Public Services Reform
Agenda item 5 is public services reform. We are again joined by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth, John Swinney, who is supported by Alan Johnston, deputy director of public bodies policy in the Scottish Government, and Ian Davidson.
Before Mr Swinney makes his opening statement, I am sure that all members would like to join me in recording our sadness at the death last week of Campbell Christie, who chaired the commission on the future delivery of public services.
Convener, may I perhaps start there? On behalf of the Government, I want to express, as the First Minister did on Friday, our very real sadness at the death of Campbell Christie. He agreed to take on the convenership of the Christie commission at a time in his life when that was a great challenge to him, because of his health. It is a measure of his outstanding commitment to public service in Scotland that, despite the health challenges that he faced, he led the Christie commission with such distinction. The commission’s report for us—I will comment later on the substance of it—was a product of Campbell’s ability to build agreement and consensus within Scotland and it has been of enormous assistance to the Government.
On behalf of the Government, I express our condolences to Campbell’s family and assure them of the deep respect and affection with which Campbell was held, in so many different ways, in the public sector, public services and civic life in Scotland. I refer particularly to the way in which that report has informed our deliberations.
The Government’s response to the Christie commission report sets a clear and challenging direction of travel for public service reform. Our reform programme challenges all public services to reshape, to integrate and to deliver improved outcomes for people. A quicker pace of change is vital if we are to live within our means during this parliamentary session and ensure that our public services remain sustainable in the medium term. However, I am clear, too, that reforms must be anchored in Scottish thinking. Perhaps the strongest testament to the work of the Christie commission is that it has produced some thinking that is in keeping with the grain of Scottish society.
The Christie commission and the preceding independent budget review have both done valuable work. The Christie commission endorsed the Government’s direction of travel on public services, including the major shift of emphasis towards outcomes and the centrality of community planning. However, the commission also delivered a pointed message that urges us to build on recent progress by clearly accelerating the pace of change. We are building our reform agenda around the four pillars of integration, improved performance, workforce development and prevention.
First, on integration, public service organisations must go further on collaboration and move well beyond the limited agenda of shared services. Building on achievements in the past four years, we will sharpen the focus of public services on place as a magnet for partnership and enhanced public participation in the design of local services. We have also made clear our intention to integrate more closely health and social care services. The Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Cities Strategy will make a further statement on that issue shortly.
Secondly, we believe that there should be greater investment in the people who deliver services through enhanced workforce development. Their expertise, energy and creativity can help to shape our evolving programme of renewal and improvement. We have done our utmost to safeguard front-line posts by pursuing responsible pay restraint. That approach has given many public sector workers stability and job security at a time of great uncertainty.
The third pillar of our reform programme is that we are committed to creating an open, transparent and rigorous performance culture in Scottish public services. I am keen to ensure that external scrutiny, such as audits and inspections, support public service reform. I have therefore asked the Accounts Commission to work with others to explore how best scrutiny activity can promote effective practice in community planning partnerships.
The fourth and final element of our public service reform agenda is prevention. In developing our budget plans, it would have been easy to apply spending reductions across the board, but amid all the competing priorities we took steps to deliver a decisive shift towards preventative spending. The spending review identified significant funding to incentivise the required transition towards prevention across public services. Our focus will be on supporting adult social care, early years and tackling reoffending, with specific funding that will be available only for joint working across institutional boundaries and sectors.
Over the next three years, through the joint priorities work of local and national Government, preventative spending initiatives will be significantly enhanced and will deliver a preventative agenda that will address the increasing demand for public services. The Government will work co-operatively with other public bodies to ensure that the measures that we develop reflect that agenda. We will also provide strong leadership and a clear direction that support our agenda of improving outcomes for people and communities across Scotland.
The Christie commission report contains so much that it is hard to know where to start. I associate myself with your comments about Campbell Christie. The commission’s document is readable—it is in plain English and is nice to read. Who knew that public service reform could be so interesting? I understand from James Mitchell’s evidence to the committee that Campbell Christie insisted on that approach from the start. That is a tribute to his public service ethos, which you mentioned.
The report talks about communities of place and communities of interest, which are fascinating. I worry a little about the people who are furthest removed from the system and who are the most vulnerable in our society. When we have the Christie report and we are considering how to change the cultural ethos of how our public services work, how do we protect the most vulnerable if they cannot speak up for themselves?
Kezia Dugdale puts her finger on the Christie commission report’s value. When I read the report, I felt greatly encouraged that the commission’s approach was broadly consistent with the Government’s agenda. I would not quite say that I felt vindicated, but I was certainly encouraged. However, the sharp message in the report was, “Get on with it.” I was seized of the point—it was made elegantly but was unmistakeable—that we must make progress on the agenda.
It is helpful that the report gives us an agenda that does not suggest a shift that would be undeliverable because the political consensus does not exist in Scotland. The political consensus in Scotland is in the same place as the Christie report is. The Government must provide sufficient leadership to ensure that the pace is delivered and I willingly accept responsibility for that.
