Chamber and committees

Compartmentalised budgeting is undoubtedly a challenge. Another challenge is lining up procurement processes so that all organisations arrive on the same day, because different organisations might have different levels of financial security.

One question is whether there is the necessary perspective and vision to imagine such concepts. I dare say that, when the Midlothian and Tillydrone facilities were being conceived of, there might have been a wee bit of people thinking, “Oh really? Are we sure that we can pull this off?” Vision and commitment are needed to make such examples happen.

There are fundamental conundrums that are difficult to resolve; one person’s local flexibility is another person’s postcode lottery. It is as blunt as that. That relates to the point that the convener put to me. I struggle to get my head around why one would resist change when faced with robust evidence that what is being done could be improved by following the example of what is being done in another locality. If another locality demonstrates that it can get a better outcome by doing something in a particular way, why resist that?

To be fair, I note that many public sector organisations learn a lot in that respect. However, if discernible and evidenced progress is being made somewhere but others are resistant to change, that needs a wee bit of challenge.

I do not really accept the premise of Liz Smith’s question on trust in our public services and the political system. Long-standing, reputable surveys of public opinion and principally the Scottish social attitudes survey—some of the witnesses who gave evidence three weeks ago will be well familiar with it—show strong and high levels of trust in public services and the system of government in Scotland. That trust is at high levels—much higher than in the rest of the United Kingdom.

An important question is how we ensure that there is a clear understanding of the rationale for decision making in the delivery of public services. That takes us into difficult territory. In my years, I have sat through tricky discussions about the delivery of healthcare, for example, when the rationale for making a change in the delivery of a service has been explained from a clinical perspective and makes strong, rational sense but conflicts with how that has been done in the past and how people feel about location-based services. Such discussions are very difficult. The answer to that is to ensure good, clear and engaged processes.

The last point that I will make—I should have said this in response to Liz Smith’s earlier question about the role of professionals—is that any decent public sector organisation should be listening and responding to its front-line professionals. If someone who is running an accident and emergency department says, “Look, it would be better if we organised it this way, rather than that way,” I as a public sector leader would be hard pressed to say, “I think I know better than you do.” All organisations should listen to their front-line people.

It is not a word that I often use about this matter, but I felt it appropriate to use it now. I think that the Christie commission report is highly ethically based—it certainly had a profound impact on me. At the time we commissioned it, a great debate was going on about the proper role of public services. The Christie commission might not have used the word “ethical”, but it provided us with an ethical justification for the maintenance of public services. As I have said, there was a great debate at the time over whether everything should just be privatised, the degree of private involvement and so on.

I thought it appropriate to use the word “ethical” now, because when I look at some of the issues that we have been wrestling with for some time now—for example, fair work, the transition to a green economy and the more sustainable use of resources—I think that they reinforce the ethical purpose of the Christie commission.

I think that that is a legitimate question, although the issue is not just about that. If one is going down the route of exploring these questions, there is an almost philosophical debate that needs to be had about determining the right level for a particular subject. With some of the issues that I still wrestle with around child protection, for example, some very sophisticated knowledge is required. We have to be certain about the approaches to child protection in all localities in the country. Clearly, we do not have a national system of child protection, but we have to be satisfied that the right level of child protection exists in every locality. Local authorities have populations that range from 25,000 to 1 million, and they support different levels of expertise to enable us to be assured that the right level of protection is available in all circumstances.

I hope that, in my answers, I did not create the characterisation that Mr Johnson has put to me. In terms of formal statutory accountability, that may well be the relationship, but, for a range of organisations, there are many other channels of accountability. For example, health ministers undertake annual public scrutiny of individual health boards, which members of the public can watch and engage with. A variety of accountability mechanisms can be put in place in that respect.

Going back to 2007, I recall that we took steps to declutter. We removed a range of public bodies and we passed the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, a consequence of which was that further rationalisation work was undertaken. However, over time, different reforms took place that moved in the opposite direction. There is an argument for keeping such questions under review and considering whether further actions are required.

