The next item of business is a debate on motion S7M-00309, in the name of Ivan McKee, on public service reform: empowering staff, service users and local communities.
15:14
I am delighted to open this afternoon’s debate on public service reform, which I believe will be the defining task of this session of Parliament.
Public service reform is about delivering our vision of a Scotland where citizens enjoy excellent public services that meet their individual needs and where the staff who provide those services feel valued and are empowered to make a difference to people’s lives. It is a vision rooted in what we believe about public services, which is that they are critical to delivering a fairer future with opportunities for all, that they are an asset and an investment, and that they must be protected for the future by wise investment. That vision is enabled by more joined-up and integrated services, with greater investment in prevention, that are delivered efficiently. Those principles were set out by the Christie commission and are embedded in our public service reform strategy, which was published last year.
Public service reform is at the heart of this Administration. We are not making marginal changes; we must reimagine the state as an enabler, which means rewiring our public services system to deliver on that vision. That means listening to and working with communities, those who rely on services, and the workforce in order to make changes and improve service delivery.
I have high hopes for today’s debate and hope that I will not be disappointed. We will not deliver the scale of change that we need without some consensus across the chamber and, although the Government is brimming with ideas for innovations to transform public services, we recognise that we do not have an exclusive hold on good ideas. I look forward to hearing from Opposition spokespeople about their perspectives on public service reform and, importantly, about where we can work together. I also look forward to hearing from back-bench colleagues, who have a wide range of experience and perspectives, about where they see opportunities to make Scotland’s public services preventative, joined-up and excellent, because that is what the people of Scotland deserve.
We have already shown what is possible. More than £300 million has been saved through more efficient procurement in the past two years and we are projecting savings of more than £50 million through the rationalisation of estates—13 core Scottish Government buildings have been closed in the past three years and there are more to follow. There is an extensive automation programme, with more than 140 automations having been implemented, delivering more than £15 million in cost avoidance. There has been a rationalisation of the public sector landscape with the formation of Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, the regionalisation of colleges and, more recently, the launch of Public Services Delivery Scotland. Legislation has empowered communities to acquire public assets and we have passed the world-leading Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026.
We have also introduced a wide range of effective preventative initiatives, including childsmile, the Caledonian system for addressing domestic abuse, minimum unit pricing of alcohol and family nurse partnerships, to name but a few. We have seen the roll-out of digital services, including the ScotAccount app, which expands people’s access to essential services via a single sign-in process and now has 750,000 users, and ScotPayments, which supports organisations across the public sector to make faster, safer payments. This summer, we will launch the Scottish Government’s mygov.scot app, which will allow people in Scotland to conveniently access a range of public services from their own devices.
I am glad that the cabinet secretary has got on to talking about prevention, which was a central tenet of the Christie commission report. I listened to the cabinet secretary when he appeared on Radio Scotland this morning and heard him mention prevention several times, but I did not hear any detail about what he thought that actually meant. Since the Christie commission report was published, we have seen a cut in preventative services, particularly in rural healthcare. How does he plan to reverse that?
I will talk more about that in the course of my remarks, but, briefly, prevention is one of the four core principles of the Christie commission. When we published the public sector reform strategy last year, we also published an extensive document outlining all the preventative innovations that have been implemented. There are many of those and there is an extensive piece of work that backs up that approach and shows how the numbers stack up with regards to investment and return. As we take forward the budget process for 2027-28, we will implement a process of tagging spend so that, for the first time, we will know what is classed as preventative spending, at what level that prevention sits and what impact it is having.
Despite the progress that we have made, we recognise that we have not delivered the scale and pace of reform that is required. The public service reform strategy identified the systemic barriers that we face: siloed organisations, budgeting that supports structures but that is not always aligned to services and a culture that can be slow to change.
The strategy sets out the actions that we are taking to tackle those barriers. Those include very clearly setting out our expectations that public service leaders should focus on systems, not silos, and our intention to empower staff, service users and communities. We will reform the national performance framework and change our budget processes so that funds flow to where they can make the biggest impact rather than getting stuck in silos, and we will ensure that the workforce and communities are part of the reform process rather than reform being something that is done to them.
Public service reform is about the future of public services in Scotland—how we design them, deliver them and ensure that they meet the needs of the people they serve. It is about driving integration, simplification and collaboration. That means that we must be open to changing how our system fits together, where decisions are made and how investment takes place to deliver for people. In our first 100 days, we will lay out our plans for public service renewal and the bill that will follow.
We know the pressures that public services face—demographic change, rising demand, fiscal constraint, global uncertainty, increasing complexity of need and increasing expectations from the public that they serve. In last year’s medium-term financial strategy, we published our assessment of the scale of the fiscal challenge over the next five years, and in the fiscal sustainability delivery plan we set out the actions that we are taking to close that deficit. Nevertheless, without reform, those pressures will outstrip the resources that are available. The choice is clear: either we change how we deliver services or we risk being unable to sustain them. That is a risk that this Government is not willing to accept.
Public service reform is not just about the services of today; it is about stewardship and protecting public services for generations to come. We have to prevent problems before they start and not just respond when they reach a crisis point. Poverty, poor health and inequality are not inevitable. They are challenges that we can address earlier and more effectively, and when we do so, the benefits are profound, including better outcomes for people, stronger communities and reduced long-term pressure on services. That is why we are committed to focusing on prevention and expanding early intervention. Prevention is not just the right thing to do to improve lives; it is essential for long-term sustainability.
The Christie commission was established in 2011. We are talking about prevention, which was mentioned then, and about joined-up working, which was also mentioned then. What is going to be different this time?
I do not know whether the member came into the debate late, but she should have heard the first part of my speech in which I listed a whole page of things that we have delivered on the back of the Christie work. However, we recognise that there is more that we need to do to take such work forward, and that is the whole point of the public service reform strategy.
Of the four Christie principles—empowerment, prevention, integration and efficiency—this debate rightly focuses on the one that I believe underpins all the others, which is empowerment. Individuals should not have to navigate a maze of disconnected services in order to access the support that they need. Too often, people, and particularly those who are facing the greatest disadvantage, have to tell their story multiple times, undergo repeated assessments and deal with fragmented support. That is not good for people and it is not good for the system. It involves unnecessary duplication, stress and waste. Services must organise around the person and their family in order to understand what is important to them.
Our commitment to whole-family support is a great example of place-based, person-centred change in action. We must consider how we deliver public services to ensure that families get the right support at the right time and in the right place for as long as they need it, and join up different parts of the system to focus on efficient and effective preventative support for service users. We know that, when services are designed in that way, we achieve better outcomes and better value for every pound that we spend. Achieving that requires significant change at both local and national levels in order to move away from one-size-fits-all approaches and siloed and crisis-driven responses towards the design and delivery of support for individuals and families that is more flexible, person centred and preventative.
With regard to the empowerment of communities, I recognise the hugely important role of development trusts, social enterprises, supported businesses and the voluntary sector in the delivery of services at a community level, which is why we talk about public service reform and not just public sector reform. Empowerment of communities is critical to public service reform.
I agree with all of that, but it sounds as if the cabinet secretary is trying to run the whole of Government by himself. Can he give us an idea of how he is going to prioritise? If he does not do so, I think that he is going to get lost.
I thank the member for his comments. He can rest assured that all my Cabinet colleagues are 100 per cent on board with this important agenda and the First Minister has his weight behind it. We have the strategy, which lays out everything that needs to be done across 18 workstreams. People have asked why there are so many workstreams—as many as 18—and the reason is precisely that, as Mr Rennie identifies, there is an awful lot of work to be done here across a very broad front. That is laid out, with more than 80 actions, and we are moving forward on all of those, because it is important that they come together as we take the agenda forward.
The empowerment of communities is critical to our agenda—communities coming together to address the unique needs and challenges of their local area; working hand in hand with the public sector in bringing new ideas and fresh thinking on how to deliver better services and improve people’s lives; taking ownership and stewardship of lands and buildings, thanks to legislation from the Government; and being partners in how services are designed, making sure that they are focused on what is important to people locally. Our democracy matters work has shown that there is a real appetite for people to have more control and influence over how services are designed and—importantly—how money is spent.
Service delivery must also adapt to meet the unique needs of rural, island and urban areas. Our single-authority model, working with island communities, is leading the way on how integration of services locally can improve service delivery. By empowering communities further, we will build capacity in all our towns, villages and neighbourhoods to do more, making public services more agile, responsive and accountable to the people that they serve.
Public service reform is also very important in unlocking improvements through empowering the staff who work in our services and who know them best to come forward with ideas to make those services better and their work more fulfilling. I will be clear: a culture that does not empower staff, and leaders who do not see that as central to their role, must change. Organisations that are excessively hierarchical, with multiple layers of management, and stifling to innovation, need to change. We will work closely with our trade union partners to deliver that change.
No one who uses or works in public services would say that they are as streamlined or seamless as they should be. Everyone can identify waste in the system. That is why efficiency is a core part of public service reform—tackling duplication; sharing services across organisations; making better use of data, digital tools and our public estate; and being honest about where we can improve.
That is why we have set ambitious targets. Every pound that is saved through doing things better is a pound that we can invest in care, education and communities.
That is not something that the Government can do alone. Partnership is required with public bodies, local government, trade unions, businesses and communities—and across parties. Everyone will want to provide excellent public services.
Every party recognises the need for change—although, to be fair, in their amendments, some have articulated that more coherently than have others. The Parliament can come together to deliver the change that is needed. I am more than happy to work with colleagues who are here today to make that possible. I invite members to work with me, give me their positive ideas and ensure with me that our public services continue to meet the expectations and needs of the people of Scotland.
I move,
That the Parliament welcomes that the Scottish Government’s Public Service Reform Strategy centres on the importance of prevention in the development of public services; believes that it is vital to empower staff, service users and local communities to be part of the design and delivery of services that meet the needs of the people of Scotland, and agrees that the delivery of excellent and sustainable public services should be the goal of public service reform, rather than the preservation of existing corporate structures.
15:27
I am pleased to speak to the amendment in my name, in which we set out very clearly, as we did in the election campaign just a few short weeks ago, that Labour believes that our public services are in need of widespread, root-and-branch reform.
We believe that the shape of the Scottish state needs to adapt to the reality of three accelerating major trends that our citizens are living with every day: demographic change, technological change and climate change. Where the change that the Government leads meets the core principles that we have laid out in our amendment, we will work with it constructively to deliver on it.
However, I have to say at the outset that the Scottish National Party’s £4.7 billion fiscal gap will loom large in today’s debate in two significant ways. The cabinet secretary said that every pound that is saved can be reinvested in other purposes. I am not sure that I entirely agree. Most pounds that are saved will be used to close the £4.7 billion gap between the Government’s spending plans and what it can afford—between the spending trajectory that the cabinet secretary has set, along with his colleagues, and the amount of money that has been identified by the Scottish Fiscal Commission. That gap has led to three emergency budgets from the Government in the past four years. SNP members are late converts—principally on that basis—to the need for reform.
