The next item of business is a debate on motion S6M-11831, in the name of Shona Robison, on Scotland’s public service values. I invite those members who wish to speak in the debate to please press their request-to-speak button. I note that we do not yet seem to have with us in the chamber the Government minister who is responsible for closing the debate. Perhaps that could be chased up. Nonetheless, we will have to start the debate in his absence, which is regrettable. I call the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Shona Robison, to speak to and move the motion.
14:56
People across Scotland, including all of us in the chamber, rely on public services, whether we are talking about the high-quality education and training that our children and young people get, the access to the right treatment and care that our loved ones need when they are unwell, the support that victims and witnesses of crime receive through the justice system or the support that the most vulnerable members of our community obtain through our progressive social security system.
This Government is determined to maintain and improve our public services, despite our facing the most challenging financial situation since devolution. Our block grant funding, which is derived from United Kingdom Government spending, has fallen by 1.2 per cent in real terms since 2022-23, and our capital spending power is due to contract by almost 10 per cent in real terms over five years.
Our approach to maintaining our public services is informed by our shared values, as set out in Scotland’s national performance framework, which include treating people with kindness, dignity and compassion. Those values, alongside our missions of equality, opportunity and community, guide everything that we do. We believe that everyone in Scotland should experience high-quality services that are delivered effectively and efficiently, and that, when people need further support for whatever reason, public services should be able to identify those needs early, build relationships with them to understand their needs and work together to support them in whatever way they need to be supported.
Crucially, we also believe that those people with the broadest shoulders should be asked to contribute a little more. That is right and fair, and our progressive approach—our social contract—sets Scotland apart from the rest of the UK.
As I have said many times, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s autumn statement was a worst-case scenario for Scotland. The fiscal settlement from the UK Government undermines the viability of public services in Scotland and, indeed, of services across the whole of the UK. Responsibility for the situation lies with the UK Government, which has brought us a decade of austerity, Brexit’s undermining of living standards and the calamitous Liz Truss mini-budget. Furthermore, when drawing up his autumn statement, the chancellor was faced with a choice on how to use the £27 billion of fiscal headroom that he had available to him. He chose to cut taxes at the expense of public services. Indeed, real-terms cuts are being made across a number of UK Government departments, including the Department for Health and Social Care.
Our values and missions are at the heart of the 2024-25 Scottish budget and have informed all the choices that we have made in response to an incredibly challenging economic environment. Importantly, the UK Government has not similarly prioritised public services through its recent policy decisions—in fact, it has done quite the reverse.
Within the constraints of the current devolution settlement, we are using all the powers that are available to us to maximise investment in our public services. Indeed, the Scottish Fiscal Commission has estimated that our income tax policy choices since devolution will raise an additional £1.45 billion in 2024-25 compared with what would have happened if we had matched UK Government policy.
Those spending decisions build on our successful legacy of investing in our public services and delivering meaningful reform that has improved outcomes for many people across Scotland. For example, the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 underpins the most significant public service reform since devolution and continues to deliver significant savings and improved outcomes. Police Scotland is on track to deliver cumulative savings of more than £2 billion by 2026, and the creation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has removed around £482 million from the fire service cost base over the past 10 years.
I very much agree with the cabinet secretary in relation to the reforms of the police and fire services and about the decluttering of the public service landscape. Does she think that there is scope for further decluttering?
Yes, I do. There is a lot of opportunity and scope for shared services and public bodies working together and, in some cases, potentially merging. However, we must be careful that, in doing so, we keep the focus on delivery rather than on organisational change, because there is a danger of focusing on the latter. In my 48-page letter to the Finance and Public Administration Committee, which I sent before Christmas, I laid out some of the detail of our extensive 10-year reform programme. I am happy to hear suggestions about how we can go further than that.
I am still a bit shocked that the cabinet secretary is relying on police reform as an example of great reform by the Scottish Government. We had three chief constables in almost as many years. Police reform cost more money than it saved, and the reality is that it was a disaster, especially the centralisation of control rooms. Why is the cabinet secretary using that as an example?
The most important outcome of police reform is the outcomes for victims of serious crime, particularly sexual offences, rape and murder, and the results that Police Scotland has been able to deliver consistently across Scotland.