When we undertake structural reform, we must always be aware of the likelihood of disruption to service delivery. I was not a member of Parliament at the time of the local government reorganisation in 1995-96, but I remember that, during that period, it felt as though there was more focus on the reform than on aspects of service delivery. We must be mindful of those questions when undertaking structural reform.

Well. Going back to Liz Smith’s question about the apparent lack of accountability in the system, I feel as if I am being invited to reflect on my term in office as a minister.

I freely concede that there are a lot of institutional barriers to making progress, and we should not underestimate the challenges facing any Government with regard to compartmentalisation. Of course, it is not just Governments. Before I entered Parliament in the 1990s, I worked for a large private sector insurance company. It, too, had its own compartments, and its leadership wrestled with the necessity of focusing on—in its case—customers and avoiding a focus on process and structures. The challenge is therefore not unique to public sector organisations or governance.

However, what is needed is a universal or agreed approach to enable us to overcome some of the barriers that I have mentioned, and the Christie commission helps us by giving an approach, methodology and set of principles that can be followed in any public sector organisation. In that respect, Christie has really stood the test of time. As I said in my opening remarks, its approach remains fundamental to what we and public sector organisations are doing today. The thinking behind the Promise, for example, essentially develops the thinking in the Christie commission report.

I suppose that what the 2021 John Swinney would say to the 2007 John Swinney is that he should not underestimate the scale of the obstacles to be overcome. That would probably be the best advice that I could offer.

There was a lot in that question. To follow up my previous answer, my first point is that the challenge of compartmentalisation is less acute in the Scottish Government than it is in Whitehall. I say that not to be critical, but to acknowledge that we have benefits of size and proximity.

I go back to some of the Covid issues that we have discussed. When I wanted to sort out any compartmentalisation that affected a Covid issue, the necessary people were on a phone call within five minutes and the issue was aired, sorted and addressed. My colleagues and counterparts in the UK Government often tell me—and there is a fair amount of truth in this—“It is much easier for you. You can just bang heads together. It is much more complex for us.” There are opportunities for us in that respect, and I am discussing with our incoming permanent secretary how we can overcome some of the boundaries and barriers.

Secondly, Mr Johnson spoke about the need for us to be focused on wider purposes. We have tried to do that with the establishment of the national performance framework, which is designed to provide us with a sense of direction over a longer period of time, and therefore to give public organisations a sense of where we are heading and what we might be achieving. There is, however, a natural conflict between some of the aspirations in the national performance framework and some of the accountability mechanisms that are applied operationally and which Parliament might spend quite a bit of time scrutinising.

Thirdly, I come to the colossal question of the role of local government, whether the 1994 reforms were absolutely perfect and what is the best way through this. There are a number of elements to that. One relates to the optimum level at which services should be delivered to individuals. That is never a perfect question at the local level. Through the health and social care reforms that we have discussed, we have tried to recognise that, although local government has responsibility for social work, the health service has responsibility for health, and there is a thing called social care that does not fall neatly into local government or health. Every individual case is at a different stage on the spectrum. The health and social care reforms were designed to address the need for collaboration between the health service and local government.

We then get into other questions about the natural desire of communities to have more control over what happens in their locality, and I am not sure that that is determined by how close they feel to their local authority. For example, irrespective of whether the council is located in Perth or Dundee, both those places feel quite distant to the citizens I represent in the town of Blairgowrie, in terms of what really matters to them and their absolute locality.

Finally, there is the role of Parliament. I go back to my example of education. I understand why this is the case and I am not complaining about it, but, fundamentally, the levers that affect the performance of the education system lie with local authorities. As Mr Johnson might have observed over the past five years, I and my successor are held quite closely accountable for the performance of education, but a large proportion of that is not within ministers’ operational responsibility. In the health service, it is different: there is ultimate ministerial control and ministerial appointments.

Parliament would have to be involved in a discussion about where the right amount of accountability lies in relation to some of these questions.

He would probably say that he should give shorter answers.