Using that gap as the animating principle of this programme is a dangerous place to start, because it can lead to the wrong decisions, driven by the greatest short-term savings rather than long-term efficiency or a vision of where the state might go. What we require is a sense of destination. What is the Government’s vision of a modernised Scottish state for the third quarter of the 21st century? I have never heard that, let alone seen it described.
Ivan McKee rose—
If the cabinet secretary wants to tell me that vision, I will gladly hear it right now.
Michael Marra talks about fiscal sustainability being the driver. That is one aspect, of course; however, as I articulated in my opening remarks, the driver is to deliver excellent joined-up public services that are preventative in nature and to empower staff, communities and service users to help to do that.
I will say two things in response to that. First, I am sure that the cabinet secretary is a keen advocate for that, but I would believe him a bit more if we had not gone for 20 years without the Scottish National Party substantially reforming the public sector. There have been some reforms, but they clearly have not met the trends or achieved the scale of transformation that is required—I will come back to that.
Secondly, I am afraid that if we do not have an idea of what is going on, that will result in a management consultancy strategy that is not very likely to gain public buy-in. All we had from the cabinet secretary were some adjectives for what reform could look like, instead of a description of the shape of services that we absolutely require.
I will give the example of health service reform. The recent division of boards into two regions—east and west—has been put in place without any real explanation. It came as a huge surprise to leaders in our national health service and it was imposed without any form of consultation with the trade unions. It did not meet fair work principles from the outset—it is a good example of how not to do reform. Whether there was a case to do it is not the question; the process that the cabinet secretary set out in the strategy and in his speech was not followed, and on that basis, we are concerned about it.
The cabinet secretary knows that I fundamentally believe in the empowerment of citizens. I have told him that my vision of a future Scottish state is very much one in which citizens are empowered, where they own and have control of their data and understand what is happening. However, that requires a broader vision of technological implementation, which I find lacking in the strategy.
Willie Rennie was right to talk about prioritisation. If we do not understand what success would look like, it is really difficult for Parliament and the public to see whether any of this is working. We need the Government to tell us something specific—what a service will look like or that a service will cease to exist—so that it can hang its hat on that and we can understand whether it is making progress, instead of its just talking about the fiscal savings. I think that that is at the heart of this.
Change is, of course, not cost free. When the United Kingdom Labour Government was elected in 2024, I met the then Cabinet Secretary for Finance and said that that moment, with the significant increase in public investment, was a unique opportunity for rapid change. She looked at me as if I had walked out of a spaceship instead of the lift to the ministerial corridor because the very idea was a completely alien concept to the SNP. That is because the SNP was elected in 2007 on the basis of no reform, and it has pursued that for 20 years.
We could say much more about this agenda. It is a huge challenge. I absolutely agree with the cabinet secretary about the preventative aspect. Delayed discharge has cost this country billions of pounds because, under this Government, there was no reform of health and social care when it was clearly needed, on the basis of demographic trends.
I will close by talking about the two practical things that we have asked for in our amendment. The first is
“a timetable for the reduction in … public bodies”.
After five years, I still trip over new ones every week, and I have no idea what they actually do.
Secondly, we are looking for an understanding of the displacement effect of the withdrawal of public capacity in our third sector. It is vital that the Government explains that. Those are practical things that the Government could be doing right now to set the framework on better footing. I look forward to the other contributions in the debate.
I move amendment S7M-00309.3, to insert at end:
“that the Scottish Government’s approach to public service reform should align with the principles of Community Wealth Building, Fair Work and the European Charter for Local Self-Government and the need to encourage economic growth, and calls on the Scottish Government to produce a detailed timetable for the reduction in the number of public bodies as part of a drive to reduce broader waste and to produce a holistic assessment of the impact of the public sector reform programme on Scotland's vital third sector.”
15:33
I congratulate Ivan McKee on his appointment. His role could be the most interesting in the Parliament in the next five years; if he delivers on the targets and beyond, he could make a significant contribution to the welfare of Scotland.
Public sector reform is the subject of the debate. The clue is in the name—Reform UK absolutely believes in reform in every area of public life. We would start by looking at the headline numbers that have been running in Scotland since devolution began. We have just had the 25th anniversary of devolution, which is always a good time to review what has happened—the good, the bad and the ugly.
The total spending for Scotland across Westminster and Holyrood in 2025 was £117 billion. Of that, £72 billion was spent on Holyrood, which controls 60 per cent of the total budget for Scotland. In 1999, that figure was £35 billion, which means that, over 25 years, we have had compound annual growth in spending of 5 per cent.
By any measure, that cannot be described as austerity. It is year-on-year growth of 5 per cent—in effect, organic growth—in spend in Scotland. The issue is not the amount of money but how we spend that money and what choices are being made for that £117 billion, and, in particular, the £72 billion spent here in Holyrood.
It is worth making some comparisons.
What Malcom Offord says is interesting. From his extensive experience as a Conservative minister in the UK Government, what can he teach members about reform of public services across the UK, particularly in his portfolio?
I will be delighted to cover that, because there are some insights that I was able to glean when I was a minister in the UK Government. Those are part of the reason why I left the Conservative Party, so I will come to that issue directly.
The £117 billion spent in Scotland is 55 per cent of GDP. In the UK, total spending is 44 per cent, going to 45 per cent, of GDP, so Scotland is spending considerably more per capita than England. The exam question is, are we getting better public services? Are our schools better? Are our hospitals better? Are our roads better? Is our policing better?
New Zealand, which has the same population as Scotland—5.5 million people—spends 42 per cent of GDP versus our 55 per cent, yet its GDP per capita is 10 per cent higher. That tells me that this is not about money. There has not been a shortage of money but a shortage of value for money for the taxpayer. Ivan McKee can intervene on that point.
The New Zealand example is instructive. The big difference is that, as a country of 5 million people, New Zealand is a normal independent country. It does not have many tens of billions of notional spend allocated to its accounts that are actually spent in Whitehall.
Of course, the response to that is that Scotland spends £117 billion but raises £87 billion in taxes, so there is a £30 billion structural deficit that is paid for by the UK Treasury. We can take that comparison either way.
I suggest to the cabinet secretary that what he has outlined on artificial intelligence, digital improvement and so on should be considered the ordinary course of business. That is how any department should be running; it should be running to maximise its efficiency on any budget. That should not be considered groundbreaking or revolutionary.
I encourage the cabinet secretary to start looking immediately at where we are wasting money, where there is duplication of money and where we are not getting value for money.
I will give three quick examples of that. As referred to by Michael Marra, we have the 132 quangos, which are spending £6 billion. We can talk about the money all day long, but what is interesting is the democratic deficit in how the country is run, with ministers not being able to control spending because it is at arm’s length. To come to Willie Rennie’s point, I saw that at first hand when I was a minister in the Department for Business and Trade and I was given the brief of trying to deal with the compensation for Post Office workers.
What I saw over the past 20 years, when I unravelled it, was a complete disconnect in the lines of authority between ministers and an arm’s-length body that behaved on its own account and did its own thing. The result was that the postmistresses and masters could not get accountability. There was no point in firing the minister, Ed Davey, because he was not in control of it in the first place. Quite apart from the money, can we please bring services back into our control under Ivan McKee, so that he can see the value for money, and so that when he pulls a lever, he can see where the money comes from?
Secondly, we know that energy is reserved to Westminster, so why does the Scottish Government spend £5 billion on net zero? Again, we cannot find that line. We cannot push a button in the public accounts of Scotland and get that number to spit out. We have to do a lot of work and go through many places, but we find that, in the current 2026-27 financial year, the Scottish budget commits more than £5 billion, which is described as record investment, to climate action and net zero measures. In the context of the £72 billion budget, that is approaching 8 per cent. I direct the cabinet secretary to that area as well.
The third area to which I would direct him is welfare. We all in the chamber believe in the welfare state to help people, as a safety net, as they move through life. In particular, we need to do a lot more to help people who have fallen out of the way of work to get back into work. I want to hear a lot more about the effort that we put into helping our colleagues and fellow citizens back into work.
The issue with welfare is that, over the past 10 years, the choices made by the SNP Government—particularly under Nicola Sturgeon, when she created a welfare economy—meant that 15 per cent, which was the biggest spend, was allocated to welfare, versus 3 per cent to education. The welfare budget is out of control. We are heading towards having a million Scots of working age who are not working, which is a national disaster for us all. That is the third area to which I would point Ivan McKee.
At the end of the day, the cabinet secretary has been in business, which is a good thing. We need more people in the chamber who have worked in business. He will know that any business can save 5 per cent of its costs without directly impacting its top line: 5 per cent of £72 billion is £3.5 billion. That would go a long way to fixing his budget, and he would be commended by the Scottish people for that.
I move amendment S7M-00309.4, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:
“believes that public money is limited, whereas demand is infinite; further believes that meaningful reform starts in its chamber by using the time available to reach meaningful and defined decisions; believes that using parliamentary time to debate a motion that lacks any substantive action, and therefore leads to no definitive change, undermines the Parliament’s expressed desire for reform; recognises that emphasis on public service provision should be focused on outcomes and not inputs; believes that the recipients of public services are the most important people in this process and must be the focus of the Parliament’s attention; looks forward to co-operation with staff and legitimate representative groups to raise standards and improve provision, and calls on the Scottish Government to publish a programme of concrete action.”
15:40
Reforming our public services means making sure that they are sustainable for the long term. It also means ensuring that they are delivering what we need them to deliver, including healthcare that is free at the point of need. Poverty is expensive. Not only is so much human potential lost when children grow up in poverty, because they lack the opportunity to thrive, but their health outcomes are worse and social structures are more fragile. We all have to pay the costs of repairing that damage.
Although I am sceptical about the focus on AI in the Government’s reform strategy, I support the cabinet secretary’s emphasis on prevention. Preventing children from growing up in poverty will alleviate much of the strain on our public services down the line. Simple things such as ensuring that our children have enough healthy food to eat while they are growing up will lessen the strain on our NHS in the future.
I absolutely do not support Scottish Labour’s approach, as set out in its amendment, that a list should be created of all public bodies and that someone—possibly the cabinet secretary—should look down that list and, with a black marker pen, cross out organisations to satisfy that party’s desire to make cuts. The Scottish Greens believe that reform in our public services should be worker led. Reform should be designed by the front-line workers who deliver the services and by the communities that depend on them, not by someone sitting in St Andrew's house with a whiteboard and a black marker pen.
The Scottish Greens believe that public services should be under public ownership and should not be run for profit. We would bring more of Scotland’s buses back under public control, and we would support having publicly owned ports that could be key economic drivers of the energy transition to develop local supply chains, bring oil and gas workers into new opportunities and diversify our marine economy.
