Chamber and committees

You are getting to the heart of the culture piece of this—

You are absolutely right that there are some phenomenally great examples, in health and elsewhere, of leaders at the local level who grab stuff and make stuff happen and who power their teams and work with them—they bring in innovations and new technology and make things happen—but it is not as widespread as it could be.

It comes down to the things that we have identified in workstream 1, around how we set the expectations on leaders’ behaviours. This year’s statement on that will be helpful, just to articulate what we think “good” looks like. However, it is very important that we then follow up with the core HR processes. Frankly, how we recruit, retain, promote, reward and incentivise leaders needs to be aligned to deliver those behaviours. As we talked about before, it is not only how you join stuff up with partners across the system, but how you empower your teams and enable innovation to flow through and be adopted into the system. That is absolutely right.

I will be honest with you—we have cultural challenges to address, but some of the structural stuff gets in the way as well. We have identified some of that, but one thing that I am very keen to do is to look at how many layers of management we have got in any given organisation. It is a metric that we are trying to push out to public bodies so that we can understand what it looks like, because it gives us a very quick indication of not just how much money is getting spent on those layers that could be spent elsewhere, but—probably more importantly—how much they are obstacles to people doing their jobs and doing things differently. If you have a lot of people whose job it is to say no, somebody is going to say no, and that is not helpful when we are trying to deliver what you are talking about.

This is key. If you look at the relevant workstream in the strategy, it identifies how we audit as being a key part of that. You are absolutely right: if we are trying to instil behaviours that are systems thinking, silo busting, partnership based and preventative, but we are auditing people on how they look after their pot of money, requiring them to spend it on the things that are in their pot and not on anything else, that clearly just encourages bad behaviour.

I know from our engagement that the Auditor General very much understands this and is seized of the need to lean into this space. I think that he said that he was very keen to support, in every way that he can, and as the expert on auditing, efforts to make sure that we have processes that allow us to look at, and frankly audit, the behaviours that we are trying to encourage. That is important.

Of course, you need to check that money has not gone missing, that the numbers all add up and all that basic stuff, but, beyond that, people need to be asked how they engage with others, how they deliver on the preventative agenda, how much of their money is going into that, and how much of their funding they are sharing with other partners to deliver on shared objectives.

I do not want to talk in the space of the cabinet secretary who has responsibility for that but, absolutely, there are opportunities to increase efficiency, remove duplication and streamline in the technical and other back-office facilities. There is a whole range of things, and there absolutely is scope to join things up better.

On what that does regarding environmental objectives, if we configure the agency right, there is a real opportunity for it to be a significant vehicle that can get its arms around various bits of what we are trying to deliver in the environmental space, on climate, biodiversity, flooding challenges, mitigation and so on. It has an opportunity to coherently join that up more effectively, to face into some of the big challenges and to have the scale to take forward the approach to those.

There is real opportunity but, as you said, the bit that we need to get right is how we design the organisation so that it delivers on those important policy objectives as well as the PSR objectives on efficiency and so on.

Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the committee. It is great to be here.

Just to build on the point that you have made, convener, I absolutely look forward to constructive engagement with the committee. The Government recognises that this is a very big programme and that we do not have a monopoly on good ideas, so we are hugely seized of the need to engage with partners and to take on board constructive criticism and suggestions on how we move forward in partnership. I think that the committee has an absolutely critical role to play in that respect.

Public service reform has been expressed by the First Minister as this Government’s defining ambition, and you will have seen its prominence in the programme for government. It is all about delivering excellent public services that the people of Scotland need—and deserve—in a fiscally sustainable way.

The public service reform strategy, which we launched last June, provides the basis for our work; it has 18 workstreams and covers all aspects of this hugely interrelated programme of work. Just this week, we provided the committee with our six-monthly update on the actions contained within it, and I look forward to engaging further with the committee on the detail in the update.

Of course, all of this work is built on the Christie principles of prevention, integration, empowerment and efficiency. They run right through all of the work that we are taking forward; as we have recognised in the strategy, we have made some progress on those principles in the intervening years, but far from the scale and pace that we need in order to deliver them. We absolutely need to do much more and do it faster, and that is what has driven the First Minister’s seizing of this agenda and its centrality in the programme for government.

Clearly, there is a danger that we focus exclusively on the structural aspects of this work. They do feature prominently in the programme for government, but it is really important to recognise that they form only one of the 18 workstreams, and that they will not succeed without everything else succeeding, too.

As we articulated in the strategy, we need to understand the barriers that have prevented the Christie commission’s recommendations being implemented at scale and pace in the intervening years. As I said, if this was easy, it would have been done before. Those barriers are difficult to overcome, but we have identified what we believe they are—for example, there are issues around leadership and culture, such as siloed management, siloed budgets and so on, that prevent us from taking forward that broad suite of activities—and we have identified how we will go about tackling them.

We talk about rewiring the state. It is important to recognise that that applies to how we rewire the structural landscape, but it is also about how we rewire the way money and data flow through the system. Frankly, we need to rewire people’s approach to all of that, because culture and leadership absolutely have to change if we are to deliver what we need to deliver. We can explore some of that in more detail in this evidence session.

As we move into an acceleration of the delivery phase in what is a very big transformation programme, we are moving through phases of denial, disorientation and resistance in some quarters, as you would expect from vested interests. However, constructive engagement is starting to emerge quite strongly, which is really helpful. On that final element, I look forward to engagement with a wide range of partners across the landscape and, in particular, with this committee, which has a huge amount to offer to the agenda.

We are working through that at the moment. We have taken the step of indicating the move from 14 to two strategic boards on the mainland, and health colleagues are now leading detailed work on that in order to model what the specifics of that will mean. Work is ongoing on what the delivery of that will look like.

The baseline has already been published, and we publish public sector head count data quarterly. That data is all available: it is available for different parts of the public sector, and it is now also available for individual public bodies. We have started to publish that as well. That baseline data is there for the 0.5 per cent reduction that we already talked about.

I have already talked about the percentage reductions in head count that we seek to achieve.

Those roles are all essential to service delivery, but, for the reasons that I have mentioned, some of them offer more scope for the restructuring to have an impact. Some roles can be more easily digitised than others, and some—I will give the example of administrative support in the health service—will need to be performed only twice rather than 14 times.

I do not accept that. Just at the macro level, the fact is that the Scottish Government’s budget is largely fixed, and we have to provide public services within it. Therefore, the issue is how you spend that money and how it is deployed over the next five years to ensure that we are improving public services and making them more efficient while we carry out the work of the public service reform strategy as laid out in the Scottish spending review. I make no apologies for trying to make things better, more efficient, and more joined up, with more of a focus on prevention and on providing better public services as a consequence. That is what the programme is all about.