Kezia Dugdale mentioned the most vulnerable and those who are furthest from the labour market, from public services or from having a connection with our communities, who remain one of our greatest challenges. A tremendous amount of unfulfilled potential and underused resource is among those individuals—let us define them as hard to reach, as a catch-all for the different categories. The Christie commission says that we must focus not only on place but on people, and on people as part of place. It exhorts us to encourage the participation of all bodies that can contribute to that agenda.
Principal on my agenda will be the third sector. I spend a lot of my time on looking at projects around the country in which the third sector has deployed innovation and at projects in which a connection has been made with people who were in a difficult space in their lives—often, but not invariably, through drug and alcohol abuse—and a journey has commenced. Such a process is time consuming, expensive and painful, but the rewards at the end for individuals and for the public purse are enormous, because the individuals involved have much better outcomes.
The third sector’s role is crucial to the agenda. It is important for us to focus on encouraging a creative agenda to find solutions that address how every individual has a part in each place.
I welcome your comments about the voluntary sector, which would say that it plays a huge role in service delivery that relates to a lot of aspects of the Christie report but that it perhaps does not have the same level of involvement in the allocation of resources. Should the voluntary sector have a bigger role and be more closely involved in that decision-making process?
Finally, you make a very important point about leadership being critical to Christie as a longstanding document. Do you find it difficult to look at Christie beyond the budget and to ensure that we are looking at transitional and cultural change over decades, rather than just during the spending cycle? How does the Government translate the ethos of Christie across all Government departments and in the wider ambition that it has for our country?
13:30
I might take a few hours to deal with that question, convener. It gets to the nub of a lot of questions that have me pacing the floor at night. I will come back to that.
On the point about third sector funding, one of the reforms that the Government has undertaken is to establish the interfaces at local level—there are 32 interfaces, one in each local authority area. When I was exhorting the public sector to have more to do with the third sector, I was being asked in return, “Who do we talk to?” We went down the route of marshalling the interfaces at local level so that the public sector had no excuse to say, “We don’t know who we should talk to, because there is such a plethora of organisations.”
On Monday afternoon, I addressed the conference of Voluntary Action Scotland, which is the umbrella body for the interfaces. I invited them—I reiterate the invitation to the committee today—to advise me if those arrangements are not working. I have put the arrangements in place and, in my view, the third sector should be represented at the community planning partnership table by the interface. The interface should be able to look at all the resources together to see how it can play a part in making that money realise some of the ambitions that Kezia Dugdale talked about; in reaching the hard-to-reach in our society; in ensuring that there is greater integration of service provision; and in making more of an impact in improving outcomes. All of that has been equipped by the Government’s arrangements.
I want to know if people think that the arrangements are not working, because my aspirations, which are completely in line with those that Kezia Dugdale set out, are dependent on whether the mechanism works. I get a lot of good feedback; I am sure that there is difficult feedback out there as well, but I assure the committee of my interest in ensuring that we take the issue forward.
You asked how Christie and the budget fit together in the short and the long term, and about the Government’s leadership role. In 2007, we made the shift towards outcomes—the Christie commission report is helpful to us in that regard, because it invigorates the direction of travel that we set out; we encouraged the formulation of single outcome agreements at local authority level; we sharpened the pace of that process; and we involved more community planning partners in it. We started the process of recognising that none of the solutions that we all seek is neatly the responsibility of any one organisation; they are spread across the public and third sectors. We have tried to create a longstanding framework that resolves many of those questions at local level, through community planning partnerships and the willing participation of different bodies locally; which brings the third sector to the table; and which focuses not on inputs, but on outcomes and on long-term transformation.
That is very much the thinking behind the Government’s national performance framework; when we designed the framework, we hoped that it would be a long-standing structure. We are looking at that framework just now. We will not make much of a reform to it, because we think that it is important that we establish the architecture, stick with it, deliver against it and be tested against it. That is the type of framework that I have in my mind. It gives us the bridge between the short-termism of an annual budget, which we have just talked about in relation to local government, the medium-termism of the Christie commission, and the long-termism of the national performance framework. I think that that all fits together in a way that disciplines the Government to work in that fashion.
The challenge is to ensure that every bit of Government is pointing in the same direction. The frustrating days come when you suddenly discover something and wonder how anyone could have thought that it was consistent with all that I have just said about short-termism, medium-termism, and long-termism. We still find pockets of—well, you know. [Laughter.]
Let us just say that it has taken a while for the news to reach certain corners. Equally, there are some shining examples. I was very struck by some of the dialogue that I had with people in the Scottish Prison Service who told me about the contribution that their rehabilitation programmes make to supporting the Government’s purpose. That is absolutely what it should be about. By reducing reoffending and reducing the prison population, those individuals have made a positive contribution. We continue to exhort that message.