There is a larger conversation to be had about the responsibilities of the public and private sectors. For too long, private companies have generated profits while polluting our environment—pollution and litter that our councils and other public bodies have had to clean up at public expense. Industries should pay to clean up after themselves—that is, the polluter-pays approach. If the public purse is stretched, that is the first place that we should look for money. It might involve taxing polluters or using extended producer responsibility schemes such as the deposit return scheme, but in any case it is clear that we can no longer afford to subsidise polluters.
The same goes for carbon emissions. Through tree planting, peatland restoration and carbon capture schemes, the Scottish Government is spending—and will spend—a lot of money on desperately trying to pull carbon out of our atmosphere. It would be much cheaper to prevent those emissions in the first place, by removing the direct and indirect subsidies for producing them.
Of course, we would know more about who is receiving public subsidies and what they are doing with them if we had a complete land registry. It is a matter of urgency that Scotland’s land register be completed so that a comprehensive and publicly accessible online map can be created. I would be very interested to hear the cabinet secretary’s view on the importance of that aspect.
The Scottish Greens believe that public money can be spent more effectively if conditions are attached to it. We would make fair work first conditions mandatory for public procurement, grants and economic development funding, which would ensure that no company in receipt of public money could use exploitative practices such as fire and rehire or zero-hours contracts. The Scottish Greens believe that public bodies should have clear duties to protect the environment, build resilience to climate change and uphold human rights. Reform of the public sector must embed those duties throughout.
In the previous session of Parliament, I was part of the cross-party SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee. I would like to highlight to the cabinet secretary two of the recommendations that resulted from that committee’s work. One says:
“While the Committee was tasked with reviewing the SPCB supported landscape only, this small fraction of the public sector should not be seen in isolation from the wider public sector. The evidence is clear that many of the measures we are recommending in this report could also apply more widely.”
Another says:
“In particular, while we welcome the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme, we were surprised to learn about a lack of understanding of the functions and potential overlaps and duplication among the public bodies it funds. We therefore recommend that the Scottish Government urgently undertakes a strategic mapping exercise to identify the functions of all Scottish public bodies and where they overlap, to inform decisions on future size, structure, and coherence across the public sector.”
It strikes me that that is precisely what Scottish Labour’s amendment describes. We must understand the shape of those public bodies, decide where there is duplication and stop having some of them. Given that the committee that the member sat on said that that was a good idea, will she vote for our amendment?
The Labour amendment specifically talks about cutting public bodies, but not about making sure that their remits do not overlap, which would involve changing the remits of those bodies. It may be that, in the course of consultation with the public and workers, decisions may be made to change the number of public bodies. However, for Labour to come in, right off the bat, saying, “Let’s cut some”, before we have even asked questions and done the mapping exercise, seems to be putting the cart before the horse, and it hardly represents the worker-led reform that we are after.
As with many aspects of governing in Scotland, we can do only so much because of the limitations of the devolution settlement. We can try to implement initiatives such as the polluter-pays approach, but we can be vetoed by the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020. We can try to do things differently on taxation or benefits so as to increase revenue or improve outcomes, but we will always be trying to fight poverty and climate change with one arm tied behind our back.
It is clear to the Scottish Greens that public sector reform must be accompanied by a greater devolution of powers to Scotland.
I move amendment S7M-00309, to insert at end:
“; agrees that any programme of public sector reform must be worker-led; believes that public service reform must incorporate community wealth building principles, including procurement reform, to ensure that more public money is spent locally; agrees that public bodies and organisations receiving public funding must adhere to fair work principles, and that public bodies should have clear duties to protect the environment, build resilience to climate change and uphold human rights and that public sector reform should be accompanied by a greater devolution of powers to Scotland.”
I call Murdo Fraser, who joins us online.
15:47
I should explain that I am having to contribute remotely today due to a family issue; otherwise, I would be in the chamber.
I welcome Ivan McKee to his new role as Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform. I know that he is keen to dispel the notion that he is here as an axeman to make cuts to public services—that is, to be “Ivan the Terrible”, as my colleague Meghan Gallacher suggested some weeks ago—but I think that we need some clarity from the Scottish Government about what public service reform actually means.
When, in a debate last week, I challenged the Scottish Government on how it would address the looming £5 billion black hole in public finances, the cabinet secretary’s response to me was that it would do so through public service reform. However, in other interviews, he has made it clear that public service reform is not about making cuts. However, those statements cannot both be true at the same time, which is why we need some clarity on what exactly reform is intended to deliver and how that £5 billion black hole will be filled.
I have been through this a number of times with Mr Fraser, but we will go back through it again for his benefit.
First, what he calls the black hole is a projected gap that is based on projecting past spending patterns into the future. As Mr Fraser well knows, the Scottish spending review that was published last year identified, over a five-year period, how the Scottish Government would close that gap, as it is called, to ensure that income balances expenditure. That has already been laid out.
In relation to public service reform, Mr Fraser needs to understand the difference between cuts to services—that is, delivering reduced or fewer services—and being more efficient while delivering the same or better services. That is about taking waste out of the system, which I am sure that he will agree exists, in order to make those services more efficient.
We will come on to waste in a moment—I have some suggestions to make in that regard—but I refer Mr McKee to today’s Accounts Commission report on local government, which highlights the scale of the cuts that the Scottish Government has passed down to councils over the 19 years that it has been in power. I hope that that is not a model that the Government intends to follow.
Looking at this whole agenda, we cannot ignore the fact that the SNP has now been in power for almost two decades, so it has had 19 years to start addressing the issue. As my colleague Meghan Gallacher reminded members just a few moments ago, the Christie commission reported on it in 2011. Fifteen years on, we are still hearing about the need to make progress on the same themes of prevention, joined-up services and efficiency, but little progress has been made. The Government can talk a good game, but it needs to start actually delivering.
The SNP has promised before now to shrink the state, but instead it has grown bigger and more expensive. In June 2025, the then finance secretary, Shona Robison, set a target to reduce the public sector workforce by 0.5 per cent a year, but, by the fourth quarter of 2025, the head count, at 601,600, was higher than it had been in the previous year. She had already pledged to reduce the public sector workforce in 2023, but it has continuously increased. The devolved civil service alone has grown by almost 60 per cent since just 2018-19.
What should the Scottish Government do? In the spirit of being helpful, let me give the cabinet secretary some practical suggestions as to the way forward. First—and this is in line with the comments made by Michael Marra and other members—there needs to be a comprehensive assessment of the number of public bodies in Scotland and whether there is any duplication or room for rationalisation. Even the Information Commissioner has said that he is astonished at the number of public bodies in Scotland and that he keeps finding new ones that he did not know about. Whatever the value of their work, each one of those independent bodies needs to have its own board, chief executive, finance director, human resources functions, audit and reporting. When we produced our manifesto just a few weeks ago, we identified that, in the field of economy alone, there were more than 100 different organisations offering business advice. Therefore, we need a simplification and rationalisation of the landscape, and considerable savings could be made if we went down that route.
Secondly, the Scottish Government needs to reconsider its policy on no compulsory redundancies, because relying solely on voluntary severance means that the public sector could be left employing people whose jobs have effectively disappeared and cannot be redeployed elsewhere into valuable roles.
Thirdly, we need to look at the whole public sector estate and assess whether there can be much better sharing of resources. We want to see more public servants back in the office, working on a hybrid model, rather than the default being just working from home. However, even with that, we have substantial buildings sitting underutilised, and we could see significant rationalisation and cost saving through sharing. That sharing should not just be done at a Scottish Government level—it could also be done with local authorities or, indeed, UK Government bodies and agencies. We could start with international offices, for example.
[Made a request to intervene.]
I will happily give way again if I get the time back.
Cabinet secretary, I am afraid that Mr Fraser is in his last minute or so.
Perhaps the cabinet secretary could respond to that point in his winding-up speech. I will cover a couple of other points quickly.
Fourthly, we need to focus on front-line services. Do we really need an army of diversity, equality and inclusion managers in every organisation?
Fifthly, we need to end the practice of funding supposed arm’s-length charities through Government. These so-called charities depend almost entirely on Government funding for support and they use that money to lobby the Government for policy change. I am thinking of the Equality Network as a very good example. If people want to lobby the Government, they should do it with their own money, not at taxpayers’ expense.
Presiding Officer, we want to see—
You must wind up, Mr Fraser.
We want to see that black hole in the public finances closed. It needs to close. We need to hear the meat of the Government’s argument on what public service reform means. That is the point that is made in our amendment today, and I am very pleased to move it.
I move amendment S7M-00309.5, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:
“acknowledges that the Scottish National Party administration has failed to deliver on public service reform during its 19 years in power; agrees that the delivery of excellent and sustainable public services should be the goal of public service reform, rather than the preservation of existing corporate structures; notes that, while a long overdue commitment to deliver public service reform is welcome, the Scottish Government’s finances will remain unsustainable until Social Security Scotland’s ever-rising benefits bill is controlled, and calls on the Scottish Government to clearly set out how it plans to close the near £5 billion forecast black-hole in Scotland’s finances.”
15:54
I begin by welcoming the cabinet secretary to his new role and wishing him well. As we have already heard, Mr McKee has been handed what might become the defining task of this Government, which is tackling the £5 billion black hole in Scotland’s finances. As Murdo Fraser has just said, although the cabinet secretary insists that his role is not about cutting front-line services, time will certainly tell.
It is often said that voters are never wrong. As my colleague Willie Rennie said in his opening remarks of this parliamentary session, given the low turnout of voters and their rejection of some of the established parties, it is clear that people are pretty fed up. They are working hard and they are playing by the rules, yet things are simply not getting any better. Therefore, we are in urgent need of a change in approach.
Liberal Democrats were therefore encouraged by the First Minister’s comments at Prosper’s annual forum held last week. He was right to say that our planning system is broken and needs to “work better”. He was also right to say that we need to change how public services are delivered, starting
“from the needs of the citizen, of the business, of the community.”
However, I warn the cabinet secretary that he faces an uphill struggle to rebuild public confidence, particularly in rural Scotland. I agree with what Michael Marra said earlier. We must recognise that there has been almost 20 years of an SNP Government, and some contrition about what has not gone right or what has not been reformed would be welcome.
Too often under this SNP Government, the term “reform” has been code for ever-greater centralisation. The centralisation of the police led to the closure of the Inverness control room and the loss of local operators with detailed knowledge of our communities. The one-size-fits-all approach taken in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has left stations in north-west Sutherland, in effect, unavailable for years. There is also the long-term trend of concentrating specialist healthcare in the Highlands at an overstretched Raigmore hospital, or, worse, losing services altogether, not least vascular care—an issue that I know Edward Mountain of the Conservative Party raised in the previous session.
