Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services
Item 2 is to take evidence from members of the commission on the future delivery of public services, known as the Christie commission. I welcome to the meeting Alex Linkston CBE and Professor James Mitchell.
Before Mr Linkston makes his opening statement, I apologise that the previous session ran on. I hope that it has not inconvenienced the witnesses too much.
Alex Linkston (Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services)
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee on the Christie commission. I apologise that Campbell Christie is not here. As you may know, Campbell is ill. He sends his regrets for not being here.
We were appointed last November and we reported in June. Once we factor in the Christmas holidays and so on, the timescale for the report was quite challenging. It was a very interesting piece of work.
Campbell Christie was keen that the report should be evidence based, and that we should spread the net as wide as possible and seek all shades of view throughout Scotland. That is what we did. I am pleased to say that we received more than 200 submissions from a variety of organisations. We had nearly 100 stakeholder meetings the length and breadth of the country, including meetings with the public and front-line staff. The net was cast wide to get people’s views on public services. That evidence formed the basis of our report.
One of our first acts was to meet the independent budget review group. Members will recall that the group reported just before us. We see our work as complementing its work. The group was asked to look at the immediate term; we were asked to look at the medium term. Our meeting was productive and we got various starters from the group on how we should proceed. We endorsed the group’s recommendations, although we did not see the need to revisit them. Those recommendations are still very much on the table, and the group’s report should be read alongside ours.
The big issue was the context in which we were reporting. We know about the squeeze on public sector spending in the four-year spending review period, but it quickly became apparent that the problem was much greater than had been thought. The Scottish Government produced a table this time last year showing that it will be 2025-26 before public expenditure gets back to the real-term levels of 2009-10. That is 16 years in which public expenditure will reduce or stay static. No one has ever had that experience in their career. It is a new phenomenon for us all. We have all lived through recessions but they lasted two or three years before the money tree started growing again. We made mistakes and we got the chance to correct them. We are in totally different territory now.
As well as the flat economic situation, there will be phenomenal growth in some expenditure over that period. We have a growing elderly population and there are environmental issues. For years we have been sending Prime Ministers to world summits on saving the planet. Many recommendations of those summits are now in European law. That is a slow candle that will burn for the next 10 years or so.
We are not at a standstill. We have huge growth in inescapable expenditure, and that is before we get into new political commitments. We also have deep-seated problems in our society, such as poor health, a benefits culture and drug and alcohol problems. We decided that we had to come up with something that would address all those issues rather than the here and now, and that we needed a cultural change in the delivery of public services.
Our report is built around four key themes that should underpin that cultural change: services built around people and communities; working together to deliver outcomes; prioritising prevention, reducing inequalities and promoting equality; and improving performance and reducing cost. Those, in no particular order, are the issues that we think should be addressed.
We looked at the organisational shape. A number of people asked, “What about the number of local councils?” We asked what the number should be and invariably we got blank looks. We were strongly of the view that form should follow function. Before we move into a review, it should be clear what we want organisations to do at any level of government. Organisations are expensive. The public sector is cluttered—there is a proliferation of organisations—and could do with being pruned. We think that we should start the process of change and start to develop organisations around that. We certainly do not think that size is a measure of effectiveness in organisations.
We saw a lot of good practice throughout Scotland, which was heartening. There is a lot of innovation in public services and it is important that we tap into that. However, it is not uniform. If we can get the best practice in Scotland to become the norm, we will be well on the way to creating the resources to deal with the challenges that we face in the next decade or so.
Our primary task was to come up with a road map, which I think we have done. You have the report. James Mitchell and I are happy to answer any questions that you have on it.
Professor Mitchell, do you have anything to add before we ask questions?
Professor James Mitchell (Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services)
The report is part of an on-going process. The process had started before the commission—there is a lot of good practice out there, which we learned from. In fact, some committee members have been part of the process of change. Clearly, the report is not the end. We see it as an on-going—indeed, never-ending—process that will have to take place.
We tried to draw together existing experience and evidence and to synthesise it and draw out general lessons. We did not burrow down into individual policy areas, largely because we did not have time and we did not feel that it would be appropriate to do so.
I stress that the report is only a small part of the process. I encourage members to look at the real work of the commission, which is contained in the submissions that we received. A vast number of individuals and organisations gave evidence, which is all publicly available. That is an incredibly rich source of ideas, information and data. We are grateful to those who submitted evidence.
I will start with a couple of questions of my own. In the key recommendations, the report talks about
“Recognising that effective services must be designed with and for people and communities”.
It goes on to talk about embedding
“community participation in the design and delivery of services”.