We have also prioritised tackling poverty, particularly child poverty, and we have made significant progress by working collaboratively and creatively with partners. As a result of this Government’s policy interventions, including the expansion of the Scottish child payment, it is estimated that 90,000 fewer children will live in relative and absolute poverty in 2023-24. [Interruption.] I know that the Tories do not want to hear about child poverty, but this Government wants to talk about child poverty.
I take this opportunity to interject. If members wish to raise an issue, they know that there are ways to do that, including by standing up and seeking to make an intervention.
As I said, it is estimated that 90,000 fewer children will live in relative and absolute poverty in 2023-24. Notably, poverty levels are lower in Scotland than they are in England.
For more than 75 years, our national health service has been a universal public service, free for all at the point of need. We are resolutely committed to those founding principles and have a strong record of investing in our health and social care sector. For example, we have invested £193 million in our national treatment centres programme. We opened two new centres in Fife and Highland in spring last year, and two further centres will open or expand early this year. Together, the centres are planning to deliver more than 20,000 additional procedures by 2024-25, which will improve patient outcomes.
Alongside mitigating the impacts of UK Government decisions, the scale of the current financial challenge means that we must change the way that we deliver public services in Scotland. In the short term, we need to reduce costs and improve effectiveness further. However, as we look at the demographic projections for Scotland, which were made worse by Brexit and the UK Government’s approach to immigration, combined with the anticipated level of demand on public services, we know that we must change the way that we deliver services in the long term to fundamentally improve people’s lives and reduce their need for on-going support.
Inward migration into the UK was at a record level last year, but that was not the case for Scotland. Why?
Actually, if we look at net in-migration from the rest of the UK, at least 10,000 people—who may have come from various parts of the world previously—are moving from the rest of the UK to Scotland, and 7,000 of those who are coming each year are of working age. I would have thought that the Tories would welcome that, but clearly not.
Will the member give way?
No, thank you.
In December, I provided the Finance and Public Audit Committee with a detailed update that set out the Government’s aims and principles for an ambitious 10-year programme of public service reform. The update included the actions that we need to take over the next two years to bring together a common approach for reform; to further align our policies and reform programmes; and to enable and empower our partners to act.
In short, the Government’s vision is for all public services to be person centred and designed around the unique needs of individuals; to be focused on prevention and prioritising early intervention and support to reduce the need for crisis intervention in the future; to be place based and designed in ways that best meet the distinctive needs of communities across Scotland; and to be built on partnership and creative collaboration with partners.
Achieving that vision will not be easy, and the Scottish Government cannot do that alone. We therefore want to build a consensus around those new ways of working with local government, the third sector and other partners in order to achieve it.
The Government has a clear plan to deliver reform. We are working with local government and the public to take forward reforms that enable us to change how services are delivered at a local level. We remain committed to delivering the local governance review and the democracy matters initiative alongside the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities; to exploring single authority models; and to delivering on commitments to reform, funding and accountability in the Verity house agreement.
We are aligning all of our major policy reforms and investments around our shared vision for public services. Across our education and skills sector, we are reforming to make sure that everyone in Scotland is supported to fulfil their potential. We will continue to support schools and local authorities to improve the attainment of children and young people who are impacted by poverty; that is underpinned by £1 billion-worth of investment in the school attainment challenge in the current session of Parliament.
We are continuing to reform our justice system to prioritise victims and witnesses; to protect front-line services; to make better use of digital approaches; and to support greater collaboration between partners to keep communities safe. In health and social care, the development of the national care service builds on our strong commitment to high-quality, consistent and fair public services. Our programme of co-design is making sure that people are at the heart of those developments, and that human rights principles are embedded, as we deliver for the more than 230,000 people in Scotland who receive social care support.
We are also driving innovation and making public services more efficient, as set out in the resource spending review. Our single Scottish estate programme has already reduced the size and cost of, and emissions from, the public sector estate. It has delivered savings of more than £4 million through the co-location of services and the closure of surplus offices in Edinburgh and Dundee. Work is under way to consolidate the public sector estate in Glasgow from five premises into one new net zero carbon property to deliver associated carbon reductions alongside anticipated revenue savings of more than £3 million a year from 2028-29.
We are expanding the use of national collaborative procurement. That approach has the potential to deliver significant efficiencies: for every £1 that is invested in Scottish Government-led collaborative procurement, more than £40 is returned in financial benefits. In 2022-23, more than £130 million was saved through that approach.
