Dear members, colleagues, friends and partners of CESI,

This week, we organised a high-level conference for ‘a strong European public service agenda’, which was one of the highlights of our slowly ending ‘PULSER’ project.

CESI has been advocating for well-performing public services for many, many years, if not decades; in the interest of citizens, workers, the economy and the overall societal well-being and resilience.

And looking back at two decades of crises (9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2010 European debt crisis, the 2015 refugee migration challenges, the 2015/2016 terrorist attacks, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and not least the dramatic increase in natural disasters), it has been established hat countries with efficient and strong public services are more resilient.

In this sense, the – hopefully – slowly dying away COVID-19 pandemic also offers a chance, “an unexpected and unique opportunity”, as the recently published EPC study ’Well-performing public services for a fair and resilient society’, concluded. The opportunity to put public services at the core again of national and the EU’s agendas.

Public services and their performance will be decisive in preparing for future pandemics and other crises which will surely come, they will prove crucial in tackling the economic and social fallout of COVID-19 which will be felt for many years to come, they will be vital in ensuring and implementing social rights and principles for many citizens, families and workers.

We will need more (smart) investment in public services – in the equipment, in facilities and human capital. And as the EPC study put it: “We will have to design and reform public services in the spirit of providing the best social results and service resilience, and not the most cost-effective outcome.”

Yet there is a certain likelihood that, in the aftermath of COVID-19, spending for (and especially investments in) public services will be cut down. The new mantra of governments being that fiscal buffers for next crises are to be rebuilt.

And here we come back to our experiences from the past ones: Had we invested more in public services and its staff in the years before the pandemic, the damages of Covid would not have been as extensive – with less lives lost and less to be repaired. It would have been the far cheaper and less painful option.

In 2016, Eurodiaconia, Social Platform and CESI had argued in a joint discussion paper: “Economies with a higher degree of investments have shown to be more resilient to shocks and perform better in crises.” So yes, we believe that cuts in (smart) investments now will mean tragedies and losses in the future during the next crisis (of yet unknown nature).

It is not without a certain irony that these findings are painfully corroborated by this week’s revelation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of the so-called ‘Pandora-Papers’, demonstrating yet again how the very rich manage to avoid taxes in enormous scales. Such losses, estimated at trillions of dollars, are losses for the society, for us citizens and workers, for our and the next generations. “The ability to hide money has a direct impact on your life. It affects your child’s access to education, access to health, access to a home”, Lakshmi Kumar, the Global Financial Integrity Policy Director, underlined this week.

In 2018, the President of the German Tax Association (Deutsch Steuergewerkschaft), Thomas Eigenthaler, coined the famous phrase: “We are hunting Ferraris with bicycles”.

Avoiding such losses requires investment, now and in the future. Investment in infrastructure, in equipment, in human capital, and in human resources. But also, investment in working conditions, pay and recognition of the public services’ workforce.

Not for the sake of it. For our and the next generation’s common public value.