THE HAGUE, 25/10/06 - The government should introduce a hiring freeze at all levels in the public sector as quickly as possible, employers organisation VNO-NCW believes. Additionally, a separate post should be created in the next cabinet to make the government more efficient.

A hiring freeze combined with boosting efficiency should enable the number of civil servants to be cut by 5 to 10 percent in the coming administrative period. "That is how you do it in a company as well," says VNO-NCW chairman Bernard Wientjes in a video talk on his organisation's website.

Wientjes is commenting on statements by health ministry Secretary-General Roel Bekker. Bekker said in Het Financieele Dagblad last Friday that the call by virtually all political parties for drastic reductions in bureaucracy is populist and ungrateful in relation to the important work he says civil servants do.

But the next cabinet should commission a minister for the implementation of a programme aimed at achieving a "smaller, more efficient and flexible" government, Wientjes says. This minister should have no fixed portfolio but operate "linked to the premier" within the general affairs ministry.

Wientjes, who has in the past urged axing thousands of policy civil servants, is surprised by Bekker's remarks. "Our country is bogged down in regulations and bureaucracy. Tackling this problem is the most important theme for the coming administrative period and the new coalition accord."

Someone who stops developing new regulations and who drastically prunes licensing systems will discover that public servants at all levels can disappear, Wientjes predicts. "Additionally, if the population is scarcely growing or not at all, it is logical that the government organisation should also adapt itself in size."

Wientjes also considers the phenomenon of central government, provinces and local authorities doing each other's work over again must be halted. "We must tackle the Netherlands as we tackle a company," according to the VNO-NCW chairman.