As I said in my first speech in the chamber last week, Liberal Democrats believe that the best decisions are made when local people are empowered to make them. I therefore welcome the intent shown in the empowering people, places and communities workstream, but I urge the Scottish Government to go further and give my constituents greater reassurances by using its rural renewal bill to put rural proofing into law.
Turning to the cabinet secretary’s commitment to making public services more efficient, I will use what I have left of my time to focus on one key area: social care, including delayed hospital discharge. It is quite astonishing that our NHS is losing £1.2 million a day because, on any given night, around 2,000 patients are stuck in hospital. Those are people who should be cared for in their communities at a fraction of the cost. If we are serious about tackling delayed discharge and reducing pressure on the NHS, the Scottish Government must deliver on its commitment to join up services.
In the Highlands, the end of life care together partnership, which is co-led by Highland Hospice, is a great example. I see Jenni Minto nodding in agreement. Between May 2023 and September 2024, people who accessed its helpline spent more than 4,000 fewer days in hospital, thereby generating savings of up to £3.8 million. Highland Hospice estimates that, with an investment of around £1 million a year, it could deliver that service right across the Highlands. That would be a compassionate choice. It would reduce delayed discharge, save money—which I know the cabinet secretary is looking to do—and ensure that more people receive the care that they want, where they want it, which is at home.
In closing, I commit the Scottish Liberal Democrats to holding the Government to account and working constructively where common ground can be found. However, we must be guided by the principle of empowering local communities, not by a one-size-fits-all approach.
I move amendment S7M-00309.1, to insert at end:
“notes concerns that previous reforms undertaken by the Scottish Government have led to the centralisation of public services, including through the creation of Police Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the proposed National Care Service; believes that the centralisation of services and the adoption of a one-size-fits-all approach have had a detrimental impact on rural Scotland, and further believes that any future public service reform should be guided by the principle of local decision-making, with communities empowered to shape the services on which they rely.”
We move to the open debate.
15:58
I congratulate Ivan McKee—I will call him super Ivan, given the scale of his task, based on his speech and the vision that he has set out today.
From listening to colleagues from across the chamber, I am struck that there is a lot of common ground here, and I think that we need to explore that. I am also struck that talk of black holes and gaps and the SNP failing to do X for 300 years misses the point and misses the opportunity. The black hole is predicted, if nothing else changes, so things are going to change. We are all agreed on that. Equally, we have the opportunity to redesign the state. That is a significant opportunity for all parties individually, and I say to them that the SNP is going to do this, so come and be part of it.
There are things that we can work on. I have read the manifestos of the other parties, and all of us in this chamber stood on a platform of change of one sort or another. We all know that what we are doing needs to change. There is a huge opportunity to redesign the state: to take a fresh sheet of paper and decide what services we need and what structures will best deliver them, to empower citizens and, crucially, to empower staff to decide what those services should be, and to design the structures that will best deliver them. Everything is on the table—everything has to be on the table.
It is not about filling a gap or reducing the head count; that misses the opportunity. It is about doing things more effectively and efficiently and delivering better services for the people we all serve. It is about identifying the need and designing the service. I am personally deeply agnostic about how we deliver those services and what structure is necessitated. I am game for changing everything, be that state, third sector or private.
The point has been made that, “The SNP could have done that.” Yes, it could have done that. I will take that criticism and accept it. However, often things could not be changed because there was not support in this chamber to do it. We can talk about 19 years of failure, as some people would say, or we can accept that the elections happened, that the SNP was massively endorsed by the people of Scotland and that we all have a job to do and common ground to do it. So, how about we raise our game and think about the future? I will take that criticism, but there is a lot that we can do together.
I point gently to the fact that Alyn Smith’s party had an outright majority in the Parliament for one of those parliamentary sessions, so not having had the numbers is not a foolproof excuse.
Alyn Smith will find common ground across different areas. My note of caution to him would be to say that, if we set the closing of the fiscal gap at the front end, we could come to the wrong decisions. Is that not the case?
I agree with that. That is my point about a fresh sheet of paper. There is an opportunity to do this. The First Minister is behind this, we have a cabinet secretary who is empowered to do this, and we know that it needs to be done. So, let us do it. We will not agree on everything—we cannot agree on everything—but there are things that we will agree on, such as the need for change, and so let us see about pushing that through.
If we are looking for ideas, I commend the Enlighten manifesto to the chamber. It has a number of excellent ideas in it. I do not endorse them all—the whips will be glad to hear that—but there is a good job of work in there, with some fresh ideas to take forward. It is a challenging read for all of us. If we are willing to think new thoughts, let us do it. While we are at it, let us think about some difficult questions.
[Made a request to intervene.]
Forgive me, but I need to make some progress.
While we are thinking about changing the status quo, I note that I was not elected and did not come into Scottish politics to administer stuff; I came into Scottish politics to change the face of Scotland, because I did not think that Scotland was working as well as it could. I believe that independence is a big part of that change. Others do not, which is fine. However, if we can agree that change is necessary, let us get on with it.
I have some questions of my own. We have local government in Scotland that is neither local nor government. Much of its money is spent before it gets there. Hard-working councillors up and down the country, of all parties, are trying to do their best, but they are operating with their hands tied and they are not responsible for their budget. The Forth Valley local authorities—Stirling, Clackmannanshire and Falkirk— are working very hard together, but we need an honest discussion about what local government is for.
Our planning system is, frankly, not fit for purpose. It is holding us back and slowing down development, and we need to accelerate it. On health boards, I ask: why do we have so many? What value is being added? Is it more effective? I think that we can restructure that.
We also do not have a national health service, but a national illness and accident service. Surely we need to get to preventative spend to make people live healthier lives. We have integration joint boards that are struggling right now, and they will struggle even more into the future.
Why are stretched local authorities operating schools? Surely a national framework with greater local accountability for headteachers running the primary schools, and better connections with colleges for lifelong learning, would give better skills as the world changes around us.
We have a huge task under way, colleagues: think about it, and it makes your head spin. However, it is a challenge that we all share. If we all accept that we need to work on this, then let us do that. Let us not think about what has not been done, but let us think about what we are going to do.
We have a number of first speeches in this session, so I remind people that the convention is not to intervene on a first speech.
I call Dawn Black to make their first speech.
16:04
I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which states that I am a councillor in Aberdeenshire Council.
It is an absolute pleasure to be here, in this chamber, representing the people of Angus North and Mearns. I thank the hard-working activists that did so much in the campaign to ensure my election and those who placed their trust in me.
I also pay tribute to my predecessor, Mairi Gougeon, who represented this constituency for 10 years as well as serving as the Minister for Public Health and Sport and, latterly, as the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands. From steering through historic land reform legislation to leading significant agricultural reform, Mairi demonstrated the power of kindness and respect in politics while always striving to build consensus across the chamber. She brought an incredible energy to her roles and I can only hope to match that.
As many of my colleagues have done in their first speeches, I claim my constituency as the best constituency in Scotland. It is a constituency that has a bit of everything, from incredible beaches and historic fishing harbours to market towns, an industrial port, a small city, beautiful glens and a Munro.
I moved to Stonehaven, in the north of the constituency, at the age of 13 when my family’s circumstances and my father’s job brought him to work in Aberdeen as part of the oil boom in the mid-1980s. It is in my soul and, despite having spent some time living overseas, it is and always will be home.
At the constituency’s most northerly point stands the iconic Dunnottar castle, as well as the historic Stonehaven auld toon and harbour. There is the Howe o’ the Mearns, which was the home of one of Scotland’s most famous and loved writers, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who had a love of the land and the earth and the communities that worked on it, which were so evocatively depicted in the Doric of “Sunset Song” and the other books of “A Scots Quair”. The rich agricultural heritage of the Mearns and Strathmore that he depicted lives on and is vital for our country’s food security.
There are the Angus glens of Glen Esk, Lee, Lethnot and Ogil, each of which is stunning in its own right. They lead up to the Cairngorms national park, which includes the easternmost Munro, Mount Keen. There is the small city of Brechin, which is rich in medieval heritage and the birthplace of Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar. Just down the road is Forfar, home of the delicious Forfar bridie and historically a major manufacturing hub for linen and jute and home to Ramsay Ladders.
On the coastal southernmost point of the constituency is Montrose, with its working port that is so vital for offshore support to the oil and gas industry and the emerging renewables industry through offshore wind maintenance and support operations. It also has the impressive Montrose basin, which is the largest inland saltwater basin in the UK and attracts more than 100,000 migratory birds every year.
All those places are beautiful and quintessentially characteristic of the north-east of Scotland, from the North Sea to the mountains of the Cairngorms. However, it is the people and the communities that make those places extra special—communities that are proud and passionate about their places. I have been proud to represent those communities as a community activist through my local business association and community council to becoming a local councillor in Aberdeenshire Council and now here in the Parliament.
I move to the essence of this debate. In the face of rising demand for public services and public finance pressures, there must be more partnership working. There is currently far too much duplication. More needs to be done to share services and there needs to be a willingness to work more collaboratively and efficiently—to work smarter.
It must be acknowledged that people who work and volunteer in communities and the third sector are experts in their fields. However, they are all too often marginalised or ignored by public authorities, and there needs to be far more respect for their contributions to local life and services. Those contributions often come from places of lived experience and concentrate on early intervention and prevention, without which many vital community services would, quite frankly, collapse. We also need to recognise that, rightly or wrongly, a pound in the hands of the third sector goes much further than when spent by either the Government or the local authority.
It is vital to understand that a one-size-fits-all approach just does not work. Every place has its own needs, foibles and quirks that need to be taken account of as we make decisions on legislation, guidance and delivery. Place must be taken account of and be respected. For that to happen, the culture needs to change. It is necessary to ensure that there is buy-in at all levels of Government and local authority delivery, and we will achieve that by breaking free of entrenched ways of working and listening to the staff and volunteers who work at the coal face.
I also question whether our local authorities are truly local—as my colleague Alyn Smith has already said, many are geographically so large that they cannot possibly be. To be frank, many of our local authorities are just too vast. Aberdeenshire—part of which makes up the northern part of my constituency, and where I am a councillor—has an area of 2,437 square miles, yet that is just the fourth-largest local authority in the country. It stretches from Braemar in the west, in the Cairngorms national park, to St Cyrus at its most southern coastal point, and to Peterhead, Fraserburgh and Banff on the north coast, and each of those places has vastly different needs. Economies of scale for procurement and management structures might be a justification for such large authorities, but they do not serve local communities well.
We cannot expect change in our local government and public services from just tinkering around the edges. We must be bold and radical in our thinking. I suggest that we look north to the model that is set by our Scandinavian neighbours, where local authorities truly are local. Since 1996, in Scotland, we have had 32 local authorities, averaging a population size of around 175,000. However, in Finland, for example, there are 308 municipalities with a median of just 6,000 residents. That is truly local. Although they are overseen by 19 regional councils that handle broader regional planning and development, the municipalities have a much higher degree of autonomy, as well as the power to levy local taxes. It means that all local decisions are truly local and made by people living and working in the space that the decisions impact, which is similar to what we had before 1996.
