A bill to unfreeze 977 positions in the civil service this year was discussed at the House finance committee on Monday.

Several thousand positions had been frozen during the economic crisis of 2013 and each time government wanted some to be unfrozen it had to seek approval of the legislature. The law will end this practice and theoretically speed up the process of hiring civil servants.

Many of these positions were not actually left vacant since 2013. As the president of the Fiscal Council, Michalis Persianis, told the committee, the freeze lasted about three years, after which “windows and a back-doors” were found to bypass it. Persianis said this led to a big surge in the hiring of temps and people on open contracts, whose employment cannot be terminated after serving a few years working full-time.

This year another 977 civil servants will be added to the public payroll, further increasing the inelastic spending of the state. At least these hirings were transparent and some supervision could be exercised by the legislature, said Persianis, who pointed out that back-door appointments, which need no parliamentary approval, prevented any control being exercised on rising spending.

Meanwhile, the president of the Council for the Economy and Competitiveness, Demetris Georgiades, warned that the sudden unfreezing “of significant number of positions could possibly affect fiscal stability and impose an additional burden on households and businesses”. Would the opening of so many positions, at a time of full employment, not put pressure on other sectors of the economy, already having difficulty finding workers, he asked.

These are all legitimate points, but the most important issue mentioned by Georgiades at the committee is never discussed – increasing the productivity of the civil service. It is the improvement of productivity that should be the top priority of every government rather than hiring more and more workers, without service to the public and efficiency showing the slightest improvement.

Persianis said that any job that could be done in three days in the private sector needed five days in the public sector. Elena Azina, the head of the administration and HR department of the finance ministry, said wages in the public sector were, on average 27 per cent higher than in the private sector. In other words, civil servants were paid 27 per cent more to take 40 per cent longer to do a similar job to private sector workers.

It is the drastic improvement of productivity that should be the main concern of the government and the political parties and not the speeding up of the hiring process. It is fewer civil servants that we need in the age of digitalisation to have a more efficient and productive service.