Digital technology and infrastructure is also a key enabler of public service reform. For example, we invested £1.8 million in a new digital dermatology service in 2023. The programme has the potential to reduce demand for out-patient appointments by up to 50 per cent, and it will lead to a better and quicker service for patients as well as reducing pressure on our workforce. The Scottish Government is continuing to review its own workforce numbers carefully to ensure that we are delivering for the people of Scotland as effectively and efficiently as possible. From March 2022 to the end of September 2023, the size of our contingent workforce has reduced by 27 per cent, thereby reducing reliance on temporary staff and contractors.
I have been clear that the Scottish Government cannot do this alone. Collaboration is central to how we deliver ambitious reform across the public sector. In the past year, we have strengthened our collaboration with local government, public bodies, business and the third sector. We have worked effectively with the Scottish Green Party through the Bute house agreement, and I welcome continued collaboration across this Parliament as we seek to deliver collectively for the people of Scotland.
I move,
That the Parliament welcomes the Scottish Government’s continued investment in delivering public services for Scotland’s people and communities; notes, however, the economic damage of Brexit, which means up to £3.7 billion of potential funding for these services has been lost; recognises the Scottish Government’s legacy of successful public service reform in recent years that has improved outcomes for people and communities, including health and social care partnerships and Social Security Scotland; further recognises the valuable role that public sector workers play in delivering precious public services; supports the Scottish Government’s ambitious public service reform projects in the education, justice and health and social care sectors, which will deliver further reforms over the next decade, including by focusing on prevention and early intervention, involving people and communities in the design of public services and embracing the power of digital technologies; believes that further reform to public services will be necessary to ensure that public services remain fiscally sustainable and continue to improve outcomes for Scotland’s people and communities, and welcomes, therefore, constructive contributions from partners across the public sector, third sector and business community, as all stakeholders work to protect and reform Scotland’s public services together.
15:10
I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests, as a practising NHS general practitioner.
We have listened to the Deputy First Minister, who talks as if the SNP has not actually been in charge of public services for the past 16 years. Once again, this SNP Government treats the people who really matter—the public, and public sector workers—as if they are fools. SNP ministers persistently refuse to admit their failures. They expect everyone to believe that they are competent despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary—and, to pay for their incompetence, they go all out to tax workers and businesses for working hard. The Scottish Retail Consortium says that the SNP Government will be back for even more in taxes next year because it will fail to reform the public sector.
The Deputy First Minister claims that her party has created a
“legacy of successful public service reform ... that has improved outcomes for people and communities”,
including in health and social care. Really? That is as delusional as Humza Yousaf’s fantasy economics and his calculation that independence would lead to Scottish households being £10,000 a year better off.
The member mentioned health and social care, which gives me an opportunity to ask him why his Government is reducing health and social care spending. It is down by £8 billion, which represents a cut of 4.7 per cent. How can he justify that?
I think that the Deputy First Minister needs to concentrate on the facts. Not only is this the Scottish Parliament, but you are in charge of healthcare here in Scotland, and what you should be doing—
I remind all members that they need to speak through the chair. Otherwise, they are referring to me, and I have no responsibility in that regard.
It is little wonder that, on 20 November 2023, the Deputy First Minister refused to confirm, when asked, whether SNP ministers always tell the truth.
Today, we are debating Scotland’s public service values. Let us start by considering the SNP’s catalogue of shame in respect of the public services of healthcare, education and procurement. We have lengthy accident and emergency waiting times, and targets have not been met. We have worsening cancer treatment waiting times, with a quarter of patients waiting two months to see a specialist, and today we have seen reports that Scotland has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the world. We have woeful workforce planning and a lack of ambition while vacancy rates for nurses are at record levels and the rates across many other NHS professions are at a four-year high. On public health, the SNP has by its own admission taken its eye off the ball. Drug and alcohol-related deaths are higher in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe. Some 1,300 babies have been born with drug dependency since 2017. That is disgraceful.
This SNP Government is all about soundbites and promises that it consistently fails to deliver on, telling us each time that lessons will be learned. Let us consider school-age children. The SNP has failed to address the educational attainment gap. That is another failed promise. Sixteen years of botched SNP reforms that blew £1 billion have ruined an education system that was once the envy of the world. According to a poll in The Scotsman just this week, the majority of Scots believe that the SNP is running public services poorly.
