Sir Brian Roche’s case for reshaping the public service

Wednesday, 24 December 2025

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The public service’s future will involve more restructuring, mergers modelled on the new mega-ministry and the sharing of back-office systems to shore up vulnerable smaller agencies.

There are just two options, according to Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche ‒ shape its own future or have one imposed on it by financial pressure and fragmentation.

And the status quo was “sub optimal to everybody”, he told The Post.

“I want to take control, because I think we owe it to the 63,000 people who work for us,” Roche said.

“We need a really strong, coherent public service in New Zealand to do what’s needed of it, but also it’s a huge part of the economy … and we need to get better performance out of it.”

Roche released the three-yearly state of the public service report which lays out risks: Fragmentation, a slow uptake of technology, sub-scale agencies, fiscal pressures and insufficient talent development.

It comes as swings in public service staffing appear to be easing slightly.

The latest quarterly workforce data showed staffing levels grew 0.5% in the year to September, reaching 63,162 full-time workers ‒ a calmer picture than the declines in 2024. That represented an additional 342 full time workers as at September 30 this year.

Roche doesn’t want the public service to be defined by costs.

“In New Zealand, we tend to wait till we’re in absolute crisis mode, and then we adjust, and then we pat ourselves on the back, because how good we are at crisis management. What I would like to do is avoid crises and actually just begin to reorientate and adapt.”

Preparing for the future includes using the new Ministry for Cities, the Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT) as a blueprint, however, Roche said there were no other major mergers on the horizon short-term.

“MCERT will make sense in the same way the Ministry for Primary Industries makes sense. If you look at MPI… all things agricultural, food safety, are in one location under one chief executive.

“The question in my mind, where else could we replicate that?”

Another area Roche is looking at is merging back office functions.

“If you’ve got less than 50 people, you're vulnerable ‒ you lose one or two people, your IP (intellectual property) gets lost.

“If we had greater commonality of systems that support agencies around call centres, accounting systems and all of that we could make quite a lot of simplification happen, but still keep the public facing policy facing stuff.”

Core to the public service is the need to attract, retain and develop staff. But many public servants are facing restructure fatigue after ongoing job insecurity.

“The public service is being defined by restructuring and ongoing restructuring. That's the reality of our lives. As a service business, we need to be constant. Not every other Monday, but there will be ongoing recalibration reviews about how we best serve others,” Roche said.

But when it comes to mergers and changes, he wants to be more upfront with staff.

Asked if a 1300-person merger of four agencies for MCERT with two major reform programmes in six months, in election year, was actually possible, Roche said the RMA work would not be disrupted.

“We think we can do it by 1 July, and that's what we're going to do.”

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