Chamber and committees

That is a valid point, and the convener made a similar point about the nature of the document earlier. The information that the Government has set out is about the framework and the structure of what is being done and about how we ensure that we are taking forward all the things that we recognise we need to do in order to deliver on the agenda. We share all that information in the interests of transparency. It is important that we do so, as it enables you to assess where you think we are and make comments on that.

When it comes to the general public, some people will be interested in diving into the detail, but you are right that it is important to get the clear message across from the top level that this is about delivering the excellent public services that the people of Scotland need and deserve, and doing so in a fiscally sustainable way. It touches on the issue of community empowerment and people feeling more able to make decisions in their local communities. That message is important, but it is also really important to engage with the public on the question of where they think that things can be made better. As I say, they will look at things and ask why we did something in the way that we did—everyone has a story where that has happened. When you talk to people about these issues, the penny drops and they say, “Yes, you’re right”, and they understand that this is the opportunity to fix a lot of things that they encounter in their everyday interaction with public services.

That is really important, and the Government’s perspective is that those are two sides of the same coin, if I can use that phrase. I have given some examples—and could give plenty more—of where, if you improve public services, you make them more efficient and save money as a consequence. That was core to what Christie said about integration and joining up services being more efficient. Prevention is more efficient, albeit that it takes a bit longer to demonstrate.

It is also about what people experience. People see things all the time. They say, “Why did this form have to be filled in six times? Why do I need to keep talking to different people in different bits of the system—why are they not talking to one another? Why are there different departments involved in providing this service? Why is it that, when they come and provide a service, they do only part of it and not the whole thing?”, which might be because a bureaucratic hurdle somewhere has prevented them from doing the whole thing. Frankly, the public services are riddled with that—there is layer on layer of managers getting in the way of people doing their job. People who work in the public services and people who experience public services see that.

You gave some examples of win-win scenarios in which, by implementing technology or other process improvements, we would both improve services and reduce costs. We see them as two sides of the same thing and, if we do one correctly, we get the other as well.

AI is very much an opportunity and a tool. If you look through our strategy update, you will see an action to investigate the opportunities that AI presents.

People jump to AI as being the thing that will fix everything, but it is important to note that we have a lot of more straightforward automation projects that have now been running for a couple of years. We have a great team in Government leading those. There are about 140 programmes laid out across different bits of the public sector and different bodies, and they have delivered savings of £10 million or more. We are investing more to expand that opportunity.

You might have an admin function that moves data from here to there and, in doing so, duplicates this or that, or you might be processing applications. The project looks at how to streamline the process. The team comes in, looks at it, maps it out and says, “We can implement a technical solution that removes 10 steps from the process, because it just auto-fills them.” It is things like that. It is quite basic stuff, but it can make a real difference and, in the short term, there is probably more value in that.

However, we are watching AI and looking to take forward pilots on that, too.

We will have a look and see what we have on that to see what we can share with you.

Obviously, the 0.5 per cent figure has been shared, and we are working with partners, including—importantly—trade union colleagues in partnership as we take forward the agenda. In fairness to everybody who is involved in the process, it is important that we work through the appropriate channels, bearing in mind that people’s jobs are potentially affected. We need to work through the due process and ensure that there is genuine and extensive engagement with the representatives of the workforce as we take this forward.

The five-year Scottish spending review lays out the spend profile for the different areas of the public service. That is the overarching guidance with regard to where we think that the fiscal numbers will move. However, on the savings specifically, as I said, we have deliberately configured the engagement with local government to be separate from the project that applies across the rest of the public sector.

I heard what he said. I do not know what he meant by “inefficient”, but I will try to unpick what I think he meant.

I mentioned the core civil service. Very helpfully, I have the head count numbers for the core civil service in front of me, so I do not need to try to remember them. The total number has come down from about 10,500 a few years ago. The attrition rate is 6 per cent. I have a chart with the actual data in it. Yes, over the past four years, the total core Scottish Government head count has come down from 10,500 to 9,300, which represents an overall reduction of about 11 per cent.

With an attrition rate of about 6 per cent, it will be possible to deliver a 4 per cent reduction, which is the target for those numbers, without having to take any other measures if we so choose. Clearly, that depends on who leaves the organisation, and it could mean that we will not necessarily have the right skill mix, but, with an attrition rate of 6 per cent, there is still scope to hire people to the tune of 2 per cent to backfill the necessary roles.

Natural attrition is a useful tool, but it is not the only one. As we have demonstrated in the core civil service over the past four years, it is a tool that can deliver meaningful results.

That is absolutely key. The team that has been working on the preventative budget have done a super job. They have worked right through every budget line and identified not just whether it is prevention or reactive but which level of prevention it operates at—because, clearly, some prevention is more preventative than other prevention.

At the committee’s meeting last week, an academic on the panel made the interesting point that, if you are not careful with your definition, everything ends up being preventative. The team have been careful to understand different layers of prevention, what falls into different categories and how to categorise them. That groundwork has been done. The key now is to implement that approach in a way that is absolutely mainstream in the budget process, alongside budget tagging that identifies which of the Government’s priority budget lines are impacting—there can be different budget lines in different portfolios that impact different aspects of the Government’s priorities—and where that money needs to be joined up.

That takes us into the world of accountable officer responsibilities. There are real issues there that need to be addressed. We need to get beyond the way that we do things at the moment and into an area where we have partnership and co-operation so that preventative spending can happen in one portfolio that benefits another, while the first portfolio does not see the benefit of that. At the moment, everything in the system is designed to prevent that from happening. Unless we break through that and structure our budgeting processes in a way that supports rather than prevents that approach, we will have a real problem.

There might be some variation, and there will certainly be variation in when it happens, because things need to change for the reduction to be delivered, be that through digitisation, the removal of duplication, consolidation or mergers. Clearly, the health service is on the verge of a significant transformation programme, as is most of the public sector when it comes to the work that we have indicated in the PFG.

Yes, there will be reductions, but they will not necessarily be delivered linearly for the reasons that I outlined.

There are an infinite number of worlds out there, convener, and in all of them, there are different scenarios playing out. As I said at the start, the scale of this thing means that you cannot sit down on day 1 and say, “I am going to do this, this and this, and I am going to get that, that and that.” It is much more complicated than that, with an enormous number of things that can go wrong and opportunities for improvement that we have not even identified yet. Every week, I meet more public bodies and identify more things that can be joined up and made more efficient as a consequence.

In terms of the PSR strategy execution and all the work that is being done on the PFG, my approach is that we should drive on as fast as we can, tackle as much as we can as quickly as we can and deliver benefits that are as big as we can make them as soon as we can. Obviously, we will monitor the numbers, but this is not an exact science. It is about doing stuff in the right sequence, so that, as I said before, changes in the structure help to drive the culture change. It is about people being empowered to take forward other opportunities and having mechanisms to allow that to happen. We will push forward on that very broad front as quickly as we can without breaking anything. There will be benefits—we know there will be—and we will work together to monitor those as they get realised.