Chamber and committees

Do you have that breakdown?

I am tempted to go off on a tangent and examine the aviation approach to risk, which I think is fascinating—it has lots of lessons. However, I will not do that.

I recognise that the answers have been expansive, but I will ask a second and final question, which I put to the whole panel. One thing that strikes me about Scotland in comparison with the rest of the UK is how little structural reform we have done over the past 20 years. Graeme Roy said that we have had 10 years to contemplate Christie and that, hopefully, we will get around to some change in the next 10 years. I know that I am paraphrasing you in an unfair way, Professor Roy, but there is a sense that that change has been very slow in coming.

I think that the UK has done too much structural change, but we have orphaned structures in the Scottish public policy landscape. For example, health boards are organised at a regional level of public administration that has not existed for 25 years, and that is odd. In fact, we are adding to that with health and social care partnerships. I do not think that Police Scotland was created for Christie reasons at all; it was purely about economies of scale. If we consider some of the handbrake turns that had to be done, that was about returning to community delivery because things had become very centralised.

There been very few examples of genuine public service reform, despite the changes that have taken place—devolution itself and societal changes. What is more, what has happened has not happened along Christie lines. Is that a fault? Is there a need to ask more searching questions about whether we have the right structures—whether they have adequate public accountability and whether they are delivering the outcomes that we have outlined? I would probably start with health—and, if you will forgive the pun, that comes with all the health warnings that come with discussing the NHS and health policy.

You are nodding your head most vigorously, Professor Mitchell, so I will go to you first.

One of the largest single increases is to the health budget. We can all understand the various needs of our health service and the demands that are being placed on it; nonetheless, that represents a 5 per cent increase or thereabouts in that budget. Can you provide detail on where that money will be going and what the priorities are for it, given that it is such a large increase in the health budget?

The figures are quite large. I assume that further breakdowns can be applied to these large sums of money. Seven hundred million pounds is about 4 per cent of overall health spending. I would hope that the NHS breaks down figures a little more finely.

You have all said that much of the work that we are talking about is not new and that some of the themes have been talked about before. I like to go back to the work of the Fulton committee on the civil service in 1966, because it talked about many of the same things, such as accountability and measuring outcomes. Therefore, such themes have been talked about for a long time. However, looking at the difference between public administration and the private sector, I wonder whether organisational reform, as opposed to structural reform, is an underexamined strand. In a sense, I am taking as read the points about measurement. I think that those are well made, and there is a lot of work to be done.

There is a case to be made for structural reform, which I will come back to in another question. However, many private sector organisations, particularly financial organisations—whether they have matrix structures or something else—have parts that run the organisation and other parts that are dedicated to changing the organisation. For example, you will hear a lot of banks talk about the “run the bank, change the bank” approach. Is that the sort of reform that we have not seen in the civil service? It is still very siloed, with delivery structures that follow those silos, as opposed to organising people around change. That would involve not necessarily a structural reform but a reform of the organisation itself—reform of the central civil service. Does that need to be examined? Are there lessons to be learned from the organisation of private sector bodies with regard to aligning the central administration along Christie principles?

The Christie report mentions technology only three times, and not really in the context of change itself. Was there a lack of focus on technology? Is technology a source of potential change for the better in public services?

We are all aware of the acute pressure that the health service is under. Are contingencies in place for the coming months? We can expect to see an increase in demand, especially in areas such as accident and emergency.

Before I bring in the other witnesses, I wonder whether they will also respond to Professor Mitchell’s point about generalism being a useful thing in the civil service. Indeed, that is one of the stand-out bits of the Fulton report. Do you think that that is correct? Would having more specialists not, at the very least, help to drive change? In any case, how do you respond to the wider point that we need people in the civil service who are more focused on change?

I would like to see the analysis, but I do not dispute the fundamental point. Any forecast will have a margin of error, and when our revenue is based on forecasting, it stands to reason that the borrowing limit should be in line with that margin of error. What I am interested in is the hard analysis of the quantum of that, and how far away the Scottish Government believes the borrowing limits are. You can take it as read that I understand that having a hard nominal limit does not make sense. The question is what the order of magnitude should be.

I will move on to an associated point that is, in a sense, almost more important. You said that you have faced an issue over the past year in understanding, once announcements have been made—forgive the shorthand—when you can bank them. I recognise that this is an exceptional year, but exceptions sometimes come along.

I have two questions. First, how indicative is that of a general issue with funding coming through the block grant, and the predictability of that? Secondly, what is the actual substance of that issue? Is it simply that the Scottish Government takes a cautious approach and wants the ink to dry on the bit of paper before it starts to action the funding, or is it that you do not know that you are definitely going to get the cash from the Treasury until it hits your bank account? I guess that there is a range of possibilities between those two points.

Again, if you have specific examples of where that has caused a problem and the amount of money has been lower than you anticipated, it would be useful to have those on the record.

I guess that with any budget process there will be external and internal volatility, but one of the corollaries of what you are saying is that you would find it useful if the UK Government were more transparent and predictable in the way that it followed through on its spending. If so, is the same true of the Scottish Government? I am thinking in particular of Audit Scotland’s recent comments about transparency, and I was interested to see that in its recent report on these matters it said:

“budget revisions are managed across Government, which means it is not always possible to establish the detail of reprioritisations within directorates.”

To my mind, that sounds a little bit like the situation that you have highlighted with regard to the UK Government.

Is tracking budget changes in directorates an issue? Is there an opportunity to improve the systems that you have in place? Audit Scotland made the supposition that the data is there but you cannot report on it. I am thinking of your relationship with the UK Government and your own practice. Is there scope along those lines to improve transparency and disciplines in budget reporting?