Prime Minister Joseph Muscat today appealed for civil respect towards policemen following the incident involving constable Simon Schembri, who was run over by a 17-year-old youth earlier this week.

Speaking at a public services conference this morning, Muscat expressed his solidarity with Schembri, referring to him as a person who he 'knew personally' and who 'loves his work'.

“This must be a wake up call for everyone,” he said. “We need to stop and reflect about the respect that society gives to those who are providing services; that policeman or woman, for example, who wakes up every morning to do his duty. They deserve respect every day; civil respect is a sign of a strong society.”  

Muscat said that the autonomy of public services has increased. "Each month I am informed on whether my ministers are performing or not," he said. "Now we have the public services that are telling politicians how much there is to do and what there is to do. These are the standards entering into the public services, and I think people are noticing this."

"This has increased the standard of the government and what we give to public services, a lot has done to decrease the bureaucracy which we face every day."

Reduction in bureaucracy was also at the forefront of the speech by Principal Permanent Secretary Mario Cutajar, who addressed the conference prior to Muscat.

Cutajar stated a number of times that decreasing bureaucracy does not alter accountaibilty. "Accountability remains at the center of everything we do," he said, "no matter how much the bureaucracy is decreased."

Earlier, he said that that when the country's situation with regards to public services was analysed back in 2013, they found that the "primary problem" was leadership. 

"Everyone used to give up when making use of government services," he said. "In the beginning we saw that the primary problem with the public services was leadership so we invested in it." 

He accused the previous administration prior to 2013 lead a public service that was 'centralised' "which was being told how to hire people." He said the former public service had a 'traditional culture', which "has symptoms of a machine that sends messages from the top to the bottom without hearing what those at the bottom, the people doing the work, have to say." "we want the public service itself to come up with ideas and run things," he said. 

Cutajar stated "we started the decentralization of the service," adding that in the coming year monitoring will only increase.