As we look to transform our public services, we must change the way in which things are done, work with our communities and empower them to ensure the provision of public services that fulfil their needs.
16:12
I note that the register of members’ interests will show that I worked until 8 May for Scottish Autism, which is a third sector organisation.
As Michael Marra laid out at the beginning of the debate, Scottish Labour fully recognises the need for public service reform. Since the shape of that reform is still evolving, I offer three thoughts that should contribute to the framing of the decisions.
First, I hope that public service reform is undertaken with a long-term perspective in mind. In recent times, there have been useful contributions to the public debate by Carnegie UK, which is based here in Scotland, and other organisations about the need for policy making to look beyond the horizons of a five-year parliamentary session and to consider the needs of future generations.
I understand that there will be pressure for quick wins in public service reform, but, as we look to employ new technologies and adopt new ways of working, I hope that we explicitly consider future generations—whether in terms of the skills and training that we need or the sustainability of the changes that we make—and that we acknowledge the technological, environmental and demographic changes that Michael Marra laid out at the beginning of the debate.
Having worked in public services for the past two decades, I note that we have seen many pilots of new ways of working, innovative projects that demonstrate how we can do things differently, and cross-sectoral partnerships and collaborations. However, all too often, we do not see long-term evaluation of impacts or the roll-out of successful projects, even when we know that there is a need for systemic change. We already have multiple evaluations, pilots and proofs of concept that we can draw on across a range of policy areas, so let us not miss this opportunity to implement that learning system-wide for long-term benefit. We do not need to reinvent the wheel when we have tried things that work.
Secondly, and with that first thought in mind, I welcome the motion’s focus on preventative spending. We have heard consensus on that in the chamber today. Like many who have worked in public services, I lament that, 15 years on from the recommendations of the Christie report, we have not seen the full-scale shift to prevention that many of us know is needed. People in mental health crisis, young people with additional support needs who struggle to cope in busy classrooms, young people who find themselves on the path to crime or addiction, and those with health difficulties that go unchecked until they present at accident and emergency—all those failures bear a heavy human cost and require a significant resource to address. I think that we are agreed that we will not avert that crisis-driven spend without significant upstream investment, so I look forward to seeing the plans brought forward in line with the Scottish Government’s motion.
Thirdly, I appeal for recognition in our planning and thinking that our public services are delivered not only by the public sector. Next week, there will be a separate debate about the role of the third sector—one that I welcome—but thinking about the public sector and third sector in a siloed way will not help us. Scotland relies on the agility of the third sector to fill in gaps where statutory services are not present and we must be mindful that, if statutory services retreat in any way, those gaps will get bigger.
The third sector provides a significant proportion of our social care services. Not-for-profit service providers innovate and provide specialist services on behalf of local authorities and health and social care partnerships across Scotland; and charities and voluntary groups often provide the services that fill the preventative function envisaged in the Government’s motion. As many charities grow from particular communities or groups with shared experience, voluntary sector organisations are often well placed to engage people who rely on those services in the processes of user involvement, decision making and planning that the motion envisages. Yet, all too often, third sector services are commissioned on a short-term basis, with little certainty about contract renewal. That often leaves their employees on more precarious contracts while budgets are settled, and with less beneficial pay and conditions than their public sector peers.
Often, those third sector preventative services are the first to be cut when times are tough. Many third sector organisations are in stressful, financially precarious situations right now and there is anxiety about what public service reform will look like. Inevitably, the third sector will be impacted, so the Scottish Government’s promised third sector partnership needs to be firmed up in dialogue with the process of public service reform.
You must wind up now.
As with the consideration of the impact on future generations and the commitment to prevention, I hope that, when we talk about public sector reform, we can build in serious consideration of the impact on the third sector.
I call Zen Ghani, who is making their first contribution.
16:16
I declare my interest: I am an elected councillor on Glasgow City Council.
I congratulate you, Deputy Presiding Officer, on your election, and Ivan McKee on his appointment as Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform.
It is the greatest honour and privilege of my life to serve the people of Glasgow Cathcart and Pollok in the Parliament. I do not take lightly the trust that they have placed in me and I will work hard every day during the next five years to deliver the change that they expect.
Before I talk about the constituency, I will mention my two predecessors, both of whom served their constituencies with a dedication that I aspire to follow. First, James Dornan diligently served the people of Glasgow Cathcart for the past 15 years. I saw at first hand how he always put constituents first in everything and anything that he did. He consistently went above and beyond to secure positive outcomes for the people of Cathcart.
Secondly, Humza Yousaf served the people of Glasgow Pollok with passion. Not only was he a committed local MSP but, as we all know, he served this country with dedication in government and in his time as First Minister. Many people across Scotland will remember the dignity and compassion that he showed during one of the most difficult periods in his time as First Minister, when members of his family were trapped in Gaza. The concern felt across this Parliament and the country for their safety demonstrated the very best of our shared humanity. I know that members will join me in wishing Humza, Nadia and their family all the very best for the future.
It is fair to say that, without people such as Humza being elected and breaking the many glass ceilings that he did, people like me might not be in the chamber today. I am sure that members will join me in thanking James and Humza for all that they did for their constituencies and in wishing them all the best for the future.
Glasgow Cathcart and Pollok is a constituency like no other. It is defined by its diversity, by its rich history and, above all, by communities filled with hope and determination. It is home to communities such as those of old Pollok, Nitshill, Darnley, Crookston, Arden, Newlands, Auldhouse, Pollokshaws, Croftfoot, Cathcart, Castlemilk and Kilmarnock. It is a constituency that is rich in civic pride. That spirit is reflected in many organisations including the Southwest Arts and Music Project—SWAMP—the Village Storytelling Centre, Home-Start Glasgow South, Barlia football centre and Threehills community supermarket. Those are all vital community resources and make Cathcart and Pollok what it is today.
My constituency includes places such as Castlemilk, a community that has produced generations of talented footballers who have gone on to represent Scotland on the world stage, Carmunnock, Glasgow’s only remaining village, and Nitshill, which has a rich history in coal mining. It also includes the two biggest parks in the city, Linn park and Pollok country park, with the latter being home to Highland cows and the world-famous Burrell Collection.
When my grandparents came to Scotland in the 1950s and built their lives, first in Stornoway and later in Tarbert on the Isle of Harris, they arrived with little more than hope, the ability to work hard and a determination to build a better future for their family. They could never have imagined that one day their grandson would take a seat in our national Parliament. Their story is not unique. It is the story of so many families across Scotland who worked hard, contributed to their communities and wanted their children and grandchildren to have opportunities that they never had.
I am proud to stand here today because of the sacrifices that my grandparents made and the values that they passed on to me. However, this honour would not have been achieved without the hard work of the activists who dedicated their time to speaking to residents across the constituency. My thanks go out to every one of them.
I would also like to mention one person in particular who inspired me to get involved in politics and who always challenged my thinking on topics—my former modern studies teacher Thomas Donnelly. It is surreal to have gone from watching First Minister’s question time and parliamentary debates in modern studies classes in 2018 to finding myself sitting in this chamber, and I will use this opportunity every day to deliver the change that people in Glasgow Cathcart and Pollok, and across Scotland, expect.
We were all elected to serve the people of Scotland and to improve their lives and the services that they use. Whether members support independence or support Scotland remaining part of the UK, it is clear from the first few weeks of this parliamentary session that there is more that unites us than divides us.
That brings me to today’s debate on reforming our public services and ensuring that our constituents get the best services possible in modern-day Scotland. The SNP is committed to reforming our public services so that they can meet the challenges of the day and of the future. We have all seen from events in recent years that the world is moving at a much quicker pace than ever before. Every month, across the world, new technologies and innovative ideas come into force, and if we are to ensure that our various public bodies can meet the needs of the future, it is vital that we embrace such reform as a united Parliament.
Technologies such as artificial intelligence have the potential to reduce administrative burdens, to support our workforce and to improve the delivery of public services. Using AI effectively will help us to ensure that public services are more responsive, efficient and accessible for the people we serve.
I know that progress is what many of my constituents want, and I am sure that it is what many other members’ constituents want, too. I ask members to support the motion, please, so that we can ensure that our public services are fit for the future.
16:23
I would like to continue the theme that Murdo Fraser and Meghan Gallacher started, which Alyn Smith followed up on, by suggesting that, in Ivan McKee, we have Ivan the Great.
Prior to moving to Argyll and Bute, I lived in Glasgow and worked for BBC Scotland, where I had the pleasure of using my skills as an accountant to empower people to make programmes as creatively and efficiently as possible and give best value to the audience. I have never made a television or radio programme in my life, but I know that, when I had to provide business plans or budgets, the best people to give me the right information to crunch the numbers were the programme makers themselves.
I believe that I created an atmosphere of collaboration, not competition, between different programme makers, and I believe that I gained their trust. Therefore, I believe that learning from those on the front line can drive change and enable progress to be made.
Islay has been my home for the past 15 years. What struck me when I first moved there was the importance of the role that the public sector plays in rural and island communities. People in such communities are closer to the public sector. We see the consequences of public sector decision making. We know the refuse collectors, the teachers live up the road from us and we bump into the doctor in the Co-op. The public sector, which provides the services that we all need, is the beating heart of small communities, and I thank it for its work. I would argue that it is the people who provide those services who know where efficiencies can be achieved, and I agree with the cabinet secretary’s point that organisations need to be structured in a way that allows such dialogue to take place.
When I served in government, I visited NHS Ayrshire and Arran with the women’s health champion, Professor Anna Glasier, and we saw two amazing examples of small teams working together to find ways of integrating disciplines and using new technologies to improve women’s health and change the culture. They knew that they had no more budget. However, they also knew that, by utilising that budget differently, they could invest in prevention and improve women’s health, which is exactly what Joe Long was talking about. I also highlight that the hospital at home service is very successful in my community.
I support the new thinking around subnational planning in our NHS to spread good practice but, having listened to constituents, I have the following observations. When it comes to specialisms such as hip and knee replacements, a national service is the way forward. However, kidney dialysis services should, in my view, be local. I have seen the difference that the dialysis service on the Isle of Bute has made there and how different that is to the experience of my constituents in Lorn and the isles, who have to travel to Fort William for dialysis. I hope that distinction will be recognised by the Government and acted on by cabinet secretaries.
I attended many hustings during the election campaign and the question of ferries always came up. It was clear from the questions we were asked that the triangle of CalMac Ferries, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd and Transport Scotland does not work. I am pleased that our manifesto includes a commitment to look at that. One suggestion—the Norwegian operating model—was considered and I hope that both Mr McKee and Mr Flynn will take that on board, so to speak.
I strongly believe that the fantastic third sector will help to provide the answers to many of our questions, as others have said. Those in that sector understand the people whom they support, are willing to find innovative ways of working, and are trusted by communities, as Dawn Black mentioned.
