The Revue generale des politiques publiques (RGPP): what has been achieved and what lessons can be learned for reforming the State?

The inspectors’ assessment is critical, but the severity of their judgment is tempered by the good points they do not fail to award. Pointing above all to the centralized, non-transparent method used to explain the discrepancy between the stated ambitions and the results finally achieved, the report does not dispute the foundations of the RGPP and even stresses the need to complete and stabilize all the measures taken within the framework of the RGPP. In a context where the issue of debt reduction and public spending cuts is becoming ever more acute, the audit acknowledges that the RGPP has achieved a series of far-reaching reforms, but whose budgetary impact remains limited.

The RGPP has renewed the methods of State reform

An unprecedented appeal to the private sector

The RGPP is less a reform in the strict sense of the term than a reform method, under which 503 measures were validated between 2007 and 2012. The RGPP has two components: a purely administrative, i.e. organizational, dimension, and a budgetary dimension, i.e. one that addresses the issue of resources, i.e. public spending.

This review of public policies was initially based on a general audit of the State’s major expenditure items: an examination of the costs and effectiveness of public policies, as well as the resources they employ. In the French tradition of public management, such a practice is relatively recent. But the originality of the RGPP lies above all in the place it has given to private players in the administrative reform process. In fact, the preliminary analysis work was carried out jointly by public-sector employees and private-sector experts, with « mixed » audit groups, made up of members of ministerial and inter-ministerial inspection bodies and private-sector firms, having been placed at the disposal of each ministry.

Recourse to the private sector on this scale was a first in French government reform. The method was criticized for being influenced by a « neoliberal » conception of the State, introducing into the administration methods that brought public management senselessly closer to private management. However, by supervising the audit teams from the private sector with civil servants from the main government bodies, the RGPP has endorsed a method that will henceforth govern all government reform: the convergence between the project and results-oriented culture of consulting firms, on the one hand, and the administration’s own culture of service, on the other.

Politicized management

However, the main feature of the RGPP remains its strong political backing. Announced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a Council of Ministers meeting on June 20, 2007, just one month after his election victory, it was placed under the direct impetus of the Elysée via the Conseil de Modernisation des Politiques Publiques (CMPP), the body responsible for validating the measures. It is the President himself who arbitrates on sticking points. Upstream work is carried out by a monitoring committee chaired by the Elysée General Secretary and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff. The three directorates in charge of implementing the RGPP (General Directorate for State Modernization, Budget Directorate and General Directorate for Administration and the Civil Service) were placed under the authority of the general rapporteur for the RGPP, who in 2007 was Eric Woerth, Minister of the Budget and Public Accounts.

With the RGPP, State reform became a policy controlled by Bercy, which supplanted its « traditional rivals » in the conduct of administrative policies: the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Civil Service.It is now the Ministry of the Budget that monopolizes State reform, an evolution that began in 2005 with the attachment of the General Directorate for State Modernization (DGME) to the Ministry in charge of the Budget, and which testifies to the growing concern of politicians to better manage financial and budgetary costs.

These institutional factors have given the RGPP a high political profile. This is both its strength and its limitation, in that it can be perceived as a partisan rather than a purely administrative reform, thus lending itself to the criticisms inherent in public debate.

A solid record of administrative reform…

Rationalizing administrative organization and striving for efficiency and performance in the public sector have become as much a matter of urgency as they were of necessity. The RGPP thus sought to reform administrative structures to make them more rational and efficient.

Major structural reforms

The RGPP was responsible for a number of major administrative reforms that helped to simplify relations between users and the administration, in some cases facilitating access to public services. The famous « one-stop-shop » policy, for example, saw the creation of Pôle Emploi, the result of the merger of Assedic and the Agence Nationale pour l’Emploi (ANPE), which simplifies the process for jobseekers by bringing together in a single body the body responsible for unemployment compensation and the agency responsible for reintegration into the job market.

Similarly, the creation of the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques, following the merger of the Direction Générale des Impôts and the Direction Générale de la Comptabilité Publique, now offers taxpayers a single point of contact for tax matters.

Simplification accounts for a third of the actions prescribed by the RGPP. Numerous and diverse reforms have also been conceived, decided and implemented, such as the reform of the judicial map, the reorganization of social ministries, and the reorganization of the Ministry of Defense (within which the RGPP sought to externalize certain State activities considered non-strategic or not corresponding to missions falling within the strict remit of the State).