However, you also talk about
“a new set of statutory powers and duties, common to all public service bodies, focussed on improving outcomes.”
How can a balance be struck between statutory powers and duties and community participation? Do we have sufficient community capacity to do that across Scotland, or are there issues that need to be addressed in that regard?
We can make progress on the improvement agenda and deal with some of the deep-seated problems only with the active participation of the individuals and communities who are involved. A community can be either a physical community, such as a street or part of a town or village, or a community of interest. It is important to involve people in designing services. We will never have enough money to allow us just to throw it at a particular problem, so we must ensure that the money that we have is spent wisely in meeting individuals’ priorities.
Communities often come up with services that are lesser than those that we would provide but which still meet the requirements. There are a lot of examples of that in the evidence that we received. To answer your question about capacity, I would say that that work is already happening.
At a more holistic council and health board level, those bodies already engage in public dialogue on budget priorities and suchlike. Our commission felt strongly that we must involve the public more in prioritising and designing services. There is a lot of knowledge out there about what gives value. We need to get away from the top-down approach to service delivery that says, “I’ve got a good idea, so we’re going to roll it out across Scotland.”
Many practicalities arise in involving people in the design of services. Many people work, have families and, frankly, do not have time. In many communities, a small minority, often of retired people, tends to dominate such groups. That was the case with the Glasgow Housing Association and various other bodies. How practical is your suggestion if we want to involve a balance of people in the community, rather than specific individuals who are already involved?
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It is horses for courses. It is more about doing it in a practical way rather than simply paying lip service.
I will give you an example. Craigshill, a small part of Livingston, has had the highest level of deprivation for the past 30 years. Livingston Development Corporation and Lothian Regional Council spent a lot of money in the area; West Lothian Council has done so too, but the area still has the highest level of deprivation, despite all that public investment. Two years ago, some staff and former staff started up the Daisy drop-in centre project in a rented shop unit, which delivers services for the community. They started off by targeting young mothers and toddlers and running baby massage classes and baby bonding classes. After that, they started to develop other services, with health workers and employment advisers coming along. That area now has a community council, when it had not had one for years. Getting involved in the community and working with local people can develop a level of trust that can help to build other things.
We will never solve the deep-seated problems around alcohol, drugs, community safety and poor health by abstract means or with provisional initiatives. We will make progress only by getting involved with the community, understanding people’s problems and, once we have got their trust and have a much more receptive audience, working with them to drive those agendas.
As I said, it is horses for courses—we need different approaches for different circumstances. However, it is important to build services with communities rather than impose services on communities. There are a lot of good examples of that happening.
There is a tension in the initial question with regard to statutory obligations, and issues of accountability trump all else. If there is a statutory obligation, it has to be met and there has to be accountability, especially when it comes to finance. That is the starting point. That should not mean that we turn our back on community participation, but it is difficult to achieve. As the convener pointed out, there is great potential across Scotland for community participation, but there is a variety of levels of community participation at present. It is easier to get it in some areas than in others.
Our great fear is that those who end up speaking for communities are not representative of those communities. We must always guard against that. That is the classic tension between representative and participatory democracy that, like others, I have been struggling with all my academic life, going back to work that I did 25 years ago on housing policy. It is a hugely difficult area, but we should never abandon the aim of ensuring that we have community participation. If we do not listen to the recipients of public services and appreciate their needs—they are better at articulating their needs than any professional or any academic—we will not make good policy.
I see community participation not as an add-on but as a central part of good policy making. However, taking account of all the points that Alex Linkston made about accountability, public finances and, not least, statutory obligations, I think that it is evident that there is a tension. Without doubt, there is a difficulty.
In the key recommendations, you say that
“Devolving competence for job search and support to the Scottish Parliament to achieve the integration of service provision in the area of employability”
is important. Do you think that that should be covered in the Scotland Bill?
We will leave it for politicians to decide the best route—
The implication is that you do, obviously.
With all due respect to the committee, we want to build consensus, and we recognise that there might not be consensus around that. To be honest, I came along here today to try to convince this committee to issue a consensual report that will build on areas of common ground. That was our approach to our appearance before the Local Government and Regeneration Committee as well. I am expressing no opinion on the issue that you raise. I hope that you can excuse me for avoiding it and being evasive. I hope that you can respect our position.
You want us to come to a consensus, but you include a recommendation on which we will not be able to come to a consensus.
Fair point.
I was particularly interested in the comments that you made in your report about community planning partnerships. We are getting a lot of evidence from community planning partnerships, which are a tier above the community level that you have just referred to. How effective are CPPs? There are good examples of some CPPs taking the agenda forward themselves—that is happening in Highland, where the health board and the council are working together—but other areas of the country are further behind.