In March, I attended a fashion show in Oban, where four local third sector organisations came together to collaborate—not compete—to raise funds for the amazing work that they do across the Oban area. It was fun, colourful and had a clear message: look what we can do if we are empowered to pool our scarce resources. I would advocate for a memorandum of understanding between statutory bodies and the third sector to enable such collaboration, and I absolutely recognise what David Green said about Highland Hospice.
In the time that I have left, I will drop some pebbles into the pool and hope that the ripples that they create will shift public service reform in the right direction. Dawn Black was absolutely correct to talk about Mairi Gougeon and her work on the good food nation, which could really empower local procurement and community wealth building. I heard a suggestion from Argyll and Bute Council about childminders looking after children outwith their homes. I also think, as others have said, that we should move away from yearly budget allocations and, as I mentioned yesterday, I think that we need simpler forms. We should listen directly to communities that find solutions to situations. For example, Tiree has a community vet, a solar array and a community interest company for local carers. Those are all things that local people are doing to try to change the way in which their community operates.
As you know, Presiding Officer, I am trying to bring Gaelic into the chamber. There is a proverb that I hope the cabinet secretary and others will take note of, and which recognises the importance of Scotland’s public service teams. That proverb is, “An rud a nithear gu math, chithear a bhuil,” or, “What is well done will be shown by results.”
The final speaker in the open debate is Gary Bouse, who is making their first contribution.
16:28
Congratulations on your election, Deputy Presiding Officer.
Before I continue, I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests: I am a serving councillor in Falkirk.
Most of us who are elected here have the same ambition, which is to do our best for our constituents who have placed their trust in us as their representatives. I am deeply honoured to be elected as the member for Falkirk West, the constituency that has been my home for more than three decades.
Having lived, and brought up my family, in Larbert, I have been incredibly well served by two giants of Scottish politics: Dennis Canavan and Michael Matheson—Dennis from 1999 to 2007 and Michael for almost two decades. Both were first elected in 1999 and both have a legacy of exemplary service to Falkirk West. In government, Michael Matheson made a hugely positive impact, introducing the world-leading domestic abuse legislation criminalising coercive and controlling behaviour, establishing self-directed support, renationalising Scotland’s railways and banning the display of cigarettes at the point of sale. In addition, he is always standing up for the workers of Alexander Dennis.
I do not claim that my constituency is the best in Scotland—if you know, you know. Falkirk has a deep history, which runs from the Romans, with the Antonine wall, to the Jacobite period and then to the industrial revolution. Without the Carron works, the industrial revolution does not happen in Scotland. We also have the odd thing to go and see. One or two members may have heard of a thing called the Kelpies in Helix park and the Falkirk wheel, which is an amazing place to go. We also have secrets such as Callendar park. If members have been to Callendar house, they will know that it is a wonderful place, especially for an afternoon tea. I have been there many times.
Although I plan to chart my own course in this place, it is with grateful thanks that I take up the mantle to be the best MSP that I can be and to honour the legacy of the two gentlemen who have gone before me. My commitment to the people of Falkirk West is to act thoughtfully and to carry out my duties with fairness, integrity and respect for everyone.
My earliest years were spent growing up in Glasgow tenement slums, where life could be extremely challenging but for the people who were around us. The deep sense of community that I have today grew from those people helping people, and I see that sense of community across my constituency and throughout Scotland. Cycling Without Age Scotland, which is based in Larbert, where I live, brings freedom and joy to people who have found themselves isolated at home or wherever they are cared for. Falkirk District Scouts builds resilient young people and gives them opportunities and experiences to explore and contribute to a bigger cause. I also note the work that is undertaken by Keeping Larbert and Stenhousemuir Beautiful. Those groups support with dignity those in the area who are most in need, breaking down social isolation, organising community events and nurturing and strengthening our communities, which are empowered to come together for everyone’s benefit.
However, transforming our public sector requires partnership. As in business, we must ensure that resources are deployed effectively to produce the best possible results while reducing waste and duplication. Most important, we must ensure that services are fairly and appropriately financed in order to guarantee positive outcomes. Key to that is engaging our dedicated public sector workforce and service users and fostering an environment in which they can take ownership of change. Falkirk Council has many examples of that, and I would welcome an opportunity to discuss that further with the cabinet secretary. I take this opportunity to invite him to visit Falkirk and see that in action.
I urge the Government to take forward any action that will protect jobs, including in Falkirk West, where recent announcements of job losses at Alexander Dennis and Hescott Engineering have added further pressure to an already precarious situation. Scotland, like any normal independent country, should have the ability to use public funding to support local jobs and protect our vital industries. Where the Scottish Government can act, it has done so.
However, I make a further appeal. The United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 and the Subsidy Control Act 2022 are holding Scotland back from being able to meaningfully improve our prospects and industries. In the meantime, while the Scottish and UK Governments are engaging on matters that are vital to my constituents’ livelihoods, amending that legislation should be the foundation on which we build. If the UK Government is, as we expect, unwilling to accommodate, it should get out of the way and let us in Scotland do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons and for the benefit of our businesses, families and communities, because that is what our constituents expect of us.
We move to closing speeches. We are running behind, so if those who are not making a first speech could stick strictly to their times, that would be very helpful.
16:35
Too often, the SNP has confused reform with reorganisation and reorganisation with centralisation. Real reform should push power closer to communities, not further away from them. However, this afternoon’s debate has demonstrated a broad agreement that Scotland faces significant challenges in delivering reform to our public services and, in doing so, empowering our communities and those who use those services.
I was therefore heartened by the thoughtful contributions from SNP members—including, in particular, those who were making their first speeches—demonstrating a willingness to work across parties. I whole-heartedly agree with Dawn Black that a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work and that many of our local authorities are too large. Dawn Black would be very welcome to go to my website and sign my petition to break up Highland Council.
I was particularly struck by Alyn Smith’s positive speech, in which he said that we are here to redesign the state. That is a bold task. If the Government is willing to take it on, it will go way beyond this one session of the Parliament, so the cabinet secretary will be sat in that position for a long time to come—beyond the next election.
The Liberal Democrats wish to work constructively with the Government rather than simply criticising. We have three simple positive tests for reform. First, does it increase local accountability? How will local councils, communities and individuals influence decisions in their area?
Secondly, does it improve outcomes? That key test is not whether the structure has changed but whether the final outcome for our constituents has improved.
Thirdly, does it strengthen prevention? During his Radio Scotland interview this morning, the cabinet secretary used the word “prevention” several times, but I am still no clearer, even after my intervention on him, what shape he thinks preventative services will take. A list of recent initiatives is simply not enough.
The cabinet secretary cites the creation of Police Scotland as the perfect example of SNP public service reform. Yesterday, he looked on enviously as I offered the Deputy First Minister a road trip to Skye. I say to the cabinet secretary that there is a spare seat for him, so he can come with me, and I will introduce him to police officers who, privately, will tell him that they view Police Scotland as the greater Strathclyde police force, even 10 years after reform. They will share their experience of his party’s flagship public service reform.
Following the creation of Police Scotland, officers are still overstretched in rural areas. Huge swathes of the Highlands are covered by just two officers on a weekend. They are put in the intolerable position of deciding between responding to acts of vandalism and dangerous parking along Glen Etive or heading to a domestic abuse incident in Fort William. They have to think twice about whether to arrest an offender, as that would require a two-hour journey up the A82 to a custody suite in Inverness, because the local facility is unmanned or unavailable.
For ministers, centralisation can look efficient on a spreadsheet. For someone in Portree, Mallaig, Lochaline or Kingussie, it often means that decisions are being taken further away, by people who know less than they do about the community that is affected.
The test of reform is not whether civil servants and ministers here in Edinburgh have reorganised services. It is whether people receive better services in their own community. Too often, the SNP’s previous reforms have passed the first test and failed the second.
16:40
I begin by congratulating all the members who have, this afternoon, made their first speeches in the chamber, including Dawn Black, Alyn Smith, Zen Ghani and Gary Bouse. All spoke passionately about their communities and predecessors. I refer to Gary Bouse’s speech in particular, because his constituency is part of the region that I represent. He is absolutely right to mention the jobs in Falkirk and concerns about the number of industries and businesses that have closed in recent times. I welcome the opportunity to work on a cross-party basis on that issue, because we know how important it is to the people of Falkirk.
I come to the crux of the debate. Two hours on, the Government has not properly explained how it plans to reform public services in Scotland. If it is not about cuts, what is it about? Is it savings, efficiencies or streamlining? I know those terms well, and I know this story. When I was a councillor, we were instructed to pursue cuts every year in order to agree a budget. After all, balancing the books is a legal requirement. Councillors in the chamber—past and present—will know that.
However, the Scottish Government has had no qualms about taking an axe to local government budgets over many years. Although ministers in the chamber passed the sentence, it was councillors who were left to carry out the difficult decisions, reduce services and manage the consequences in our communities. That is finally catching up with the Scottish National Party. As Michael Marra said, after nearly two decades in government, the SNP has finally been forced to confront the consequences of its decisions. The looming £5 billion black hole in Scotland’s finances will simply not disappear by itself, especially when the Government spends money as though it is going out of fashion.
The Government is now in the same position that it has put councillors in year after year, and it has only two realistic options: cut spending or raise taxes. Instead, it appears to have chosen a third route: rebrand the problem as public service reform. As Murdo Fraser rightly pointed out, the new cabinet secretary has already insisted that public service reform does not mean cuts. I hate to break it to the cabinet secretary, but “public service reform” is precisely the kind of language that councils have long been encouraged to use when trying to soften the blow of reductions in services. We have been here before. Two decades on, we are still hearing the same promises about joined-up services, prevention, efficiency and transformation. That is why I asked the cabinet secretary earlier what is going to be different this time. What is the point of holding a debate when there is nothing concrete before the Parliament to scrutinise? Given the SNP’s track record on delivery, why should anyone take it at its word?
The Scottish Conservatives have attempted to be constructive by making practical proposals that could help to deliver meaningful public service reform. We believe that it is necessary and the right thing to do, but any serious discussion must also address the ever-rising welfare bill. If the Government is genuinely committed to reducing demand on public services and creating a more sustainable system, it cannot continue to ignore one of the fastest-growing areas of public expenditure. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has made it clear that spending on social security is rising more quickly than funding provided through the block grant adjustment. By 2026-27, the gap will exceed £1 billion, and it is expected to grow further.
The question that the Government never seems willing to answer is this: if the benefits system is costing more every year, why are so many of the underlying problems facing Scotland getting worse? Every pound that is absorbed by the spiralling welfare budget is a pound that is not being spent to tackle the root causes. The result is a vicious cycle—less investment in opportunity, more economic inactivity, greater reliance on benefits and ever-growing pressures on public services and finances.
