Chamber and committees

Cabinet secretary, I do not want to blur the lines between spending and prevention, and spend to save. My colleague Murdo Fraser always raises the example of NHS appointments being sent out on paper—if we could do that through an app, it would not prevent anyone from getting ill, but we would save money.

There are two different things. One is about preventing people from needing services; that is about demand reduction through preventing people from getting ill or falling into crisis. There is also spending to save to improve our services and make them better for people. My worry is that the prevention tagging is doing a different job, while the invest to save is a grant fund for any business or organisation with a good idea and is not being strategically deployed in the spend to save space. Surely, we must be strategic about our spending, to get those Christie recommendations in place and to save money.

That is clearly true, but it does not seem like there is a strategic approach. You are not saying to me that, first, because there is a housing emergency, you will look at the housing sector and make sure that all those third sector organisations have multiyear funding, and that in future years, you will maybe look at the SFRS, and after that, you will look at other areas. There does not seem to be a strategic approach to rolling out multiyear funding. It seems that you are saying, “We are trying our best, but we do not have enough money,” instead of saying, “This is the desired endgame. We know that there are some real priority areas, which we will focus on, and you will see in this budget that we are putting in place multiyear funding for those high priorities”.

When we look at the budget, where will we see those items? We have already talked about invest to save. Are invest to save and the digital spend the two pots of money that we should be looking at? When we are scrutinising the budget, what should we be looking for?

We are all quite interested in how we measure outcomes and success. Ian Bruce said clearly that what everybody wants from the process is to design better services. Everyone will absolutely agree with that. How, though, do we measure better outcomes? In fact, what is a better outcome on the ground? Is the national performance framework the framework that we should be using? Are there other numbers? Whose numbers should we be using? How do we ensure that we do not just push problems around? One organisation might say, “My numbers are great,” but the next organisation down the road might be falling apart, because the problems have been pushed along.

That is really helpful. I am glad to hear that there is support for the national performance framework being a framework for all that, but I hear what you are saying about the secondary effects of that. It means that we have to collect the right data and we have to have collective accountability among organisations, including those in the public sector, for delivering that, and you cannot just look narrowly at your own organisation’s metrics.

I have a second question that probably segues nicely into what my colleagues are going to ask about prevention. It is specifically on the chest, heart and stroke piece, because such a high percentage of people in Scotland still suffer from or die from those conditions, and prevention could go a long way. Many of them are preventable for years with the right nutrition, the right environment and all the good things that we know are so hard to achieve, especially for people who are struggling with poverty, other health conditions and so on.

Chest, heart and stroke conditions are a really good example of something that we could tackle as a country, which would save hundreds of lives every year. If we used that as a case study—perhaps with learning from elsewhere—what steps would we need to take as a country to apply prevention in that one space?

I am concerned about the delivery of public services being pushed on to charities and our depending too heavily on them. I can think of several examples—I am sure that others can, too—of high-profile charities in the United Kingdom that have gone under after someone fiddled the books or because they had poor management structures. That leaves all the people who depend on the charity for vital services totally in the lurch, and the public sector has to come in and pick up the pieces.

I do not want in any way to undermine the excellent work that third sector organisations do—the example of hospice care in the community is a good one—but do you share my concern that, if we give the responsibility for delivering public services to charitable organisations, we put people at risk if those organisations can no longer function? How do we ensure that we do not put vulnerable people at risk by outsourcing public services in that way?

Yes, that is the fund to which I am referring. My question is also a broader one about how much money should be invested in this area. What level of investment should we be looking for in the budget?

I ask that witnesses respond in order from left to right.

I want to pick up on what Liam Davenport said about redeployment. That is an important point, because when we talk about there being no compulsory redundancies, people have the idea that only natural attrition is being considered. Of course, the worry that we all have about natural attrition is not only about people losing their jobs, but about a loss of experience, of senior people in particular, who have a great deal of knowledge in their heads, when they suddenly decide, “Oh, well—I might as well take early retirement, because I don’t want to be made redundant or pushed out in that way.”

Another problem relates to one of those things that the public sector has a reputation for, which is not necessarily true—namely that, when such restructuring takes place, people are a bit unhappy about it and anyone who is very employable, who can easily find employment elsewhere, will go off somewhere else, with the result that the people who remain are those who are not easily redeployable.

I want to dig into the issue of redeployment a bit more. What would good redeployment look like and how could that help with the public service reform agenda? I presume that redeployment requires people to be retrained, and that the process needs to take account of employee morale. How do we do that well?

Convener, do I have time for one other question or are we running late?

Brilliant. I want to ask about an issue that Liam Davenport raised. My question, which relates to spend to save, is for everyone.

We have heard in other evidence sessions, and Liam also mentioned, that one of the barriers to implementing the Christie commission’s recommendations is that you have to put money in up front. I note that the Scottish Government has allocated £30 million to spend-to-save initiatives. I am not saying that the projects that funding has been spent on so far are all bad, but when I look at them I see that they are small beans. I think that only one of them cracks £1 million. They are all quite small; they will not be transformative.

What do we need to see in the budget that would be transformative? Is £30 million enough, with the money simply needing to be invested differently, or are we talking about a totally different sum of money?