We have had some evidence from CPPs and other partners that the Scottish Government needs to play a leadership role. That is obviously important, but what are your expectations as regards the CPPs themselves showing some leadership, given the patchy performance at the moment?
As you say, some CPPs are extremely effective, but the picture is mixed. The commission looked at some of them in action and came to the clear view that CPPs should be a building block going forward, but that we need to improve the way in which they operate. This touches on our emphasis on collaborative working. We think that a lot of joint working should go on through CPPs to identify areas of demand and to come up with joint plans to reduce that demand.
The statutory framework is not conducive to such an approach, particularly in health, where people work to the health improvement, efficiency, access and treatment targets. In relation to accountability, the health service is measured against the HEAT targets, not the outcome agreement or the community plan. That must change. There are many areas in which policy cannot be taken forward effectively on a collaborative basis without the active participation of health. You have just heard about early years, which is one example. Without the involvement of health, it is not possible to have an early years strategy. The first person in the door when a child is born is a health professional. They are the child’s first contact with officialdom, and they are the only person a lot of parents will let in the door—a social worker or the police might mean trouble. That is a barrier. If we are to have an accountable system of community planning, there must be accountability to the community planning system.
In addition, we said that the role of the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland should be changed, and that there should be more active inspection. It is the old carrot-and-stick approach with community planning: it is about all partners being required statutorily to contribute meaningfully to the formation and delivery of community planning objectives. We were quite strong in our view that Government must change the framework, otherwise progress will depend on how individual community partners happen to get on or on the problems that they can unite around. We did not think that things should be left to chance, given the challenges that we face. The collaborative approach should be mandatory; it should be the way in which we do business as a country.
Alex Linkston mentioned cultural change. It is possible to change institutions without necessarily changing the culture. We have a different institutional structure in Scotland, but we have not necessarily changed the culture. That explains the patchiness across the country. It will take time to change the culture, but the way to do it is through sticks and carrots. Incentives can be provided—I am a great believer in incentives, especially financial incentives—but sometimes we need to use a stick.
That approach needs to be rolled out beyond and below CPPs. That is the only way that we will make progress. My strong sense, which I think the commission shared, was that those who work at the service delivery level are highly committed to that approach and that working environment. That must be encouraged, but I wonder whether such commitment exists at a higher level. That explains the patchiness. The culture must be changed but, as Alex Linkston said, sticks and carrots are required.
In the spending review, effort has been made to incentivise that through the identification of shared pots of money that could be used to encourage more collaborative working between health and social work and between other partners. Do you support that approach, given your experience and the evidence that you have had from stakeholders?
We very much support that approach. One of our recommendations was that there should be a change fund to support joint working, so the commission very much welcomes that step. Well, that is my view; the commission has not met since we produced the report, but as it was one of our recommendations the commission would clearly welcome it—I certainly do.
I certainly do, too. I was interested in Mr Allen’s earlier presentation. Unfortunately, we came in only at the end when he was commenting on shifts in expenditure in England for the long haul. His idea of departmental budgets setting aside 1 per cent for early intervention is very interesting. It fits with what the commission said. I would not necessarily sign up to that approach, because I am not sure how easy it would be to implement, but it certainly heads in the direction in which we need to travel.
As Alex Linkston said, the commission recommended that we have change funds. However, we must be careful to ensure that what happens year on year is monitored and that that does not become just a tick-box exercise. That is the kind of mistake that we made in the past, when we worshipped the structure or the initiative. Now we must follow the policy through; if we do not, it will fail.
However, we need the kind of carrot that Paul Wheelhouse described. As the commission has not met since we published our report, that is very much a personal view. I like the idea of a change fund, but it must be only the start—I would like to see us move much further forward.
It is terribly important that we do not get too hung up on money. I very much welcome the change fund, but we need the hearts and minds of front-line staff all pointing in the one direction. That is a bigger prize than the change fund, but the change fund would facilitate it.
On preventative spend, I am particularly keen to use more choices, more chances interventions to prevent kids from leaving school without a positive destination. The MCMC group comprises about 20 per cent of young people. No doubt that figure will rise, given the economic situation. When we had relatively full employment over the past decade, that figure was still sizeable.
Part of the MCMC intervention will be intensive work with young people of 14, 15 or 16, but part of it will be about working with families all their lives. For example, when the health visitor is working with an expectant mother or a new-born baby, they should be thinking “How do I help this kid to go to a positive destination when they are 16?” The same should happen at nursery school and primary school.
