“The final judge of the state must be the citizen himself”
The prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited the morning the interior ministry and chaired a meeting with the leaderships of the Ministries of Interior and Digital Governance on the priorities of the two ministries.
During the meeting, the questionnaires were presented that will be sent to 4 million citizens next year to evaluate public services, while discussing, inter alia, the planning and acceleration of recruitment through ASEP, the digitization of all public services, the completion of the public and the intelligence of the land and the integration of Camera and Integrated Information System for Digital Call Recording.
After the meeting was completed, the Prime Minister made the following statement:
“I am pleased to return to a place and a ministry that I am very familiar with since I was the Minister of Administrative Reform and E -Government. And also with great satisfaction I find that through a series of initiatives our state is changing. And it changes for the better.
In order to be able to achieve the ambitious goals we have set, two constituent elements are needed: The first is political will and the second is the use of technology, which can now allow us to see the state and the state’s contact with the citizen completely different from what we have,
We are in the face of a new phase of implementation of many projects, funded by the Recovery Fund, which will improve both the public performance itself and the way the citizen, the business trades with the Greek State.
As for the elements that are purely on the issues of the ministry led by Mr Lebanese, let me dwell on some important priorities: the first concerns the acceleration of recruitment. It has been done an important job, but we know we have to move much faster. The purpose is to complete recruitment this year, without having to wait for years for civil servants to sit in their positions.
The second issue I would like to stand for in particular is the evaluation, where a very important job has been done. I would like to remind you that I made the first attempt to get away from it 11 years ago, I would say, a “curse” of universal excellence in the evaluation of civil servants. Then we hadn’t succeeded. We met big resistors.
Today, however, for the first time we have an evaluation system that can really distinguish excellent civil servants, reward them and at the same time give us the necessary tools for those who are lagging behind, who do not have the performance we expect, we can intervene to improve them.
I also want to dwell, especially on an important initiative that will be presented in the coming weeks. This is none other than the horizontal evaluation of public services by the citizens themselves.
In the immediate future, four million citizens will receive a very detailed public service evaluation questionnaire – when the time will come we will talk more in detail about it – and I think this questionnaire will be extremely useful for us to see where we must focus on us. The final judge of state services must be the citizen and for the first time we will give him the tools to be able to evaluate us as a whole and make us suggestions on how we can improve.
I would also like to dwell on the implementation of the Digital Card for the State, an important initiative that has already been applied to the largest part of the private sector.
But also to an issue that is specifically concerned with Northern Greece, and this is about the substantial reform of our country’s large gates. I am referring primarily to the gardens and the Evzones, there will be interventions to other entrance gates so that our country is not wronged by an image that certainly does not suit us.
For issues related to the Ministry of Digital Governance, let me stand in particular on the range of digital services which is now provided through the gov.gr platform.
To place a particular emphasis on the e -health folder, on an iconic project that will allow us to be able, at the level of each citizen, to have the historical image of the health file of all citizens.
The big progress made in the Land Registry, with the aim of having 100% cadastral registration at the end of 2025. A national goal of decades is finally completed.
But also in the horizontal use of artificial intelligence to improve the functioning of the State itself, I believe that we are ahead of many other European countries there, combined with the infrastructure that is being created.
Tomorrow the contract for the supercomputer “Daedalus” in Lavrio is signed. A very important technological infrastructure that will allow both the State and individuals to use significant computational power, which is developed in Lavrio through the “Daedalus” supercomputer.
In other words, to close, there is one – I would say – a revolution in the way the state and the public operate in our homeland. It is a constant struggle for constant progress. But it is a big bet for our government and the reason why the two ministries are here is precisely because we recognize how useful technology and digital governance tools are about how to finally get a state worthy of the expectations of Greek citizens.
We have set very clear goals. Let me also reiterate that we must adhere to the timetables that are primarily concerned with the works of the Recovery Fund, which must be completed by the summer of 2026. And I am very optimistic that this great revolution that has already begun in 2019 will be accelerated by any more, or more than any other,
For his part, Interior Minister Thodoris Lebanese said:
“We had the opportunity, along with Dimitris Papastergiou, to present to you the most important works that are ongoing, with an emphasis on both public sector staffing and public accountability and the introduction of innovative tools, such as the evaluation of public services by citizens,
Together with them we discussed the new Code of Self -Government, which is a great project, and of course all the other major initiatives taken by the Interior Ministry on the daily lives of citizens.
The aim is – and of course, in collaboration with the Ministry of Digital Governance – to make life easier, more effective public administration and to be able to have a public that will be evaluated and improved and progresses. “
Subsequently, Dimitris Papastergiou’s Minister of Digital Government noted:
“By taking the baton from what the Interior Minister said, to note that we are actually running dozens of projects, hundreds of precision, works.
Our ministry only in the recovery fund runs 104 projects, totaling at close to $ 3 billion, so that we can provide solutions, to make the citizens’ simpler, safer, more secure. Projects that should be delivered on time, since we are talking about recovery fund, but should also be projects that will be effective, will leave their footprint.
Our lives are digitized and we continue to do so in collaboration with the Ministry of the Interior and all the other ministries with which today, we are currently running joint projects. “