Northern Ireland Civil Service Commissioners

Our Northern Ireland Commissioner colleagues and staff visited London in May 2009 to discuss common issues around ethical regulation and hearing appeals.

A full meeting with the Northern Ireland Civil Service Commissioners was held in London in March 2010. We had useful discussions on a number of topics of mutual interest.   The Northern Ireland Commissioners are reviewing their Recruitment Code and we shared our experience of moving further in the direction of principle based regulation with the adoption in April 2009 of our Recruitment Principles. The Civil Service Code has been a major focus of our activity over the past 24 months and we shared our experience of auditing against the Code. The Northern Ireland Commissioners were also interested in the positive results that had come from the Civil Service-wide staff survey. We updated our colleagues on the progress of the Civil Service Reform and Governance Act and discussed the revised governance arrangements we were working on. In some instances these are based upon precedents developed by the Northern Ireland Commissioners.

We were extremely fortunate this year to receive a joint invitation to a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. This was timed to coincide with the joint meeting of the two sets of Commissioners in March.