Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad says they are trying to bring back the National Planning office to the Ministry of Finance.

Speaking in Nadi recently, he said having the department under their ministry would help improve some of the Government services that had been left neglected for years.

He said one of these was the national investment facilitation process.

“As far as the national investment facilitation process is concerned, we have started doing some things to look into this issue,” he said.

“At the National Economic Summit we had discussed how we can improve efficiency. So what we are hoping that with that a Committee that we will formalize soon will address that.

“The other problem that I found out while within the Ministry of Finance is we used to have a separate ministry for National Planning and all of that were gone.

“So we are trying to bring back the National Planning office within the Ministry of Finance.

“We are going to start monitoring and evaluation of these processes to look at where or what we can improve.”

He said there was a need to change the whole culture of how things were done within Government.

“I am not saying that this problem will be addressed tomorrow.

“It is about changing the whole culture and the way laws and regulations were made, half the time those that came into Parliament no one knew about them.

“There was hardly any knowledge out there in the public and even the civil servants who had to implement them would not understand the law.

“The regulations would not be made once they were passed in Parliament.”