The government published the main features of the work plans of the various ministries for 2023 today. The idea of the document, amounting to hundreds of pages, is very good: to set concrete, numerical goals for the ministries, against which they can be assessed, criticized, and improved. In practice, it does not succeed in being an effective tool for measuring and examining the ministries’ performance. There isn’t always a view to the future, there is practically no review of the degree to which past goals have been met, and the goals selected are sometimes too general, or altogether irrelevant.
1. Absence of future goals
In the introduction to the work plan document, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu writes: "Setting clear, measurable, quantitative goals facilitates for us and for the public high-quality monitoring of the execution of the government’s policies, while continuing to strengthen advanced policy planning capabilities and development of efficient, innovative methods in the public service." He’s quite right, but in many cases the numbers do not relate to the future.
Take the Ministry of Defense for example. It publishes as a goal the number of dunams of land that it vacates in transferring bases to the Negev and the Galilee. It sets out the number of dunams vacated in 2022 and 2023, but what are the plans for the future? How many dunams does the ministry plan to vacate in 2024 and 2025? Without knowing the goals, how can the achievements be measured? Or take another example: the Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water publishes statistics for the quantity of charging stations for electric vehicles in Israel, which has risen from 2,600 in 2022 to 4,100 in 2023. A substantial rise, everyone will agree, but what’s planned for the coming years? When there are no concrete goals for the future, what really is the point of a government work plans report?
2. No past review
So much for planning for the future, but sometimes the document doesn’t even cover the recent past. In no category does any review go further back than 2022, which does not enable the reader to understand whether this or that ministry is meeting its goals or not.
For example, it’s very nice that, between 2022 and 2023, we rose from 64% to 69% in the measure of reliability of public transport services by bus, but how good is that in relation to the past? Is there an improvement, or are we going up and down around the same numbers, or even deteriorating? Without an indication of what happened in the past, it’s impossible to know whether the direction in which we are headed is meeting goals or not.
Worse than that, there are past measures that have been completely abandoned even though they set a course for the future. For example, in the work plan document for 2022, the Ministry of Finance set itself a target for making collection of state revenues more efficient. The main, multi-year measure was the amount of debt to the government. The ministry presented a commendable decline from NIS 53 billion to NIS 51.5 billion, with concrete target numbers for 2023 and 2024. Now, the 2023 report arrives, and we’d like to know what progress we have made towards the target. We can’t. This measure has completely disappeared in the 2023 document. If there is no follow-up of multi-year targets, what makes them targets, and what’s multi-year about them?
3. Selectivity in what is measured
It’s hard to miss the fact that almost all the ministries present noticeable improvement in almost all the metrics they choose. But that last part is the most important - what do they choose to measure? Sometimes it becomes really absurd: the Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water measures power production from renewable sources in Israel, but instead of measuring it as a proportion of total power production, it measures installed capacity in absolute numbers. This metric will certainly rise, since the population is expanding and the economy is growing, and so power production is rising accordingly. The relevant number is therefore electricity produced from renewable sources as a proportion of total production in Israel, from which we could understand our situation.
Furthermore, the Electricity Authority also has statistics and goals for capacity for producing electricity from renewable sources, but its numbers are completely different. Whereas the Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water cites 5,800 megawatts installed capacity in 2023, the Electricity Authority cites 6,600 megawatts. Following an enquiry by "Globes" at the Prime Minister’s Office, the ministry’s figure was found to be correct, and the Electricity Authority had to change its figures and its targets.
It becomes even more absurd when one recalls that Israel already has a target for power production from renewable sources, which is 20% of total production in 2025 and 30% in 2030. According to the Electricity Authority’s document, at present we’re at just 10%. Will we double the proportion of power produced from renewables within two years? Probably not, but that doesn’t feature in the government plans document, even though this kind of thing is precisely what the document is for.
4. Lack of depth
All these problems relate to goals expressed in concrete, numerical terms. But an even larger part of the goals are not even expressed that way, and are mainly just words floating in the air, and not really goals at all. The Electricity Authority set as a goal "advancing a clean power industry, minimizing environmental effects." The Ministry of the Negev, Galilee and National Resilience wants to "advance small and very small businesses"; the Ministry of the Interior will bring about "expansion of regional cooperation"; and the Planning Administration will advance "planning with a regional and functional view." What do these things mean? What concrete actions derive from them? What successes have there been in these areas, and what do the ministries seek to do in the coming years? All these matters are missing from the report, and we are left with slogans.
Since the report covers all government ministries and auxiliary units (apart from the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which are in the process of being formed), it exposes how many ministries are fragmented into tiny pieces that do not necessarily communicate well one with another. In the report, there are 32 ministries plus 17 auxiliary units. When that is the situation, how is it possible to set real goals and work harmoniously to reach them?
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 16, 2023.
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