Samaras’ mandates for State reform

Three days after the meeting with the Ministers for Administrative Reform, Finance and State, the PM sent a letter to cabinet members, ministers, vice ministers and deputy ministers, asking them to speed up the procedures for the "rationalization" of the State.

Here is Samaras’ letter addressed to the cabinet:

"A key area that our government needs to implement is to reform the state and public administration. Our main goal is to create an effective and functional administration free of its chronic pathologies, which will contribute to the development of the country and will be close to the people; an administration worthy of a European Union member-State.

In the next days we will start the evaluation of the structures of ministries and agencies with the aim of restructuring through the Ministry of Administrative Reform and Electronic Government, in cooperation with the Task Force for Greece and the valuable contribution of our workforce. This will detect and neutralize the weaknesses and failures of the administration. The result of the evaluation will be the restructuring of services by merging or eliminating idle facilities and services to streamline the functioning of ministries and reduce unnecessary costs.

It is imperative to reduce bureaucracy drastically and any unnecessary procedures that afflict the people and to guarantee transparency and meritocracy. We also need to streamline costs and upgrade services. To see this difficult task through we must have coordinated cooperation among all of us at every step.

The reform governing council will coordinate and direct the overall effort for the design and implementation of administrative reform and will meet regularly under my responsibility."

In statements made last Friday, Administrative Reform Minister Antonis Manitakis said the goal is to reduce public sector services by 30% although, as he added, this cannot be measured in financial terms for the moment.