If there were a number of high-level key outcomes that you wanted to achieve that went right through all your partners, and you asked them how they could add value to those, you would start to change the culture. That does not really cost any money—it is just a wee drop in the pond—but it can mean that you suddenly get a whole change in the culture. There are many examples of people in their day job just making a wee difference, and that wee add-on suddenly making a big change to an outcome. Money will encourage that, but it will not all be driven by money. The improvement agenda and community planning priorities have to be part of the day job.
You have mentioned hearts and minds and sticks and carrots. I imagine that the commission gave a bit more weight to one over the other. If your objective was to reach consensus and get the highest common denominator of support, I think that you have achieved that. Perhaps those who expected a blueprint of what the public sector should look like are a wee bit disappointed, but I hear what you are saying around our needing more effort and energy on outcomes and less concern about structures and the number of organisations—although the report is fairly silent on coterminosity, which some people believe is a more effective way of building together to achieve outcomes.
Specifically on community planning, you suggest that we should introduce a new set of statutory powers and duties. Can you expand on that? Do you mean that the community plan leader, manager or chief executive should be responsible for a range of indicators cutting across departments, sectors and so on? How will you actually make community planning work and be accountable? As an add-on, would you give some of the new partnership funds directly to a community planning partnership, rather than to an individual agency?
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I would certainly give those funds to the community planning partnerships. The commission envisaged that each community planning partnership would determine its priorities. The Government has three change funds for the three broad areas, and that is probably necessary for the first stage. Personally, however, I would like that to be freed up, with community planning partners given a change fund for which they would be collectively accountable and responsible: they would determine what they would do with it, what their priorities were and what outcomes they would achieve from it. They would collectively sign up to that. It is not just about spending that bit of money; it is about how they bring their other resources to the table and how that money is used to facilitate the changes.
The commission’s view is that the community planning partnerships should be responsible for determining local priorities to reduce demand and meet the national priorities where there is a cross-cutting issue. They should all sign up to that and should be held to account in a meaningful way, through, we suggest, the extension of the Accounts Commission’s remit across the public sector. If one partner came along to meetings but did not contribute an awful lot, we would expect that partner to be publicly named and shamed in any review process.
There is a similar procedure in child protection, whereby the inspection process cuts across the police, the health service and social work services—it is a joint inspection. That has changed the culture of inspections. Before, it was primarily councils that fronted all that, but an effective child protection strategy needs the active participation of the police and the health service. Having that joint accountability and a joint inspection process certainly sharpens all the procedures. That type of approach should be taken right into the heart of community planning.
That is the carrot—the easy bit; now for the stick.
Well, the stick is the public naming and shaming. That has worked effectively in the best value and service inspections of local government. When a service is failing, it gets exposed and a number of politicians and senior officers have left the scene because of an adverse report. It is very in your face.
Can I give you an example to see how that would work? Let us take delayed discharges. There is a HEAT target for the Scottish health service but not for local government, although both must work together on the issue. Do you suggest that such a target, duty or whatever should also be a target for the community planning partnership and that the political leader and the lead official should also be responsible for that target being met? Is that the kind of duty that you suggest placing on community planning partnerships?
Yes, that is exactly the kind of duty that I am suggesting.
They would be responsible for the target being met.
They would be jointly responsible, along with whoever else was involved—in the case that you mention, primarily the health service and the council. In other areas, such as employability, more agencies are involved, but through community planning partnerships we could hold them publicly to account for their joint performance. On a lot of these issues, no one agency on its own can make much difference, but collectively organisations can make a difference.
We started working with the health service on delayed discharge many years ago, before it became a national priority. At that time, our social work people saw it as a health service problem or a Government problem that not enough money was being spent on. I suggested that we start working together on it as a joint problem. We started to come up with a lot of different solutions, and we now have the smart homes initiative. Joint working develops more innovative ways to deliver services. That is what we need to create in addressing all these cross-cutting issues, and I think that the public services are up for it. Before I retired, the HEAT targets were a major barrier to that and, unless you address that, they will be a major barrier to it in 10 years’ time.
You could establish specific accountabilities for things such as delayed discharge and follow them round, but why not put the onus on the community planning partnerships to identify the key issues in their areas? Fair enough, there could be Government guidance and advice and Government sign-off for the agreed programme, but let the community planning partnerships come up with ways to deal with those priorities. Many innovative ideas will come up and, if a change fund is there to support them, different ways of working can be tried out before they are mainstreamed.
This is about the way in which priorities are set. Putting things in silos will lead to all sorts of problems and will certainly not allow you to maximise the impact of limited resources. If we consider things in that way, the only conclusion that we can reach is the one that Alex Linkston articulated. If we do not do things jointly, we will have a problem.