No one is arguing against supporting those who genuinely need help. However, when we look at compassion, we also need to look at whether the current system is delivering the outcomes that people deserve.
I am in my final few seconds. During the debate, we have heard a few different phrases to describe the cabinet secretary—we have had “Super Ivan”, “Ivan the Great” and “Ivan the Terrible”, but time will tell which version of the cabinet secretary will be his legacy in this role.
16:45
As I close the debate for the Scottish Greens, I return to the question of what public service reform means for communities on the ground, because communities across Scotland are already doing remarkable work. The voluntary and community sector delivers services that are essential to daily life, from social care and community transport to services that tackle isolation and support people through crisis.
About 40 per cent of the sector’s income comes from public funding, including more than £1 billion from our local authorities and a further £1 billion from the Scottish Government. That tells us something important: not that the sector is overreliant on public funding, as Murdo Fraser’s comments indicated, but that its work is not peripheral but central to how public services in Scotland function.
In the south of Scotland, we see community wealth building in action through development trusts taking on local assets, creating jobs and keeping wealth circulating locally. We see regional partnerships, such as the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere, bringing together communities, businesses and public bodies to deliver economic development that works with nature and strengthens local resilience. That is prevention in practice, and that is empowerment done well.
Michael Marra, in his intervention earlier, talked about empowerment. Communities should have power, but they also need support; otherwise, we are just passing the buck. We also have to be honest about the pressures that that brings. Too often, empowerment risks becoming offloading, and that risk sits at the heart of the strategy, because although it talks about prevention and empowerment, it is also driven by a need to deliver savings, which raises a real concern that we end up cutting capacity today while promising transformation tomorrow.
In many rural communities, residents are now taking on roles that were once delivered by the state, such as running transport schemes, building homes and keeping services alive. They do that because they care deeply about their communities, but they do it unpaid, often without adequate support and sometimes at real risk to their own health and wellbeing. That is not a sustainable model for public services, and it is happening in a wider context in which Scotland has about 62,000 fewer public sector workers than it did in 2008, all while demand continues to rise, particularly due to our ageing population.
Communities are being asked to carry more responsibility at the same time as the system around them is under strain. We have to be clear about what that means for workers, too. Reform cannot simply mean a smaller workforce, more automation and more pressure on those who remain. If there is to be a just transition, workers must be partners in change, not the price of it.
That pressure does not fall evenly. As David Green said, decentralisation is fantastic, but localism without resources is not empowerment. It is responsibility without support, again. We need to match local decision making with long-term, reliable funding, not short-term competitive pots. Some communities have the capacity, confidence and professional expertise to navigate complex funding systems, but others do not. The evidence from the voluntary sector is that short-term, competitive and bureaucratic funding arrangements create instability, funding delays and growing stress for staff and volunteers, especially in the places that face the greatest disadvantage.
The result of all that is a quiet inequality. Wealthier, better resourced communities manage to retain services. Communities with fewer resources, which often face deeper poverty and poorer health outcomes, lose out. That is not community empowerment; it is structural unfairness.
Community wealth building must therefore be about shifting power and resources, not just expecting communities and the third sector to fill gaps as the state steps back. There is a real danger that we continue to talk about prevention while budgets remain locked in a crisis response. If we are serious about prevention—I am grateful to Andrew Baxter for raising the issue in his first intervention—we must move beyond short-term thinking. Community organisations repeatedly tell us that one-year funding cycles undermine long-term planning, workforce stability and the ability to build on what is already working.
We know what helps: multiyear funding, flexibility and full cost recovery. Early evidence from fair funding approaches shows improved staff retention, stronger planning and greater resilience. None of that is terribly radical. It is simply aligning funding with the reality of how change happens. Prevention does not deliver instant savings; it requires upfront investment and patience. Investing in youth work now will reduce pressures on the public purse in the future, whether that is through welfare, health or justice costs. As mentioned earlier, the Christie commission told us that years ago, and it remains true.
Public service reform should be an opportunity, not a code for cuts, as we heard from Malcolm Offord. It should be an opportunity to build a wellbeing economy that is rooted in place, reduce inequality rather than entrench it and genuinely share power with communities. However, that will happen only if we are honest about the choices that are in front of us, because reform cannot be a cover for doing more with less and it cannot be austerity repackaged in the language of empowerment.
The question for the Parliament is whether we will step up in the way that our communities have and back empowerment with investment, whether we will replace short-termism with certainty, and whether public service reform will be about fairness, not withdrawal. If we get that right, we will not just preserve services but build a Scotland that is fairer, greener and more resilient for the long term.
I call Max Bannerman to make their first speech.
16:52
I take this opportunity to record my formal congratulations to the Deputy Presiding Officer on her appointment and to the cabinet secretary for his appointment to the public service reform brief.
Everyone in the chamber knows that holding public office is a tremendous privilege, but it is an even higher honour when you have been sent to the Parliament by the people back home. Highlanders are rightly known the world over for their independence of mind and spirit and I think that they made that clear in sending not one, but two, Reform MSPs to Holyrood at the recent election. I pledge to always stand up for their interests.
I pay a fulsome tribute to my predecessors. Fergus Ewing embodies that Highland indefatigableness. He has campaigned on the A9 and the A96 for decades and he will be sorely missed by his constituents. As a new MSP, I have greatly valued his wise counsel. I also pay tribute to my friend Douglas Ross, who will be missed, too—possibly not by the Government front bench but, certainly, by his former constituents in Moray and beyond. Although he stepped down from the Conservative front bench at the end of the previous parliamentary session, it often seemed to some of us that he was still the de facto leader of the Opposition in the chamber. I wish him well.
Finally, I place on public record my deep gratitude to a great friend, mentor and fierce advocate for the Highlands, former MSP Mary Scanlon CBE. Some in the chamber, including the First Minister, will remember her well. When I was growing up outside Tain in Easter Ross, Mary was the standard bearer of centre-right politics in the Highlands. If I do nothing else in the chamber, I hope to follow her example of dedicated service in my five years in the Parliament.
I recall Mary Scanlon imparting to me that, in the north, we do politics a bit differently from the rest of the country. People in the Highlands have no time for endless hyperpartisan posturing if it gets nothing done. Instead, they expect us to leave the party rosettes at the door and be judged on our individual actions and merits. I am not talking about consensus for the sake of consensus. However, in keeping with true Highland tradition, I will work with anyone in this chamber and everyone across the region to address the geographical, demographic and economic challenges that our unique part of the world faces.
Public service reform is key to addressing those challenges. It might sound just like a phrase from a Government strategy document, but, in my region, public service reform will mean the difference between whether the ferry sails on Monday morning, whether the maternity wards in towns are open and whether someone can see their GP without making a 100-mile round trip.
Let me be clear. I am a Reform MSP who is for public service reform. I want it to succeed but I do not want it to be done on the back of my constituents or to be used as yet another excuse to push a centralising agenda. As much as the inclusion of this portfolio in the Cabinet is welcome, the Government cannot be allowed to reinvent the wheel. The Christie commission laid all of the issues out, warts and all, in 2011. Why, then, are we holding this debate today? It is simple: it is because of a failure to deliver. Let us examine the evidence. Scotland has accumulated countless non-departmental bodies, directorates and other quangos, and layer upon layer of management and duplication that no business in my region would tolerate for a week.
Reform should mean chopping middle-management bureaucrats, meaning fewer managers and more nurses, fewer strategies and more services. It should mean measuring by outcomes rather than inputs—that is, by whether the patient is seen and whether the child is taught well at the local school.
Let us look at lifeline ferries. The story of CalMac and Ferguson Marine is, I am sorry to say, a case study in how public services fail, with ferries delivered years late and hundreds of millions over budget, and islanders paying the price in cancelled sailings and lost trade. We all know that ministers can be dragged to this Parliament to answer for such shortcomings ad infinitum, but that makes no difference to my constituents who want a boat that sails—nothing more, nothing less.
On health, Dr Gray’s hospital in Elgin—in relation to which I declare an interest, as the doctors there saved my mother’s life—has had to send expectant mothers down the road to Aberdeen or Inverness to have their babies because we could not sustain the service closer to home. NHS Highland, meanwhile, wrestles with serious financial pressures. A reformed health service should be protecting such services, not quietly centralising them out of existence.
I want to see the sort of radical reform that we have not seen since the dawn of this Parliament, which reconvened in 1999—nothing less than a radical restructure of the state. Instead of the moniker of Ivan the Terrible, the cabinet secretary might be more comfortable with being known as Ivan the Radical, because public service reform must run in tandem with real devolution and decentralisation. We should push power and money out of this Parliament, out of the quangos and the ministerial departments, into our communities and on to our front lines.
We have already seen some of that in action in my region. Look at the community wind farms in Lewis, which operate without vast subsidy and generate revenue for the local area. That is an example of a community that is taking responsibility and just getting on with it.
I will be an unashamed advocate for that sort of thing in Parliament, because there are consequences for getting our approach wrong. Every ward closed and every job cut that is not replaced by one in the private sector will be another reason for a young family to leave the area. Reform must reverse the hollowing out of rural Scotland, not accelerate it.
I will apply one test to every public service reform that comes to this chamber: does it make life better for the expectant mum in Thurso, the crofter in Lewis and the parent in Elgin? Where the answer is yes, ministers will find me a constructive colleague. In that regard, I have been heartened by some of the comments today, particularly those of Alyn Smith. However, where the answer is no, I will stand up for my constituents and hold this Government to account.
I will finish on a personal note, where I began. The motto of my old school, Dornoch Academy, is, in the Gaelic, “Le ionracas ‘s dìchioll”, which means “With integrity and industry”. That is the standard that I will set myself, so that every week when I leave this place and go back home, I will be able to look my constituents in the eye, knowing that I have done my very best to advance their interests.
16:59
My entry in the register of members’ interests shows that I am a councillor in South Lanarkshire.
I congratulate all those who have made their first speech in the chamber today. I will say that making a first speech is not quite as daunting as the prospect of making a second, because the second time around the Parliament can answer back.
With that in mind, I thought that I might start tactfully—and, indeed, tactically—with some points of consensus. Most of us agree that a forward-thinking approach to public service reform is about emphasising the importance of place, breaking down silos to become more community focused, partnership, collaboration and prevention, and the shift towards early intervention. I hope that we can also agree that the workforce across our public services is an informed, experienced resource, and that empowering staff, whether they are front line or back office, is critical to developing a progressive approach to public service reform.
Our amendment is not about diminishing the Government motion, but about steering a consensus over what happens next. We believe that our approach to public service reform can align with our approach to community wealth building, densifying local supply chains, fairer procurement, bringing contracts back in-house where it saves taxpayers money and recirculating local wealth. That can all contribute to fairer, more resilient local economies. It always has been and always will be the case that a strong economy is the foundation on which to build good public services, and that is especially true under the current fiscal framework.
