Chamber and committees

There are a few points there. The budget process is owned by the Deputy First Minister, so she will answer to how she wants to take the process forward.

On the mechanics of this, the work has been largely done. That is why it is colour coded blue in the strategy update, so that you can identify which budget lines impact different levels of preventative spend. You are right that that is the budget as it is. What that does is, for the first time, open up the window of opportunity for us to monitor and measure—to go back to your point about how we measure performance—and understand trends from that. We can see, from year to year, whether we are increasing the number, what we are targeting and in which areas, and where we would expect to see benefits as a consequence.

That is a good question. That ties in with the fiscal challenges that we face, but it also ties in with the work that we have done to understand where the workforce spread is. We have been clear that there is a need to protect and, indeed, in many cases grow the number of individuals who are working in front-line or public-facing services, because, by their nature—you heard comments from the Institute for Public Policy Research on this last week—those person-to-person services depend on people spending hours engaging with people. That is important. Therefore, the reduction is based on the non-front-line workforce. Again, we can have a big discussion about various aspects of that, but the target represents a reduction in that workforce of approximately 4 per cent a year over a five-year period. That is the calculation that sits beneath that—it comes at the issue from a number of different directions.

We thought that it was important to set out a number, because it gives us a target to move towards and the ability to engage with different bits of the public sector in terms of what the expectation is. If we did not do that, we would have to have said that this is the direction of travel, but that there is no target. In that environment, we would have found it more difficult to make progress.

That is correct.

I am sorry but, to answer your question, no, that document does not have numbers.

To be honest, the things that you have identified are all manageable. Up to now, the issue would have been whether we had the appetite to express the scale of the ambition. That hurdle has been cleared with the programme for government, which lays out a lot of stuff, with a lot more to come behind that. No part of the public sector is left untouched. To go back to why we did not deliver Christie, that is because we have not had the appetite and ambition. A second thing is how you deal with vested interests. You will get all kinds of people coming out and saying, “It does not apply to us,” and giving reasons why we cannot do it and saying that this or that will not work et cetera. We are well able to face that down.

The things that concern me are the culture and attitudes around siloed thinking and budgeting. To my mind, that is the key to all of this. If we continue to have an environment in which people think only about their organisations and their part of the system, and do not co-operate and lead across the system, we will fail.

Right at the core of that is how we do budgeting. At the moment, we put money into lots of small silos and we then make accountable officers responsible for making sure that the numbers all add up. Their job is not to co-operate across the system; frankly, it is the opposite—it is to make sure that, for their bit of the system, they think, “I’m all right, Jack,” and that everyone else can look after themselves. There are lots of great leaders in the system who work to overcome that structural barrier, but the system is designed in a way that prevents co-operation, system thinking and bulldozing of silos.

That is the single biggest barrier. If we do not get that right, the rest of the programme will not succeed. However, if we get it right, the rest of it is all manageable.

I absolutely think that we can do so. This absolutely gets to the core of it, and it was something that was at the core of Christie, too. Christie identified that up to 40 per cent of spend on public services was for meeting failure demand. Anybody who engages with or works in public services will point to countless examples of things not being done in the most efficient and effective way. That has two impacts—first, it drives additional costs into the system, and, secondly, it results in poorer public services—so there is absolutely a win-win to be had here if we do this correctly.

Indeed, that is the whole point of this programme. Where there is, say, duplication, we need to ensure that data is joined up so that people do not have to input it into different systems for different people in different bits of the sector to process, and that different bits of the public sector are talking to each other so that we do not have different people doing the same job multiple times. That will provide a better service to the individuals who are receiving it, but it will also make the service more efficient and joined up.

Absolutely.

There are obviously some grey areas around that. We have to work through that, because there could be roles where interpretation might be required. However, effectively, those are roles that would not traditionally be understood as involving people dealing directly with members of the public.

There is an important point to be made. When we have the conversation about head count reduction in the public sector, people immediately identify large cohorts of public sector workers within various parts of the sector with a view to saying that we actually need more of those workers, not fewer. We therefore felt that it was important to understand and differentiate between the types of roles, so that we could look at head count reduction in a way that allowed us to take forward measures that would protect specific cohorts. For example, the Government has been clear about keeping teacher numbers at a high level, and we continue to seek to recruit across many of the medical professions and elsewhere.

However, if we are serious about reshaping the workforce, we need to understand which types of roles offer more scope for reductions. As the convener said, that does not mean that those roles are not important. What it means is that a variety of measures can be taken, such as the use of technology, the removal of duplication, and mergers of organisations, to reduce the number of people who perform those roles to support the services that we need to provide.

That is one of the advantages of having fewer health boards.

Can we quantify it? Maybe, to some extent, in relation to digital spend, although even that is difficult to do in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. You have articulated very well the potential operational delivery improvements from having data joined up more effectively; there are clear benefits to doing that.

You are right that, at the moment, there are many barriers, but how much of that is perception, how much is legal reality and how much is around the technical challenges of sharing data between different organisations such as health boards? I had a conversation in that space yesterday with somebody who is working on improvement activities. We should be able to get the data on what has happened in one health board, analyse it to understand how to drive improvement activities and transfer it so that we can compare it with what is happening elsewhere. At the moment, there are big walls that prevent that from happening, when it should just happen, so that is a clear example of where the restructuring will open up the opportunity to do things a lot better.

For all the reasons that you gave, that is an area that I and colleagues thought that we should recognise in the PFG. If you go through the PFG, you will find that, in some areas, such as health and the environment, we say, “This is what we’re going to do,” while, in other areas, such as local government, we say, “We have some guiding principles, and we want to have an engagement process.” There are other areas in which we have said, “We think we need to have a look at this. We’re not quite sure what it will tell us, but we absolutely need to have a look at it.” Land and culture are in that space, and there are other areas in which our thinking needs to be developed. The very fact of our doing that stimulates discussion and debate and leads to people coming forward with proposals, which allows us to consider what the opportunities are.

You are absolutely right. As you very succinctly identified, when it comes to land, there are tremendous synergies that we could leverage. If we could take that example and apply it more broadly as best practice, that could allow us to propel forward what is a very important resource.