Permanent Secretaries are to be responsible for hiring, firing, disciplining and promoting public servants.

And a new body is to be created to recruit, train, promote, place, discipline and fire teachers.

These are among the proposals of the Draft Constitution, which were outlined by Prime Minister Patrick Manning at the PNM’s Public Education series, held at the Wendy Fitzwilliam Boulevard, Diamond Vale on Monday night.

Manning said the Service Commissions had done an excellent job at recruiting but had not done well in the promotion functions because people were promoted largely on the basis of seniority and because they did not take into account the individual skills of people.

He said it also emerged that in the public service it was difficult to discipline anybody.

He said under the proposed Constitution, ’to get around that, we are going to delegate these functions from the Service Commission to the permanent secretaries in the various ministries’.

He explained that there would be a human resource unit in each ministry which would employ, discipline, promote people in accordance with established principle.

The Service Commission would become an appeal body.

’If anybody is aggrieved by anything that happens to them in the public service, you appeal to the Service Commissions,’ he said.

Noting that the Teaching Service Commission was a special body, he said the document proposes that a new agency be created to recruit, train, promote, place, discipline and fire teachers.

’When the Ministry of Education says to this agency, I want a teacher in geography in a secondary school, the agency provides it. And if that person is not working well in the job, the principal sends the person back to the agency,

saying ’this person is not working well, these are the problems we are having with this person, you deal with that and send me someone else’...And any decision that the agency takes...that person can appeal to the Teaching Service Commission.’

Manning asked his audience to think about how the Judicial and Legal Service Commission could be brought to account without encroaching on its independence.

’We want to get the views of the public on that,’ he said.

Manning defended the proposal to elect the President on the electoral college system rather than on the first-pass-the-post (one man, one vote) system.

He cited the chief reason as the danger of having the President coming from a party which does not have the majority in the Parliament.

He also pointed to the tendency of some politicians to narrow everything to race as another justification. Manning said the country also had to ’rethink’ the whole issue of the Integrity Commission since it had not worked well.

’We have a situation now we could hardly get people to sit on the boards because of the provisions of that (Integrity) legislation...It is becoming increasingly more difficult to get people to sit on boards.. And worse we are now discovering it has become very difficult for people to sit on the Integrity Commission itself. That arrangement has not worked well...and we would have to rethink. We would have to hear the views of the population on that,’ he said.