Chamber and committees

Clearly we all want to see service improvement. The committee just wants to be able to monitor that as we move forward, along with the public service reform agenda.

We turn to a question from Alex Kerr.

It has been a long morning for you, cabinet secretary, but I am afraid that there is one final question.

It has often been suggested in this place that balancing the Scottish budget and end-year outturns is like landing a jumbo jet on a postage stamp. What you have told us about today feels a little bit like that, given the time constraints. I understand the numbers that you have set out and that underpinning everything is the goal of having improved public services, greater efficiency and better outcomes for the people who use those services. You have talked about 0.5 per cent of public sector staff leaving or being redeployed within the services, and the £1.5 billion that is to be realised and reinvested, and how that will all happen over a three-year period.

Given that the goal is to deliver better outcomes, is there a world in which we accept that it takes three years and six months or four years to get those targets spot on, or in which, within that three-year period, only 0.4 per cent rather than 0.5 per cent of staff leave or are redeployed, or we realise only £1.2 billion rather than £1.5 billion? That is, could we accept that the aim of embedding that efficient, deliverable public service might be best served by taking slightly longer to do so or landing slightly off the targets?

Those are not things you want to hear, cabinet secretary, because you are driving that change forward, but it is a reasonable question for us to ask. Underlying that, what are the contingencies that the Scottish Government has in place if we do not land that jumbo jet on that postage stamp?

I thank you and your officials for joining us this morning. We look forward to working in partnership with you in the months and years ahead.

We will now move to item 3, which we have agreed to take in private.

11:15

Meeting continued in private until 12:05.

Lorna Slater mentioned the environment agencies. I note that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has 1,300 staff, NatureScot has around 700 or so staff—the figure might be a bit higher—and Zero Waste Scotland has 169. From what I can gather, together, SEPA and NatureScot have 45 offices. Therefore, I can see why that is an area that might come in scope.

However, I come back to my original question. Each cabinet secretary is responsible for driving forward public service reform, but you sit at the head of that process in the Government, and, as a committee, we are trying to co-ordinate some of the common themes. Let us assume that I were to ask a question about what modelling work was done, what we could expect in year 1, year 2 and year 3, or how outcomes could be measured. It would not be possible to give an answer on those issues using the public service reform strategy update document that we received the other day. I just wanted to reinforce that point.

Can you give me a range? For example, are there 20,000 posts out there now across the range of public services that, once we end the reform process, might not exist or might exist in a different form, with people being redeployed and roles being restructured or merged or whatever? Financial assumptions are being made, so there must be modelling to show what that means for head count. I hate the expression “head count”, because that is about people’s jobs, of course. Is 20,000 a reasonable estimate?

Can the headline numbers in that work be shared with the committee?

I sound a little like a broken record, but when will those numbers start to appear? We have been clear with all the witnesses that we have spoken to that we need a baseline to work from. Without clarity on that baseline or without a baseline to work from, we cannot monitor and map progress.

I have suggested sectors to you and to others. Is it reasonable for the committee, at some point, to get some baseline numbers around the workforce and, as you work this out in consultation with all the relevant organisations, unions, management and everyone else, at least range for what head count attrition reduction looks like? I will come back to what I mean by that in a second.

I get that, for example, in the NHS, 24/7 thrombectomy will involve employing more staff, not less, because that is a new, positive commitment. However, there is a group of staff in the NHS whose jobs will change, alter or perhaps not exist anymore. That is the baseline that we have to monitor; it is the same for social care, local government and the environmental agencies. Can we have some confidence that we will get that baseline and be able to monitor it going forward?

09:45

Will that be a uniform percentage reduction across the board?

Is the consultation exercise similar when a draft bill is published?

That is why we are asking our questions and hoping to get more information.