TALLINN, 19 February 2025 – Although the merger of the various transport sector authorities into the Transport Administration in 2021 has brought some savings, the Administration can reduce its office space even more. It is difficult to assess whether or not the quality of public services has improved with the creation of the Transport Administration, as there are no comparable data. The audit indicated that neither the Administration itself nor the Ministry of Climate, which manages the sector, has taken an interest in the lessons and results of the establishment of the new Administration, and the management of the transport and mobility sector remains fragmented.
“The merger of the Road Administration, the Maritime Administration and the Civil Aviation Authority has indeed reduced the number of vehicles, buildings, support staff and managers, which was the objective,” said Ines Metsalu-Nurminen, Director of Audit of the National Audit Office. “Unfortunately, no quantifiable and time-bound criteria have been set for the targets of optimising office space, the number of vehicles or their management costs – how much money should be saved and by when it should be achieved.“
The National Audit Office finds that the office space of the Transport Administration could be used more efficiently and at the moment, it seems that the Administration can reduce its office space. It should be taken into account that the share of e-services has increased and the number of office visits has been decreasing steadily. Although the number of office buildings has decreased by three, from 26 to 23, since the establishment of the Transport Administration, the audit indicated that the efficiency of the use of office space should be further analysed.
The savings achieved by reducing the support staff were expected to cover the estimated cost of merging the authorities, which amounted to €1.4 million, but in a context of rising salaries and the impact of new tasks added to the Administration in the meantime, this expectation proved to be too optimistic. The savings achieved as of 2023 only amounted to approximately €167,000. It is unlikely that these savings can be significantly increased in conditions where prices and wages are rising. At this stage, it cannot be said that there has been no progress towards the goal at the planned pace, because no deadline by which the savings related to the reduction of support staff had to be achieved was set at the time the Transport Administration was established.
Although the goal declared at the establishment of the Transport Administration was to provide better quality public services – such as the grant of various driving licences and permits , approvals and certificates –, it is unclear how to assess the change in quality retroactively, as the Administration has not assessed the quality indicators of all services consistently so far. Also, no base levels for service quality indicators, which could be used to measure the change, have been established either before or after the merger of the authorities. In 2021, there was no client feedback data for the majority of services, and in 2022 and 2023 for almost half of the services. Although satisfaction with the services provided in 2023 had increased for 24 services and decreased for eight services in compared to 2022, it is not known whether the quality of services provided by the Transport Administration has improved compared to 2020, as the Transport Administration has not compared these results with the same indicators of the merged authorities in 2020.
Neither the Ministry of Climate nor the Transport Administration itself has shown any interest in identifying the benefits of the establishment of the new administration. Whilst the establishment of the Transport Administration was expected to create an agency that would deal centrally with all mobility issues, the opposite has happened in practice and fragmentation has increased in places. For example, whilst the Ministry of Climate is responsible for transport infrastructure and international passenger transport, the planning and implementation of national public transport policy was transferred to the Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture from 1 July 2023.
Another purpose of the establishment of the Transport Administration was to bring the budget under a single management, with the aim of providing greater flexibility to fund innovative solutions and set priorities at the level of the administration to ensure the development of the sector as a whole, but at present the merged authorities are helping maritime and aviation services, which were previously underfunded.
The necessary positions for the provision of public services have been filled by specialists and the competence of the employees has generally been maintained. However, there is still a problem with the shortage of aviation specialists, which was already known before the merger of the authorities but has now led to the European Commission opening infringement proceedings against Estonia in early 2023 following audits by the European Aviation Safety Agency. In the course of this, the Transport Administration has submitted to the European Aviation Safety Agency a plan for recruiting specialists until 2028, but the Transport Administration considers that following the plan is not feasible based on the current funding principles.
The National Audit Office recommends that the Director General of the Transport Administration analyse the use of office buildings. Based on this analysis, a proposal should be made to the minister responsible for the area of government to reduce the office space of the Administration, taking into account the optimal usage of space deemed to be the best practice in the state.
The National Audit Office also recommends the introduction of quality indicators that characterise each specific service in order to assess the quality of direct public services.
The Director General agreed with the recommendation of the National Audit Office to optimise the buildings in order to reduce property management costs, and the Transport Administration plans to submit a proposal for the optimisation of buildings to the Minister of Infrastructure by August 2025 at the latest. In order to assess the quality of public services more accurately, the Transport Administration defined indicators in 2024 that clearly characterise service sets, in addition to the number of services provided and the customer satisfaction indicators.
Background
The idea of merging the transport authorities – the Maritime Administration, the Road Administration and the Civil Aviation Authority – was proposed by the Ministry of Finance in 2016 in its analysis of the state’s tasks. The merger of the agencies was approved with a resolution of the Cabinet meeting of the Government of the Republic of 18 June 2020. The Transport Administration started operating on 1st of January 2021. Several structural changes have taken place in the three years of the Administration’s operations.
The objective of the audit was to assess whether the merger of the Civil Aviation Authority, the Road Administration and the Maritime Administration in 2021 has resulted in a more cost-effective organisation of support services and a higher quality of public service provision. The audit focused on the preparation of the establishment of the Transport Administration and the subsequent period until 2023.
Priit Simson
Communication Manager of the National Audit Office
+372 640 0777
+372 5615 0280
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http://www.riigikontroll.ee/
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Posted:
2/19/2025 11:00 AM
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Last Update:
2/18/2025 8:37 PM
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Last Review:
2/18/2025 8:37 PM