Pa, green light for the reform: top-level individual bonuses for just 30 per cent of staff

The civil service reform, which has just been given final approval by the Senate (86 in favour and 59 against), is certainly not lacking in ambition. The bill, entitled ‘Merit’, has reached the finish line exactly one year after its approval by the Council of Ministers, and without any significant changes to the text submitted to Palazzo Chigi by the Minister for the Public Administration, Paolo Zangrillo, on 30 June 2025.

This tight timetable is a sign of political commitment, which must now be sustained because experience shows that the fate of attempts to reform pay and career progression in the civil service is decided once the revised rules have been published in the Official Gazette. The preliminary technical work on the six implementing measures designed to regulate appraisal systems and career paths, and to update the regulations of the National School of Administration, has already been completed, so that the entire regulatory framework will be in force by 1 January next year. Then the real challenge will begin, which will be played out within individual public bodies.

For the more than 123,000 organisational units into which Italy’s 10,000 public administrations are divided, the reform proposes entirely new elements alongside the revival of criteria that have already been tried in the past but with little success. In a nutshell, the new rules aim to achieve three interlinked objectives: to use reward mechanisms for their intended purpose, which is to incentivise commitment and results rather than to distribute bonuses to salaries that are certainly not generous, to enable those who demonstrate greater initiative to apply for career progression without the competitive examination being the sole route to management; and to establish a truly independent system of oversight for performance appraisals. ‘With this law, we are finally putting people at the centre,’ says Paolo Zangrillo, Minister for the Public Administration. ‘We are not merely introducing new rules, but promoting a new cultural approach that recognises merit, rewards results and offers real opportunities for growth to those working in our public administrations.’

Among the many factors underlying the reform is the report published in 2024 by the Court of Auditors (Resolution 62/2024 of the Central Audit Section for State Administrations), which showed that 92 per cent of employees in the ministries had been rated as ‘excellent’, and had consequently been awarded the highest individual bonuses. For some time now, national collective agreements for the public sector have called for the highest performance ratings to be reserved for ‘a limited proportion’ of staff. However, these provisions have not been applied strictly to this point.

This is why the bill approved yesterday reintroduces the quota system into primary legislation, without, however, delving into a complex system such as the ‘three merit bands’ attempted in 2009 and subsequently shelved following lengthy and successful resistance from the public administration. The new rule is simpler, and stipulates that in every department ‘top scores may not be awarded to more than 30 per cent of the assessments carried out for each category or grade’. Any ‘annual excellence bonus’, which each organisation may award to recognise particular merits, may not account for more than 20 per cent of these ‘top scores’: in essence, it will be awarded to a maximum of 6 per cent of employees (20 per cent of 30 per cent).