Improving relations between users and public services

With access to public services becoming increasingly online, the RGPP has accelerated the major project to « dematerialize » procedures. To simplify procedures for users, online administrative services have undergone significant development in recent years; taxpayers can now, for example, file their income tax returns and pay their taxes online, and speed up and personalize priority procedures, notably concerning civil status.

…but with mixed results when it comes to reducing public spending

The limits of an incomplete approach

When it was launched in 2007, the RGPP was presented by political decision-makers as a means of limiting the State’s indebtedness.

However, throughout the Sarkozy quinquennium, the Cour des Comptes (French National Audit Office) took a particularly critical stance on the RGPP, stating that  » while the exercise of reorganizing administrations is often useful, even if its methods are sometimes open to criticism, its budgetary impact is relatively limited « . In June 2010, its First Chairman Didier Migaud expressed the view that the need to reduce public spending called for  » a much more ambitious control policy than that pursued as part of the general review of public policies. We need to re-examine all public spending, especially the most costly. Structural reforms of this kind require a prior assessment of the justification and effectiveness of public intervention, to ensure that the quality of service provided is not compromised. The general review of programs is ahead of us « .

Indeed, one of the shortcomings of the  » RGPP method  » has been its inconsistency with the organic law on finance laws (known as the LOLF) which, since August¹, 2001, has been the main budgetary framework for introducing performance-based steering into public management, with a view to controlling expenditure. However, whereas the LOLF reviews the functioning of the administration in terms of State action categories (missions, programs, actions), the RGPP only reviews administrative functioning in terms of State structures. In other words, the RGPP focuses on what the State is, while the LOLF is concerned with what the State does.

Between 2001 and 2007, the State’s modernization procedures were therefore not consistent with each other. In fact, the RGPP did not fully examine public policies, their cost and their efficiency, as most public policies are shared between the State, local authorities, operators and social organizations, and the RGPP focused mainly on the administrative organization of the State.

On the other hand, the RGPP was originally intended to focus on reducing State intervention expenditure, rather than just State operating expenditure, before a change of course was quickly made, albeit without any official announcement.

The downsizing of the civil service was part of this exclusive focus on operating costs. A 10% reduction in operating costs was set as an unbreakable rule, with the non-replacement of one out of every two retiring civil servants as the key measure, with the aim of achieving a situation by 2012 where the number of civil servants in the State would be equivalent to that in 1990. Over the 2008-2012 period, almost 150,000 civil servants were not replaced, i.e. 7% of the total civil service.

An incomplete balance sheet

In the final analysis, the budgetary results are mixed. The RGPP had set a savings target of 15 billion euros over the 2009-2013 period, including 12.3 billion by the end of 2012. In the end, however, these savings amounted to only 11.9 billion euros, which is still very low compared with the need to limit the State’s cost of living. By focusing on operating expenses, the RGPP has only tackled a third of the total volume of public spending. As a result, the budgetary effort has remained largely insufficient.

Since the budgetary impact has not been commensurate with the objectives, nor with the challenges of reducing public spending, the question now arises of the « post-RGPP » period. The political will is now to put an end to this phase of government reform, which was unpopular with civil servants and badly perceived by their departments. In fact, the report considers that it is no longer possible to seek savings on the State alone, but that it is on the contrary necessary to extend the reform to the whole of public action, which includes local authorities, operators and social organizations. In other words, we need to think more in terms of the State’s missions than its administrative organization – the LOLF rather than the RGPP…

Since 2007, the number of State missions has in fact never stopped growing, despite the RGPP. This explains its low budgetary impact. It also raises the question of whether it would be socially costly and politically risky to abolish certain government missions.

References

François LAFARGE and Michel LE CLAINCHE, La révision générale des politiques publiques, in Revue française d’administration publique, 2010/4 n°136.

Frédéric ROUVILLOIS, Philosophie de la RGPP, and Henri Michel COMET, La RGPP et l’amélioration de la qualité du service rendu aux usagers, in Vers l’Etat optimal, La Documentation française, 2012.

Report by interministerial and ministerial inspection bodies submitted to the Prime Minister on September 25, 2012, available at http://www.acteurspublics.com/files/pdf/audit_rgpp.pdf