Coterminosity is an interesting idea, but I would ask whether it is an end in itself—and I would guard against viewing it in that way—or whether it could be a means of achieving some of the things that we have been talking about. There may be a case for coterminosity, but only so long as function is regarded as the important thing. Form follows function. We must not allow things to happen the other way round. When we discuss coterminosity, we should ask what it is for and what we are trying to achieve. I am not saying that we should dismiss it out of hand, but we should not worship it either. Finding a nice balance will be tricky. However, I cannot see a way around the problem, other than the way that Alex spoke about; otherwise, we might end up going off in different directions. Also, with limited resources, things will be more difficult. However, even if we were in a period with a lot of resources—which we are not—this has to be a better way of achieving maximum impact.
I remind Alex Johnstone that there should be no use of BlackBerrys in committee.
Earlier, you talked about communities and about taking a bottom-up approach—which I would certainly be enthusiastic about. At any community meeting, people do not see everything as being in silos; they see police, housing and health, for example, all tied up together.
A bullet point in your report identifies as a priority
“Concentrating the efforts of all services on delivering integrated services that deliver results”.
Is there a danger that everybody will end up doing everything and that we will lose specialisms? For example, housing associations are extremely good at providing houses and probably landscaping as well, but I am not so sure that they would be good at running youth clubs—something that I know one or two have got into. The police are good at a range of things, but should they be running the five-a-side football at midnight, even if it is diversionary? How can we strike a balance without losing specialisms?
If you ever have to prescribe these things, you have lost the plot. Within your framework, you have to use your resources appropriately. In a football team, you would not use your goalkeeper as a centre forward; you would use people’s skills and play them in the right place. If you considered diversionary activities as important, you might consider that a police officer was the right person to run midnight football. Alternatively, you might think that a youth worker was better. However, that would be decided locally; you would not prescribe how football should be run everywhere in the country. You would consider the people you had available—and it may be that volunteers would do it. We are trying to facilitate something happening and to use the resources available without being prescriptive. If every area has a different solution, so what? The outcome is important, not the input.
I agree with that as a concept, but I struggle to see how it would be put into practice. I have seen cases in which the police had a little bit of a budget for something and went ahead and did it. To some extent, it was linked with other things, but despite community planning, they were not really joined up.
You say that the police just went ahead and did it, but you will probably find that they worked with the council and with youth services. They may sometimes do things on their own, but in most cases they work in partnership. Many good local arrangements exist, but they are ad hoc and are not uniform. We are saying that a lot of good practice exists but it is not the norm; if we can capture that good practice and make it our way of doing things, we will address a lot of problems that we are not addressing just now, and it would not need to cost a lot of money.
Does that depend totally on the individuals locally rather than on the structure?
That is the case at present: although councils have a statutory duty to produce a community plan and bodies have a statutory duty to participate in community planning, what does “participation” mean? I could come along here and say little, or I could contribute fully—I am here and my number of hours’ input is the same. The contribution depends on how people want to interact. In the same way, if somebody from a service goes to a committee that is not a priority for them, they will come along and tick a box, but they will not necessarily add creatively to the discussion and they will certainly not bring a lot of—or any—resources to the table.
Bodies might want to have a joint priority—for example, on an issue such as community safety, which might involve the youth service and the police—and still have it in the community planning framework. To avoid having many ad hoc arrangements, the community planning partnership should agree the priorities, then action plans to meet them should be worked out. It will be horses for courses—it will involve those who have the skills, budgets and wherewithal to contribute meaningfully. Joint accountability does not mean that everybody must contribute equally.
John Mason makes a valid point. There is no doubt that the danger is that one recommendation could be taken to an illogical conclusion. You are right to say that we should guard against simply thinking that everybody should work together and that everybody should do things. That is not what we are trying to say.
The point that you were right to quote must be set alongside other recommendations and the important point about form following function. If people forget that and look only at the point that you quoted, they will get it wrong and strange things will go on. However, if function is important—the examples that Alex Linkston has given show that it is—the question is how we get that right in communities.
In different communities, different sets of actors will participate. You mentioned housing association youth clubs. Where I live, the police organise youth clubs. That works there, but it might be better for the housing association to do that in another area. We must be very careful that we as a commission and the people at the centre—in the Parliament and in government—do not take a top-down approach and say, “This is the appropriate model.”
It is important that our report is seen as having a number of recommendations, each of which is linked. Tensions will always occur. No simple, single blueprint exists. If we created such a blueprint, we would get it completely wrong. We must always guard against that. We must try to ensure that the tensions are creative. I return to the point about community participation—about listening to people locally. If that happens, we will begin to get it right, but we will not always get it right.