The SNP also sets a very low bar when it comes to setting an example to others in Scotland. There is a police investigation into the party’s finances, which is fuelling doubts about transparency and adherence to the rule of law. Of course, we are well accustomed to the SNP blaming its failures and incompetence on others. I am not talking about the Scottish Greens, although some in this chamber clearly blame them.
The SNP is also quick off the mark in making claims about others that do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, a misleading post on the Scottish Government’s official Twitter account claims that the autumn statement resulted in only an extra £10.8 million of funding for our NHS. However, that is just spin, because HM Treasury provided a record £43 billion to fund public services in Scotland, and the Scottish Government can spend the funding in any way that it wants. [Interruption.]
Members!
In the same way, the SNP Government decided not to spend on Scotland’s NHS the £18 billion that it has received by way of consequentials from NHS spending down south since coming to power.
It is about SNP choices, such as having 160 officials—costing £9.77 million a year—working on preparations for a bloated national care service.
Will Sandesh Gulhane give way?
No.
Other examples are the spending of £7 million per year on pretend overseas embassies, millions of pounds on a failed deposit return scheme and hundreds of millions of pounds on ferries—I could go on.
While we lament the performance of the SNP-Green Government, we must stress our admiration for Scotland’s amazing public sector workers, who deliver vital services. The trouble is, those workers are undermined by the SNP Government’s mismanagement, year in and year out, and by the SNP’s failure to properly support local government. To deliver well and stay true to public service values, we need to do things differently. We need to recognise a reorganisation of Scotland’s public sector that prioritises efficiency, preventative care and productivity.
No one is saying that reform is easy. The Scottish Parliament Finance and Public Administration Committee has been tasked with conducting an inquiry into such reform. That is important work. Audit Scotland has called for urgent reform and highlights that the SNP-Green Scottish Government has made no progress since 2016. It is vital to deliver reform in order to deal with long-term financial pressures.
The Scottish Conservatives believe that the principles of the Christie commission on the future delivery of public services are as important today as they were when they were published in 2011. Back then, the Scottish Government was told:
“Unless Scotland embraces a radical, new, collaborative culture throughout our public services, both budgets and provision will buckle under the strain”,
with a
“fragmented, complex and opaque”
system hampering the collaboration between organisations, and an approach that is
“’top-down’ and ... lacks accountability”,
while failing to deliver to meet the needs of individuals and communities.
The Scottish Government has not heeded what the Christie commission said. Instead, the SNP has the highest taxes in the UK, despite receiving around £2,000 more per Scot than is received from the UK Treasury for people in the rest of the United Kingdom.
Will Sandesh Gulhane take an intervention?
Dr Gulhane is about to conclude.
I would take Stephen Kerr’s intervention if I could.
We need to grasp the thistle. Reform is possible if there is a will to do it. The SNP’s raising of taxation to record levels in the history of devolution, while the capacity of public services continues to be reduced, demonstrates that its public sector model is unsustainable. A major review of Scotland’s public sector is required and must be implemented, lest our services face a disastrous collapse.
I move amendment S6M-11831.2, to leave out from the first “welcomes” to end and insert:
“recognises the valuable role that public sector workers play in delivering vital public services in Scotland; further recognises the urgent need for reform within the public sector for the reasons set out by the Finance and Public Administration Committee; believes that the principles of the Christie Commission remain important, but that the delivery of these principles has been undermined by the economic mismanagement of successive Scottish National Party administrations and the failure to properly support local government, which is on the front line of so many public services, and urges the Scottish Government to implement a comprehensive re-organisation of the Scottish public sector to prioritise efficiency, preventative care and productivity.”
15:18
There is a very important discussion to be had about the urgently needed reform of our public services in Scotland, in order that they be fit to meet the huge challenges that we face in responding to climate change, demographic change and technological change. Sadly, the motion that is before us does not really rise to that opportunity. Having gone through the party’s spin machine, the Government’s mangled motion comes to us from another planet—one on which the SNP has a genuine interest in or a credible plan to reform public services in Scotland.
