Secretary of the provincial Party Committee Nguyen Van Doc (Photo: VNA) Quang Ninh (VNA) – The northern coastal province of Quang Ninh will further its efforts to hasten administrative reform in 2018 towards improving the province’s competitive capacity, said Secretary of the provincial Party Committee Nguyen Van Doc.
He made the statement at a conference on May 21 on evaluating the local Public Administrative Reform (PAR Index), Satisfaction Index of Public Administration Services (SIPAS), and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) in 2017.
Doc said Quang Ninh must continue to work to maintain its position among the top performers of those indexes.
Therefore, he instructed relevant sectors and branches must press ahead with administrative procedure reforms, enhance the efficiency of public administrative centres, cut unnecessary administrative procedures, complete e-government apparatus, and pay due attention to providing training for public servants.
The provincial party secretary also required that localities and agencies in the province should organize conferences to seek solutions to bettering their performance in those three indexes.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the provincial People’s Committee Nguyen Duc Long said that administrative reform aims to provide citizens and enterprises with better services and their satisfaction will be used to assess the efficiency of local authorities.
An action plan with concrete solutions was issued by the provincial People’s Committee right after the conference, in which all localities are required to review and further cut administrative procedures and enhance their accountability to local residents.
The chairman assigned the Department of Information and Communication to provide training on e-government to the locals while the Department of Home Affairs should give recommendations to the provincial People’s Committee on how to address issues arising when carrying out the solutions.
Last year, Quang Ninh for the first time rose to the first place in the PAR Index with 89.54 points, which was 6.72 points higher than its score in 2016. Meanwhile, it was ranked 5th in the SIPAS index among 63 cities and province nationwide and in top two of PAPI, moving up 30 steps compared to the previous year.
However, Pham Minh Hung, head of the Administrative Reform Department under the Ministry of Home Affairs, pointed out some drawbacks in the local administrative reform, including the lax observance of regulations on regular reports in some localities, the large number of deputy heads in some departments and agencies, the irrational ratio between management and staff in some sections of provincial departments, and limitation in decentralisation of state management between the province and districts.
Hung suggested that administrative reform must go hand in hand with the application of information technology. In addition, special attention should be paid to popularisation work to raise public awareness of administrative reform.
In 2017, the province saw improvement in five out of six components in PAR INDEX, which are residents’ participation in local governance, transparency, corruption control in public sector, public administrative procedures and public service supply. However, despite the improvement, Quang Ninh was still in the lower-ranking group. Its performance in accountability dropped.
Assoc. Prof. Dr Le Van Chien from the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics said that Quang Ninh province should enhance inspection of the making and enforcement of plans on improving public governance and administrative efficiency at communal and district levels, while those holding the top positions should be held responsibility for the outcomes of the work.
He also recommended that the PAPI should be applied in all organisations at district level from 2018.-VNA
VNA