I welcome the cabinet secretary’s continued movement away from inputs towards outputs and, most important, outcomes. When he talks about the framework, what are his thoughts about the provision for benchmarking or on benchmarking as a tool?
I referred earlier to the performance culture. In a sense, that is the approach that I would take on the question. Benchmarking is a tricky term. It can lead us to a conclusion in which we tabulate different public services rather than improve them.
Yesterday I addressed the all-staff gathering of Audit Scotland. That gave me an opportunity to explain that I am looking for the audit community to ensure that public money is being spent wisely and judiciously—that is its duty. I am also looking for it to take out the Government’s message on improving the performance culture to identify which areas have not quite got the message—Kezia Dugdale mentioned that—and what we can do to improve performance at the local level. I am interested in the concept of performance improvement, but I do not want it to be viewed as a tabulation process. There is a potential danger of opening ourselves up to that if we go down the benchmarking route and do nothing else.
I associate myself with your comments about getting away from any sort of tabulation or the league-table culture that we might have had in the past. However, when wholesale change is being made, it is important to measure the impact of that change. When changes in different areas mean that different ways of working need to be assessed, it is important to have instruments that are sophisticated enough to do comparisons that are fair to individual local authorities and health boards, for example, when health and social care are combined. The impacts still have to be assessed. Is there any Government direction on how that might be achieved, or are there any ideas on where such direction might come from?
Some work that has been initiated by SOLACE through the Improvement Service is looking at those areas of benchmarking. Some of the research that has been produced demonstrates that, for example, an authority can spend a lot on a particular service area but deliver poor outcomes, while a low-spending authority is delivering great outcomes. That gives rise to a few questions. An element of comparison on cost and efficiency is now being done to challenge some of the ways in which public money is being used and how it can be better used. Of course, if some of those project initiatives succeed, resources will be freed up to invest in some of the greater and deeper challenges that exist within our public services.
I concur with the views about Campbell Christie. Probably the greatest tribute that we could give to him would be to get on with it, as the cabinet secretary said.
We heard about the SOLACE benchmarking project from COSLA. I believe that COSLA will be discussing it on Friday, and that the Government has a copy of the decisions—[Laughter.] Obviously, that is a surprise to the cabinet secretary. It would be interesting for the committee to get those decisions sooner rather than later.
If benchmarking is done wisely with a good leader in place, and if it enables someone to see that something is not quite right on their patch, it leads to greater aspiration. People can ask why they have not done so well. We should concentrate on looking at best practice in all places and analysing the difficulties. We should not be hung up on league tables, but we should create the required aspirations. Will the cabinet secretary comment on that?
My aspiration in all this activity is to improve performance. It is not about making an example of people; that is completely pointless. We should not pillory an area just because its service is not the best designed; we should set a direction for it that improves performance. I agree with Mr Stewart’s point about that.
I have yet to see the SOLACE report and from the blank looks I see on the faces of my officials, I think that none of us has seen it. It might have come in somewhere in the Government, but it has not got anywhere near this end of the table yet. We will be happy to give the committee our observations on it in due course.
I, too, associate myself with all the positive comments that have been made about Campbell Christie and his report, especially on its readability.
The foreword to the Government’s response refers to the
“greater integration of public services”.
That is an important and wonderful statement, in my opinion. Does it extend to such revolutionary things as merging different chunks of delivery services? I am thinking of social care in local government and the health service, because that is where there is tremendous scope for joint management and perhaps even merger-type activity at management level. The message needs to get through about working together. You mentioned that earlier, cabinet secretary; I think that you referred to the silo mentality and people saying things such as, “This is my budget, not yours.” Are you thinking along those lines?
The Government’s approach to public service reform does not involve the type of wholesale structural reorganisation that we are doing in the police and fire services. We are interested in pursuing collaboration and integration, as was set out in the first pillar of our response to the Christie commission. There are many examples around the country of good collaboration and the integration of different aspects of public service. For example, Midlothian Council and East Lothian Council have voluntarily merged their education and social work services. They have not merged local authorities, just the services. They are two comparable, smaller local authorities and they can clearly see benefits in that way of working. At the other end of the country, NHS Highland and Highland Council have agreed that Highland Council will take leadership of delivering services for early years and NHS Highland will take leadership of delivering services for adult social care.
Different models are possible. I used those examples of local authority collaboration and health and local authority collaboration to illustrate the point that if I were to design a one-size-fits-all approach, I guarantee that it would not keep anyone happy. The approach that we have chosen, in essence, requires that collaboration and co-operation, and a financial framework that enables it to happen. We then pursue it on that basis.
The Cabinet Secretary for Health, Wellbeing and Cities Strategy will, in due course, make a statement on the specific point about health and social care services. That will set out the Government’s aspirations for the further integration of those services.
As there are no further questions, I thank the cabinet secretary for his double evidence session. I am not sure what he did wrong, but it came after he gave evidence at the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee—he must have been very naughty at some time to get a triple.
Meeting closed at 13:45.