You are right to raise an important note of caution. We should not rush in and think that we have the answer. This is all about working together, but what we recommend has many other parts. If we do not acknowledge that, we are in trouble.
Away back in 2005, the Kerr report made quite a lot of recommendations about preventative spend in the NHS. That is obvious. My question is simple: why has there not been more movement on that? Everybody keeps talking about it, but nothing is being done.
I will raise a simple issue. We were told that, as preventative spend is not in the NHS targets, the NHS is more interested in the number of beds that are freed up, the number of patients who go through the waiting list and so on. How do we put on the list of NHS targets simple matters such as ensuring that preventative spending is a priority? People should not talk about preventative spending but do it.
What will be the third sector’s involvement in making the approach work?
From what everybody has said, I think that the point is emerging that somebody really strong is needed at the top of CPPs to make the arrangements work, push them forward and make them effective.
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The Kerr report was a health report and is another example of silos. It was never a community planning report. The strategic planning framework sits at the top of government and all the targets go down the various silos. We are saying that it is fine to have appropriate silos in local government and health, but the joint areas should move to community planning. They would then become part of areas for which the partnerships were accountable, and performance in those areas should be assessed within the community planning partnership.
Before I retired, health targets were a major barrier to joint working because health chief executives were accountable purely on the basis of health targets. Health resources are challenging; health could spend double the resources it has. If health targets are what the executives are accountable for, and there is public accountability through the cabinet secretary’s system, that is the area where they will put all their resources. We have to change that.
If we want collaborative working to work, there must be within the system accountability at community planning level, and there must be the carrot and stick. The carrot is the change fund and the stick is some inspection mechanism that holds people to account collectively, not individually. If an individual part of the system is not performing adequately, it should be publicly named and shamed.
The third sector has a lot to offer as well; we received a lot of representations from the third sector telling us that, through procurement, third sector organisations are being driven to the lowest costs. We have recommended that there should be more of a partnership with the third sector. Yes, we have to get best value, but we need to use the innovative skills that some of the third sector organisations have. The balance has gone too far towards cost, and less account is taken of effectiveness or outcomes. That imbalance should be redressed.
If we were paid a pound for every time that we heard someone agreeing about the importance of preventative spend and agencies working together, there would be no spending gap anywhere. Everyone seems to be signed up to it; I see that the committee has noted that there is a unanimity around the idea. The question therefore is why that is not happening. What are the barriers?
One of the key barriers is, of course, the fact that people do not want to change what they have been doing; they want to defend the policies that are already in place. Policy creates interests more often than interests create policy, and there are a lot of policies out there. Especially at the moment when resources are limited and there are going to be reductions, we will have to shift resource—if preventative spend is going to be meaningful, resource will require shifting. That means taking resources away from those who have them, and they will fight, even while saying that they support preventative spending. That is natural, but it is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing us in the years ahead and will take a great deal of political will and consensus to overcome.
If I may, I will throw the issue back to the committee as I did in the Local Government and Communities Committee. I am delighted that the committee is considering preventative spending because it is incredibly important for the future. For us to move forward, it would be great if a cross-party committee was at least able to say that to start doing it, we will have to roll back on existing spend, without necessarily identifying how that would be done at this stage. I know that that is politically difficult. I have views, and I can tell you what I think, but I do not have the authority. The Parliament has the authority. You have to identify some of the areas and input targets that are being put into the system.
I have spoken to people across Scotland, including police officers, and people have asked what the issue of police numbers is really all about. Perhaps we should start asking that question. I fully understand why police numbers, teacher numbers and all the rest of it become part of our country’s politics: that is about elections, and it comes from the media—although I am not criticising the media for that because it is their job.
We must show leadership and it cannot just come from chief executives: it has to come from Parliament and Government.
Perhaps I am completely misreading this, but my sense is that there is a great deal of consensus and agreement across the parties and across the Parliament. I plead with you as a committee to start that process, because it would make an amazingly important contribution to these debates.
It is easy for me to say that, but I went on public record early—unlike some of my colleagues—to say that we need to shift resource in education further down. The points that Graham Allen made are incredibly important. Shifting resource in that way would mean that my institution and my sector would suffer. My response to that is, “Let’s have tuition fees.” You do not like it, but that is my solution and at least I have an answer. We need to find resources. We have to move resources down, but that does mean taking resources away from some people.