The Scottish Government recognises the fundamental importance of partnership to the delivery of the public service reform strategy, so we are asking it to understand the implications for the third sector, to work with trade unions as social partners in delivering fair work and to observe the European Charter of Local Self-Government, which is already endorsed on a cross-party basis.
There is common ground—as there has been in this debate—with the Government and other parties, as well as with the cabinet secretary, whom I will refer to simply as Ivan McKee.
[Made a request to intervene.]
Although Lorna Slater seemed to be falling over herself to find reasons to disagree with us, I thought that we had a lot of consensus with the Green contributions on community wealth and fair work, as well as with the Liberal Democrats’ points about localism.
Just as there are points of consensus, there are areas of real tension, too. The public service reform strategy is a Government strategy. The target to reduce the workforce by 0.5 per cent per year until the end of the decade is a Government target. I have every confidence that local government will collaborate on improvement and transformation and I think that the Scottish Government can learn from local government about improvement and transformation. However, let me be clear: a central Government strategy should not be used to dictate the size of the local government workforce or to justify balancing the books on the backs of Scotland’s councils.
There is a core tension at the heart of the strategy between cost reduction and transformational change. Transformational change requires either patient long-term change—and a fiscal reckoning is looming at some point in this Parliament—or up-front investment and, therefore, a period of double running costs as we invest in alternatives to reactive spending, as the Scottish Trades Union Congress has warned. My concern is that that strategy could fall down in the lack of a plan for transformational investment.
In the time that I have left, I will pick up on a couple of points that were made in the debate. Both Joe Long and the cabinet secretary were keen to emphasise that the agenda is very much about public service reform and not simply about public sector reform. I felt that the cabinet secretary was slightly more self-aware in the strategy document, in which he acknowledged what a number of members have said—that we have not gone fast enough or far enough.
Lord Offord made an interesting point, but I think that he came to the wrong conclusion. It is true that, other than at three points in our history—two world wars and the Covid pandemic—public spending, as a share of the UK economy, has never been higher, so why do we not feel the benefits of that? I do not think that it is just about quangos and waste—it cannot be. It goes back to the issue of prevention. There is too much failure demand in the system, because there is too much inequality and there was too much austerity, and we cannot go back to that.
It is testament to the wisdom and foresight of the Christie commission that the ideas that shaped its report are still powerful today, but it is dispiriting to know that so much of its ambition failed to materialise. Last year, delayed discharge cost the NHS in Scotland £440 million—a figure that is almost identical to the reported funding gap in Scotland’s health and social care partnerships. The prison population is at a record high while local government often has to squeeze those services that give us safer communities. Tonight, 10,000 children will go to bed in temporary accommodation, while social housing starts have fallen to a record low. That is the cost and absurdity of inaction, and that is why rewiring our public services and how we govern is so urgent.
Presiding Officer,
“Ultimate responsibility for reform rests … with the Scottish Government. I urge them to act quickly and decisively—as a society we no longer have time for delay.”
Those were the words of Campbell Christie in 2011—15 years ago. This session, the new Parliament has to be different. It is time to act and time to change, because people’s futures and people’s services depend on it.
Before I call the cabinet secretary, I say to members that, if they seek to make an intervention, they should remember to stand up and ask to make an intervention. I notice that buttons are pressed but, sometimes, the speakers do not see who is trying to intervene.
17:05
On reflection, I am happy with the extent of the contributions that we have heard this afternoon. As I indicated at the outset, I was keen to hear from members, and that is what has happened for the most part. I will try to pick my way through the mind map that I have in front of me of all the contributions.
I will start with the third sector. Laura Moodie made some great points about community organisations doing great work. All the Labour speakers spoke to that subject. Michael Marra led off with that in his contribution, and Joe Long mentioned it, too. Jenni Minto made some great points about third sector organisations, as did other members. The point that this is about public service reform is critical and it involves taking on board the issues of the stability of third sector funding, reducing complexity and streamlining. Jenni Minto proposed the interesting idea of having a memorandum of understanding between public bodies and the third sector.
The third sector is absolutely key to our work and it should be put not at the end of the line but at the beginning of the line when it comes to funding allocation. As the Deputy First Minister and I go into the budget discussions, we will be reflecting on that very seriously.
I commend the comments on the third sector that we have heard in the chamber this afternoon. I draw the cabinet secretary’s attention to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee’s report on funding of the third and voluntary sectors, and I highlight the longer-term funding that is required. If those sectors are strategic partners in public service reform, they will have to be funded strategically and appropriately in the long term. Does the cabinet secretary agree?
In principle, we need stability of funding and to recognise the great work that happens in community organisations, which I see every week in my constituency. That work is absolutely critical, because those organisations are, to a large extent, the front line, and their ability to deliver for local communities is absolutely critical and needs to be enhanced.
The second issue that I want to talk about is prevention, which Andrew Baxter spoke extensively about. I have his invitation to Skye but I also have a competing invitation to Falkirk, and I am not quite sure which one—if not both—I can fit in over the summer period. The issue of prevention is really important and it is one of the core principles of Christie. It is very easy to talk about and, in principle, everybody gets the idea, but being able to understand and quantify the impact is not as easy as it first appears.
Extensive work on that is going on in Government. Last year, we published our reflections on 25 years of preventive interventions—not just to list them, although there are many, but, more importantly, to understand their impact and the process that was gone through, as well as how the numbers stacked up, what the multiplier was and over what time period those preventive interventions made a difference.
That data is really important. Members can rest assured that extensive work is going on in Government to develop that understanding and to tag budget lines at various levels of prevention—it is not just one preventive bucket; there are many different layers of prevention—depending on their impact and the logic between them and the outcomes. That work is going on, and I would be very happy to engage further with members who are interested in going through the details of it.
A number of members, including David Green and Dawn Black, who made an excellent first speech in the chamber, talked about the importance of local communities. As Jenni Minto identified, that gets to the core of what should be national, what should be regional and what should be local. There is a tension—I will not pretend that there is not—between how we drive economies of scale and how we drive local empowerment. We are keen to work with partners to find our way through that, and we have ideas for how that can be taken forward. It does not make sense to replicate many times something that can be done efficiently once for Scotland. We are focused on that work.
We have saved hundreds of millions of pounds, which we can get to the front line, because of what we have done on procurement and elsewhere. However, that obviously had to be led by what communities want—by what is important to them and by their priorities in the decision making about how resources are allocated. We are working through that in a mature way, and we are happy to engage with others on that.
Alyn Smith made a fabulous contribution, although I am not sure that he is so delighted that he got plaudits from the Reform front bench for it. However, his comments on redesigning the state, about the fact that we have a huge opportunity and about inviting parties across the chamber to be part of that were profound and important. There are some great examples of working together. I know that local government in his area is very much focused on that, and some great initiatives are coming forward from there.
There were too many other ideas in Alyn Smith’s speech for me to cover in this contribution. However, he also hit on a point that we, on these benches, certainly recognise, which is that we are doing this to make Scotland better and to make Scotland ready to be a normal independent country. Getting that foundation in place and rewiring the state is an important stepping stone on that constitutional journey.
Although I am not surprised, some of the contributions were a bit tired, repetitive and less impactful, and they suffered very much from a lack of innovation.
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
I will take David Barratt’s intervention, and then I will go on to talk about those other contributions.
In moving the Reform amendment, Malcolm Offord stated that the Scottish Government should have no remit on net zero and energy, and he suggested cutting public bodies that are responsible for related areas. In contrast, Max Bannerman noted the value of community wind power in his region. Reform’s plan would see bodies such as Local Energy Scotland scrapped, along with the community and renewable energy scheme, cutting support for often small—
Hello. It is not a speech within a speech. It is an intervention.
—renewable energy schemes and for community-owned wind. Does the cabinet secretary agree that that is not the kind of reform that we need?
Yes. David Barratt also draws out the important point that the inconsistency in the Reform position is quite apparent. Reform members say in their amendment that we should not be talking about this stuff, and then they go on to talk about it from very different and contradictory positions. I draw Malcolm Offord’s attention to the fact that the biggest part of the net zero spend is financial support for bus fares and train subsidies—the removal of peak fares and so on. I do not know whether it is Reform policy to get rid of that support. Certainly, I expect Malcolm Offord, like me, to benefit from a bus pass. I would hate to lose that, frequent user of bus services that I am.
I will talk about some of the contributions that, frankly—although, as I said, not surprisingly—I was disappointed in. Murdo Fraser banged the same old drum and asked how we are going to fill the black hole; yet, every time that I answered that question, he did not listen and went back to the same point again. Likewise, Meghan Gallacher symptomises the descent into irrelevance of the Tory benches, whose members are simply going round in circles on these old canards without any innovation in their approach to how we tackle this very significant issue.
Does the cabinet secretary recall that Max Bannerman’s point on community wind farms was that they do not rely on subsidies? Therefore, it forms no contradiction in Reform policy on our opposition to net zero.
I think that the confusion is more broad. The Reform manifesto talks about getting rid of all 130 public bodies—or “quangos”, as they call them. However, there is also a recognition from across the Reform benches that those public bodies—whether Police Scotland, the court system, NHS boards or whatever they want to abolish—provide very important public services that the people of Scotland rely on.
The Tories are becoming increasingly irrelevant. On Murdo Fraser’s list, there are a whole bunch of things that we are already doing. [Interruption.] For his information, we have already saved more than £50 million on—[Interruption.] There is a bit of shouting going on at the back of the chamber.
Mr Kerr, you know to try to intervene rather than to attack from a sedentary position.
Does Mr Kerr want to intervene? I will get the time back, so I am happy to take his point. No, he does not. Okay.
We have already saved more than £50 million on estates. I thought that it was 12, but we have now, in fact, shut 13 Scottish Government buildings. Murdo Fraser has not thought the matter through, because we can exit a lease only at the point at which it expires; we cannot simply shut down leases willy-nilly halfway through, because that incurs more, rather than less, cost.
There are two important final points that I want to make. First, I think that this will be the last speech in the Parliament before Scotland’s men’s football team appears at the world cup, and I want to highlight a community organisation that deserves special attention—the Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal—for those who are not aware of the great work that it does. It is a community of interest, if you like, but it is worth highlighting, and it shows that community and voluntary work across our country extends as far as what is happening in the United States over the weekend.
My final point is that there has been much consensus around the chamber, as well as many indications of collaboration. The real test of that will come when we bring forward concrete proposals, which everyone is calling for us to do. That will happen sooner rather than later, right across the public sector landscape and in our support for the third sector. We will refer back to this debate and what members have said in due course, when we come to the nitty-gritty of taking proposals forward, but I would like to think that the proposals will be approached in a constructive manner and that there will not be oppositionism for opportunistic reasons.
I look forward to continuing this discussion with Opposition parties and others across the Parliament.
That concludes the debate on public service reform and empowering staff, service users and local communities.
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