Madrid, December 18, 2024.- The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, Óscar López, has announced that the Government has managed to fulfill its commitment to Europe, reflected in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR), to stabilize public employment places and has done so exceeding the objective: 321,776 temporary places in the public administrations have become fixed. “In 2021, when we sat down with the European Commission, we committed ourselves to transform 300,000 temporary places into fixed ones by 2025. Today, 18 December, we have achieved and exceeded that objective. Once again, the Government of Spain fulfills its promises and achieves a collective milestone,” he said.
The minister thanked the collaboration of the unions and the Autonomous Communities in this achievement, and explained that it has been possible thanks to the “impulse of a huge management of selective processes” that has involved the call for more than half a million places at all levels. “The sectors in which stabilization has most impacted are the education and health sector, fundamental professions to sustain our Welfare State,” the minister explained; “never had so many places been convened in such a short time.”
This announcement was made during his appearance in the Finance and Public Service Committee of the Congress of Deputies to explain the general lines of his department for this legislature.
The minister has appealed to the collaboration of political groups in the challenge of transforming the economic model of Spain and with it the Public Administration, “because the public sector is the best guarantee for fair growth.” And to achieve that goal, he recalled, the Consensus for an Open Administration plan has been launched, which involves all stakeholders: “the State as a promoter, trade unions as protagonists, companies as collaborators and people as beneficiaries”. This roadmap is structured around three strategic axes: investment in public sector capabilities; an Administration open to citizenship, accessible and humanist; and transparency, public participation and accountability.
Public resources and social dialogue
Regarding the first of them, Investment in public sector capacities, the minister stressed the importance of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, which devotes a specific component to the modernization of public administrations: “We talk about more than 6.5 billion euros for digitization projects of entities such as the Public Employment Service or Social Security, to improve the cybersecurity of the State or for the development of data-based public services,” he said.
At this point, the minister emphasized the role of the Framework Agreement for a 21st Century Administration, signed in 2022 with UGT and CCOO, to which today “we have added another great milestone: This very morning I signed an agreement with both unions to recover the right to partial retirement of public officials.” This commitment will be achieved, López explained, by modifying the Basic Statute of the Public Employee, to achieve “eliminate unjustified inequality with workers in the private sector and promote the transfer of knowledge in the public sector among older workers and the new generations.”
Two new laws and better public employment
In the design of this Public Function of the future, Óscar López has advanced the implementation of two Laws: “a new Civil Service Law, which is already in this Chamber, and the Law for the Transformation of the Administration, which we will send to the Council of Ministers next year”, which will strengthen the capacities of the civil service based on two pillars: strategic planning through Personnel Pension Management, which has the dual objective of simplifying procedures and attracting and retaining knowledge, and access to public employment and recruitment through the Junior and Senior Talent Recruitment and Retention Plan.
The minister indicated that the steps that are already being taken in this regard (design of selective processes based on skills and competencies; simplification and digitalization of processes and tests; the implementation of a model for the effective management of gender equality in access and professional career or improvement in the processes of inclusion of people with disabilities) are already translating into “hopeful results: the average age of public employees decreases for the fourth consecutive year; the number of personnel under 40 years of age has increased by more than 4% in the last two years; for the second consecutive year, the number of admissions exceeds that of casualties; and women account for almost 60% of the public workforce.”
López has emphasized that the Government continues to work on designing public employment offers with better conditions, as it has been doing in recent years: 223,000 places convened in the last seven years (more than 40,000 in 2024 alone), increase in the salary of public employees by 14.9% since 2018 and increase the number of places for people with disabilities up to 10%. “If the most competitive private companies bid to attract the best professionals, the state cannot be left behind,” he said.
Quality public services
With regard to the second strategic axis, an accessible and humanist administration, the Minister placed the citizens at the heart of these projects, which must be taken care of by facilitating “the exercise of their rights, the fulfilment of their duties and access to quality public services”. All of this, says López, must be done through “a digitized, accessible and humanist Public Function”.
The steps that have been taken in this regard through the Digitalization Plan of the Public Administrations are giving important results, said López: “we have saved 4 million euros thanks to the holding of telematic trials, and another 60 million by centralizing the contract of telecommunications services of the General Administration of the State, and we improve the functionalities of the web administracion.gob.es and the 060 service line, incorporating new channels such as the webchat060 that has already served through its virtual assistant 140,000 queries since last year”.
López has especially highlighted the role of My Citizen Folder (“a public application that triumphs in Spain and that is revolutionizing the relationship between the citizen and the digital administration”), of which he has announced an upcoming update with a specific profile to also serve the collective of companies: “It is about the business fabric of our country also benefiting from the simplification and modernization of public services.”
The minister stressed that initiatives such as these have managed to put “Spain in an outstanding position in digital public services, according to the Report of the Digital Decade of the European Union, surpassing countries such as Italy, France or Germany. At the global level, the UN ranks us 17th out of 193 electronic administrations.”
Open government
The last axis to which the minister referred is that of transparency, public participation and accountability. Thus, he recalled the commitment of the President of the Government, expressed in July, to draw up the Action Plan for Democracy, in line with the European Union initiative of the Action Plan for European Democracy launched in 2020.
Within the framework of this plan, initiatives of the Ministry are included, such as the celebration of the global summit of the Alliance for Open Government, which will take place in Vitoria on 7, 8 and 9 October next year. In it, López has advanced, the Open Government Strategy of Spain will be presented, the instrument in which the recommendations of the OECD will materialize in transparency, public participation and accountability of the General Administration of the State.
During the first half of 2025, Óscar López also stated that he will bring to the Courts two legislative initiatives: a Draft Law on Open Administration that will extend the State’s obligations in terms of transparency, mandatory six-month accountability and improved citizen participation; and the Draft Law on Interest Groups, a framework of transparency and integrity applicable to the actions of interest groups in their relations with the public personnel of the State. “Spain is ready to have its own Law of lobbies,” he said.
The minister ended his speech with a new appeal to the consensus: “Let us face this challenge together, let us defend a broad consensus for an Open Administration. I am counting on you, Members of Parliament, so that the strength of the public is increasing every day.”