleworking in the Administration must identify objectives and contemplate evaluation "so that this type of service provision does not reduce any access to the service by citizens".

Sánchez has appeared before the Treasury and Public Function Commission to report on the new bill for the institutionalization of the evaluation of public policies in the General State Administration, a rule that he has defended as "authentic cultural change"

Thus, Sánchez has assured that the new law will put "accountability to citizens at the center" and will allow knowing if a specific measure "achieves the achievement that was proposed when it was designed and approved".

The rule, approved in the Council of Ministers on May 24 as a bill and sent to Congress to start its parliamentary process, aims to generalize the evaluation of public intervention, promote that these evaluation elements are present from the beginning of a policy and incorporate the results of the evaluation into the management and adoption of new policies.

The Secretary of State has assured that the regulations will allow Spain to position itself as one of the "most advanced" countries in this matter, and has maintained that, based on this regulation, public employees "must know the importance of evaluation and exercise it professionally".

Sánchez explained to the Treasury Commission that the evaluation will be applied "as an ordinary and fundamental activity in public management" of the entire General State Administration, and that it will be carried out with "a serious methodology", with the reinforcement of internal data and information exchange mechanisms and an interconnected information system.

Finally, he has insisted on the importance of incorporating the results of this evaluation, and has said that access to these evaluations will be facilitated --"Each and every one of them will be public"--, with a link between them and decision-making .

A "paradoxical" statement for the "popular" spokesperson for the Civil Service, Llanos de Luna, who has accused the Government of "opacity" both in its accountability and in access to public information.

Mari Carmen Martínez, from Cs, has also reproached the Government for circumventing existing evaluation mechanisms, such as the opinions of the Council of the General of the Judiciary (CGPJ) or the Council of State, in the processing of regulations such as the new Housing Law , for which he believes that all these measures will end up depending on "the good will of the legislator."

Antonio Honrubia, of United We Can, has expressed his doubts about the external evaluation of the Administration, while ironizing that the problems that the people in charge of evaluating the policies have encountered so far have been the lack of resources and personnel , precisely the requirements that they consider basic to have good services.

For his part, Juan Carlos Segura, from Vox, has said that he does not see this law as necessary, has called the coordination bodies that it contemplates "beach bars", and has framed the norm in an attempt by the Government to have a "Soviet State " but "with the Venezuelan economy."