Now that you have got me on to the subject, I have to say that we have been benefiting those who have too much over the past decade and more. With all due respect, every party has been guilty of that. We have to tackle that. I plead with you to help us contribute. You cannot provide all the answers, but we need that kind of political leadership.
Margaret McCulloch is right to highlight a really interesting point about community participation and leadership. At one level it sounds like a contradiction, but I think you need both. In public policy making, I am always worried when I see something that is a clear answer. If there is not a tension or a conflict, you are in trouble. We should expect, anticipate and work with those tensions; resolving them is what counts. It is important to have a strong leader to drive things through, but a strong leader on his or her own will create problems. You need to get the balance right. It comes back to the point that I made in response to a previous question: of course there are tensions, but that is the essence of public policy.
I point out that Alex Johnstone has left—he did not realise that the meeting would run on for so long—because he has a school visit.
I assure Professor Mitchell that the committee has been very consensual in its approach—so far.
Alex Linkston said that we judge success on the outcomes of what we do. You recommend
“Forging a new concordat between the Scottish Government and local government to develop joined-up services”—
but sometimes the priorities clash. Will you expand on that?
There will always be tension between national Government and local government. We endorsed as the way forward the strategic planning framework and a concordat—whether it is called that or something else—between central Government, community planning partners in particular, and councils, with targets for which they would all be jointly accountable. That is what we meant by an amended concordat. Although community planning partners sign up to the concordat, only councils are held to account. We want all the main partners to be held equally to account.
We had the Auditor General here last week and heard heavy hints that there are perhaps too many structures in Scotland, given the plethora of local authorities, health boards and agencies. Some would agree with that and others would disagree. On streamlining delivery of services, what is your view of the structural map of Scotland? We touched on coterminous boundaries earlier, but this is obviously a bigger issue.
It is a point that we considered—it also came up in the independent budget review. We agree that there are too many bodies, but we should look at what they are doing and at what we want them to do before we start changing things. We should not just go into a reorganisation without having any clear idea of what we want the bodies to do. We have heard that there are too many local authorities; that presupposes that there is a relationship between efficiency and size. Where is the evidence to support that? I have seen none. If it were true, the City of Edinburgh Council and Glasgow City Council would be the two most efficient councils in Scotland, but you would be hard pressed to get evidence to support that.
On the other hand, East Renfrewshire Council is a very effective council, but if you were getting rid of small councils, it is one that might go. If we are to have reorganisation, let us also have objective criteria; let us be clear about what we want the councils to do and then define their sizes.
We very much focused on communities and community planning, and we touched on coterminous boundaries. I raised that issue in the commission, but Campbell Christie was keen that our report be evidence based. I think that one respondent alluded to the issue very indirectly, but no respondent raised it in a meaningful way as being something that we should consider, which is why we did not consider it, although I thought that we should. I have personal experience of it, but I know that there are particular problems in the west of Scotland, particularly where councils straddle two health board areas. That makes it difficult to develop meaningful relationships.
Alex Linkston is absolutely right. We are aware of people making headlines by saying that there should be X councils, but we simply did not see the evidence, although we went out of our way to try to find it.
People must be aware that we are not saying that we are against restructuring public bodies, but we are saying that we should be careful about what we do and that there should be due diligence. We must ensure that restructuring would work. I have seen evidence—I cannot remember whether it was submitted to the commission or whether I saw it separate from the commission—that suggests that the supposed savings from the major restructuring of Whitehall departments or local government in Scotland or England are generally exaggerated. I have certainly seen evidence about that from Whitehall departments and from local government in Scotland and England, which also says that if there are to be savings it will take a long time to realise them. It also said that there is a tendency for a process of change to focus on the restructuring itself and that we will lose sight of the things that we believe are—and that we articulate in the report as being—more important.
My suggestion, which is not in the report, is not to reject restructuring of agencies and organisations and not to run headlong into restructuring, but to be very cautious and careful and perhaps to look at things case by case. We cannot afford to do otherwise, because one thing is for sure: major restructuring costs a hell of a lot of money. Do we really want to spend our time doing that?
I suspect that the way forward is incremental restructuring. We are conscious that voices in the west of Scotland are pressing for changes; perhaps changes could be made, but I am not saying that those voices are right. We need to come to back to the point that I made, which is that there must be due diligence and we must check things out before we rush in.
I think that you are referring to paragraph 100 of Audit Scotland’s report entitled “Scotland’s public finances: addressing the challenges”, which we touched on last week.
