Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has 6400 staff - what do they do?

Sunday, 8 October 2023

MBIE’s monolithic headquarters give little clue to the variety of work going on inside.

Many public servants are worried about losing their jobs after the election, according to Karl Löfgren, head of the school of government at Victoria University.

The Government’s operating deficit was on Thursday confirmed at just under $10 billion in the year to the end of June, and both Labour and National are promising spending cuts.

Staff at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) would appear to have more reason to be nervous than most, after ACT Party leader David Seymour singled out its budget as a “perfect example” of expenditure that needs be curtailed.

The ministry’s permanent staff numbers have almost doubled from 3203 in 2016, to total 6396 at the end of June.

Over that time, MBIE’s annual wage bill has jumped from $320 million to about $725m.

So what do all those staff do?

MBIE is a “super ministry” created by the merger of four agencies in 2012 that performs a sprawling variety of functions that go some way to explaining its size.

More than a third of MBIE’s staff, 2328 at the last count, work for Immigration NZ, which sits under the umbrella of the ministry.

Of those, only 848 are actual immigration officers.

But other staff include the likes of medical assessors and support officers and staff who are involved in verifying people’s identities and assessing refugee claims, as well as admin staff and managers.

Immigration NZ’s staff numbers are up from 1460 back in 2016.

Deputy secretary Richard Griffiths says that is partly because the latter figure did not include 300 workers who used to be based overseas processing visas, a function that has since been consolidated back in New Zealand.

PM Chris Hipkins told Monday's post-Cabinet press conference the Government's found $4b to cut from the public service over the next four years.

A further 320 people were taken on after the border reopened in 2021, to support the “rebuilding of the pre-pandemic workforce”, he says.

Another 1593 of MBIE’s staff – 553 more than in 2016 – are employed by its Te Whakatairanga Service Delivery unit, which provides a wide range of public services, such as running tenancy services and the Companies Office.

Among its recent hires are 160 staff who have been involved in coordinating temporary accommodation for people in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, 58 staff involved in the processing of Fair Pay Agreements, and 36 who are engaged on a new programme to prevent the exploitation of migrants.

MBIE used to employ a few hundred staff to run the country’s managed isolation and quarantine centres during the period of Covid border controls.

They don’t figure in its latest employment numbers.

But there are many small pockets of staff performing a heap of tasks that might normally fly under the radar.

Griffiths says examples include trading standards staff who “make sure ‘500 grams’ is 500 grams” and staff whose job it is to track down equipment around the country interfering with radio transmissions.

Yes, minister

As of June last year, MBIE employed 422 policy advisers, up from 331 in 2016.

The topics they work on have ranged from trying to figure out if the Lake Onslow power scheme stacks up and developing new regulations for offshore wind farms to consulting on how to improve the building consent system.

Their workload is to a large extent determined by the demands of the Government of the day.

Yes Minister famously satirised the public service in the 1980s. The cost of government agencies such as MBIE has become an election issue here this year.

It seems fair to say some of the ministry’s policy work appears more productive than others, but attributing blame for that between the public service and politicians may be nigh impossible.

For example, between 2017 and 2021 MBIE conducted a review of the Copyright Act, which was last amended in 2004 and has struggled to address conundrums created by the internet age.

An issues paper was put out for public consultation, 148 submissions were received and a paper published setting out “draft objectives”, before the review was shelved by ministers.

MBIE says a project of that size would normally be lead by a senior adviser and three or four other advisers, who would work on the project alongside other policy programmes

Even so?

Griffiths says that more than 65% of MBIE’s workers are defined as “operational” staff focused on the delivery of services.

“Increased demand is a result of changing social and environmental factors. For example, labour force participation is currently at a record high, meaning more demands for support in areas including dispute resolution, labour complaint investigations and employment rights advice,” he says.

“More New Zealanders are living in rental accommodation for longer periods of time, which means more demand for support from our tenancy team on rental agreements, bond payments, tenancy dispute resolution services as well as monitoring and enforcing compliance with the Residential Tenancies Act.

“Cybersecurity threats are becoming an increasing reality for New Zealand, and the digital and data space is becoming more complex, making it even more important for MBIE to have the people needed to both protect and support our own organisation, as well as other agencies and New Zealand as a whole.”

But that would seem to leave a lot of staff in administrative-type roles.

MBIE’s corporate, governance and information division, its “digital, data and insights” team which includes its IT arm, and its “finance and performance” unit, together employed 1252 staff in June.

That is more than double the 585 staff they employed in 2016.

Accounts and accountability

Löfgren says it is difficult to measure performance in the public sector and it’s getting harder.

“There are so many different factors you want to fold in nowadays – effects on Crown-Māori relationships, diversity, gender equality, well-being.”

At the same time, we are asking more and more from the public sector in terms of more and better services, particularly, in healthcare and education, he says.

Some of the increase in staff across the public sector in recent years may reflect the impact of the cap on numbers that applied under National governments between 2008 and 2017.

Victoria University professor Karl Löfgren says ministers’ “letters of expectations” and the expectation they won’t be surprised by agencies has made the public service very risk-averse.

“It was very clear everyone knew how to game it by bringing in consultants and contractors instead – it didn't really work,” Löfgren says.

A documented increase in staff turnover may also have resulted in agencies building up a bit of a “buffer” in their workforce “because you're constantly losing people”, he says.

Löfgren believes the public service has been underfunded compared with overseas jurisdictions “where you have far more money invested in analysis and research”, but also that it has become more bureaucratic.

“There are a growing number of people working on organisational matters such as human resources, communications, reputation-building and there are a hell of a lot of project managers.

“Traditional administrative workers in more secretarial or clerical roles have decreased over the years and ‘frontline workers’, who we call occupational professionals, are just demonstrating moderate growth.”

Ironically, a push for greater accountability may be partly behind that trend, he says.

“The whole set-up around the public sector now with all the ‘letters of expectations’ and the emphasis on ‘no surprises’ is very risk-averse. You don't want any scandals.

“There's no appetite for making mistakes, which means you continue to build up these cohorts of people in front of you to deflect yourself from critique – but that's a bit of my own personal speculation.”

The irony of that is it suggests the more heat goes on the public sector, the less efficient it could get.