Chamber and committees

As I said, we have engaged separately with local government, outside those targets.

The no compulsory redundancy policy is the same as it has always been.

The no compulsory redundancy policy is the same policy as it always has been, which is that there is a process to explore every opportunity not to have compulsory redundancies. There is a chapter in the workforce manual that details exactly how that process works.

Interestingly, there was an article in one of the newspapers last week that accused us of having done too much work on this. It said that we already had a pre-baked plan to move to two health boards, and that we had put in the groundwork for that in advance of the announcement. I thought that that was an interesting accusation. Quite a bit of work has been done but, as I said, the detailed numbers will become available as we work through the details.

The police merger is an example of where significant savings were made. Savings of £290 million a year still come through as a consequence of those reforms. Some of those savings are only now being realised. That shows that, once structural reforms are made, more opportunities become apparent. We will be able to see things that we did not see before, because it was all locked up in individual health boards. When we see the whole picture, even more will become apparent than we initially thought.

Thank you very much. I look forward to your support.

That is a great question. As I identified earlier, if we are talking about rewiring the state, one of the things that needs to be rewired is how data flows around the system. There are a number of aspects to that, and the folks working on resolving the technical aspects of it have done a good job. There are lines in the report on some of the more technical stuff that is in good shape in terms of providing solutions on how we share data.

This comes back to people’s perceptions—frankly, this is a cultural issue—of what you are allowed to share, and the administrative mechanisms for how you go about doing so. As I said, the technical layer is in a better place, so such issues are no longer a barrier. It is now very much about engaging with those who are at the sharp end of those issues. Every week, when I meet third sector organisations, local government or service providers, I hear that they cannot provide data. I also hear from Cabinet colleagues that they have real issues with that.

Some good work has happened in that area. Social Security Scotland has done a lot of good work with other partners in that space, and a lot of that has been point to point. Taking a more systemic approach to the issue and getting to the core of the cultural barriers, such as why people think that the general data protection regulation stops them from doing anything, is a big part of the challenge. Engagement and working with partners on that is very much in my sights.

Engagement with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has been happening throughout the summer. We had a COSLA leaders meeting the Friday before we launched PSR, and the DFM, the FM and I are attending a COSLA leaders meeting tomorrow. We will work with COSLA on the specifics of how often it wants to meet and what the shape of that will be. We do not want to be prescriptive and are open about that, although we hope to meet regularly. We are meeting individual councils and council leaders and others who have an interest, such as people who are part of public discourse and members of the Parliament. I am happy to meet anyone who has a contribution to make to what they think the shape of local government should look like going forward.

The bill will be configured very much as the answer to whatever problems we uncover. If we take a step back and consider the things that need to be fixed, as identified in the PFG, and the strategies that we need to take forward, we can see that we do not need legislation for much of that. The bill’s purpose is to catch anything that requires a legislative change, and it will provide a vehicle for making such changes. Quite often, somebody says, “I want to change this, this and this, but I cannot change that because primary legislation is needed.” The answer to that is that we will put such changes in the bill.

We will not be clear on the bill’s shape or specific provisions until we have worked our way through the process of determining what we want to change. We have started to articulate a lot of that, but we need to work out the barriers to making such changes and how many of them require legislative changes. We are going through each line of the PFG to see whether primary legislation is needed, and we are also thinking about whether stuff such as the data-sharing work requires legislative change. If they do, we will think about what the changes should look like and put them in the bill. The short answer is that we will not know what will be in the bill until we have gone through that process.

Going back to the point that we made earlier that hiring is still taking place but there is less of it, I have been quite clear that digital is absolutely a priority area. There is a bigger context here. I spoke with a civil service director general about this recently, because we are looking at that in Government, but there is also digital resource across the wider public sector. Every one of the 130-odd public bodies has its own digital folk. It is the same across local government and the health boards. The digital spend runs into billions of pounds; indeed, we are not quite sure how much the spend is, because it is in wee pockets all over the place. We are taking forward a piece of work on making that spend more efficient and accessing the digital resource that is spread across the system in order to leverage it more collaboratively and focus on tackling specific opportunities. One of the workstreams on digital resource leans into that space. It is all about resolving the issue of how to most effectively use the thousands of people who are working on digital across the piece to target these kind of projects.

Sure.