Both of you immediately thought of the 32 local authorities, but there are also 147—there were 199—agencies in Scotland, which are possibly being focused on more at the moment. This is not just about local authorities and health boards having coterminous boundaries or whether we should have fewer or more local authorities; it is also about where the agencies fit in. Obviously, local authorities are democratically accountable; agencies are perhaps somewhat indirectly democratically accountable. Where do the agencies fit into the reform agenda? That will be a more fundamental question in the months and years ahead.
The commission did not directly consider that question because of the timescale. We were appointed last November, but by the time we got out the request for evidence, we were into the Christmas and new year period. We left it to the end of March to get all the consultation evidence, so we really had only April and May to consider what we had seen and heard before our findings had to go to print. If we had had more time, we might have considered that issue.
My personal view is that we have too many agencies. If I were a minister looking to simplify the landscape, I would put all the agencies under the microscope and ask, “What added value do they actually bring to front-line service delivery?” Given the environment that we are going into, the value of a lot of them needs to be questioned. However, we did not do any work on that because we did not have any time to do it. Therefore, the commission did not have a view on the matter.
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We did not have the time, but the independent budget review went further than that; it even talked about the number of universities in Scotland. We need to look at such matters, but there are things that could be done short of restructuring, such as ensuring more working together, which we are beginning to do. In that respect, reports and recommendations from other people are useful. In other words, you should try to focus on what you are trying to achieve. If structures are getting in the way, change them, but, if they are not, do not. Can the structures be worked around? We might be able to do that in the next few years.
That is an important point. We felt that large-scale restructuring at this point would be a major distraction, because it would take up a huge amount of creative resource. The real issue is how we take cost pressures out of the structure. Work around community planning, collaborative working, preventative spend and such like is, in our view, where all our creative energies should go at present. If we can take pressure out of the system, we will solve a lot of problems.
The great danger is that we contemplate our navel and take out one or two bodies, which means hee-haw in the bigger picture but takes up a huge amount of resource, and does not make any fundamental change. If we get to the next spending review, still with a flat economy and facing the same financial pressures, but with no plan to deal with the situation, there will be serious cuts in services. It is terribly important that we put all our resources into planning how we stretch the public pound to meet as many of the legitimate demands as possible going into the next four to 10 years. We must focus on that major challenge.
I would like to ask you many more questions, particularly on sections 5 and 8 of the report, but time is against us, so I will ask one final question. You spoke of the need for cultural change. Can you give us any examples of where cultural change has been implemented successfully?
That would take two or three hours.
You could perhaps say not where it has been implemented but where it has evolved.
I will give the example of bed blocking. Back in 1996, when the new council structure was set up, my former council, West Lothian Council, had a separate integrated health trust, which complained to us about bed blocking, which at that stage was not a Government priority. I went to my social work people and they said that it was not their problem, but that the problem was consultants putting people into expensive packages of care or the Government not giving them enough money. At the time, I had major problems bedding in the council and balancing the books.
The trust came back to us three times in 15 months. I kept getting the same answer and I said that I was not going through my career getting that answer, so we should start working together. We started working together and about four years before I retired, bed blocking was at zero. We have a young population, so we have a lower percentage older population, but it is the fastest-growing base figure in Scotland and we had brought bed blocking down to zero. We developed a lot of policies that have now been rolled out by the Government.
We further developed our approach to include technology supporting people at home, which has gone down a bomb in our community. Money for all that was found within the resources that we had, so we had to make some courageous decisions. We had six old people’s homes: we had to close three to get the resource for smart technology. That was very painful and there was a lot of community resistance, but everybody now thinks that it is the best thing that we have ever done.
We had to go through a pain barrier to get the resource to take us into new methods of service delivery. That was incremental change brought about by two agencies working together. It became a bit more difficult when the integrated trust was replaced by Lothian NHS Board, which covers a big area, but we managed to hold on to what we had. Such an approach does work; neither body could have solved the problem on its own, but we did so by working together.
I can give you examples on youth unemployment, MCMC and community safety. I have a lot of practical experience of seeing such an approach working. In my previous career and, in particular, in my time on the Christie commission, I have seen a lot of examples throughout Scotland. That approach is not taking place in only one or two areas, but it is not uniform. The challenge is to embed it in how we do business. It is the Parliament’s job to say that that should be the culture, that these are the processes and that these are the carrots and sticks to enforce it. If you do that, you will encourage it, but you have to create the framework and hold people to account so that there are no hiding places. If you do that, you will create a lot of resource to deal with the problems.
I will draw the meeting to a close. I thank Alex Linkston CBE and Professor James Mitchell for their attendance and their diligence in answering all our questions.
At the committee’s previous meeting, we agreed to take item 3 in private. We will therefore now move into private session to discuss the committee’s work programme.
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Meeting continued in private until 13:02.