Back in the real world, the SNP has never been invested in the hard, honest work of public service reform. It came to power in 2007 on a platform of no reform, and it has spent 17 years ensuring just that. The single change that matters to it has come ahead of all else, so we have had populism rather than progress, and party before people.
Members need not just take my party-political word for it. In 2023, the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee conducted a wide-ranging inquiry into the Scottish Government’s public service reform agenda—or lack of it. The committee heard an abundance of evidence, including from Audit Scotland, which laid bare the paucity of the Government’s track record of reform, which is abysmal. It said that there was
“limited evidence”
of any
“real difference in improving the quality and effectiveness of services provided to the public”.
What little reform the Government has engaged in has, of course, been botched, and often reversed in fairly short order. The motion that we are debating cites health and social care partnerships as one of the Government’s successes—so successful, of course, that they are to be scrapped as part of the chaotic national care service plans. Those plans are themselves an unmitigated disaster, with spiralling costs, no progress after years of prevarication and delay, and an incompetent minister saying that the proposals are “a little bit hard” for them to get their “head around”.
All the while, delayed discharge soars across Scotland. It has now reached—just in recent weeks—its worst ever level. That is despite the Deputy First Minister’s personal commitment to end delayed discharge entirely by the end of the year—that year, of course, was 2015, not 2023. Day by day, GP access and NHS dental care are increasingly a myth for families across Scotland.
We could also take education reform as an example. We are three years on from the SQA scandal: the SQA was, rightly, going to be scrapped, and Education Scotland to be replaced, but on they roll, unabated, unchanged and unrepentant, across the forest of reports and commissions that now lie on the floor, undelivered. Any real possibility of reform is stifled by the Government. The latest cabinet secretary announced just in November that the one attempt at reform from the past decade—John Swinney’s useless regional improvement collaboratives—is to be wound down. What a track record of success. So committed is the Government to not reforming education that, just last month, the Deputy First Minister slashed the education reform budget.
Any programme of reform must be about genuinely improving the lives of the population. The absence of any programme of reform and of adaptation to a changing country means that our services have become less efficient and ever less appropriate to the needs of our citizens. It places those services in a spiral of decline. One in six Scots are languishing on an NHS waiting list. PISA figures show that Scottish pupils are a year behind their English counterparts in maths. There is falling life expectancy in this country. It really matters. We have to get reform right for the sake of the public services on which we all rely. I am afraid that the Government’s reality-denying motion does little to fix the mess that it has made of our NHS or our education system.
The Tory amendment references the Christie commission principles, which we have already heard a bit about. However, I wonder whether we should not simply collectively acknowledge that none of that was ever implemented. It is not that the commission was wrong or that those principles were incorrect or not based on sound values; indeed, much of what Campbell Christie had to say was prophetic. He set out the consequences of an inadequate Government, which have come true, to the detriment of the country. However, all of that was 13 years ago. Frankly, I find the continued use of Campbell Christie’s name to validate an approach that has been wilfully ignored to be disrespectful. It is the antithesis of his call for practical reforming co-operation and the values that he espoused in his work in our trade union movement across Scotland.
Christie called for a programme that was “urgent and sustained”. Nothing could be further from the truth. After 16 years of decline, Scottish Labour is clear that our public services are in desperate need of reform. However, we know from the cold reality of experience and the chaotic heat of current conduct that this Government cannot be trusted to do it. Only by getting rid of Scotland’s two bad Governments can any meaningful change take place.
I move amendment S6M-11831.1, to leave out from first “welcomes” to end and insert:
“recognises that communities in Scotland have been let down by the Scottish National Party (SNP) to the extent that poverty is rising, life expectancy is falling and health inequalities are widening, and that the SNP administration has a 16-year record of failure in reforming public services, as highlighted by Audit Scotland, COSLA and other public bodies in the recent Finance and Public Administration Committee inquiry; further recognises that the promises of a healthcare system free at the point of need have been broken by this SNP administration, with almost one in six people in Scotland on waiting lists, whilst £1.2 billion has been wasted on delayed discharge since it promised to eradicate the practice, and that a lack of a credible workforce plan has resulted in millions being spent every year on agency workers; considers that the botched National Care Service and stalled education reform under this SNP administration are particularly egregious examples of its failure to reform public services; welcomes the invaluable work that public sector workers continue to do, and calls on the Scottish Government to urgently provide clarity to public sector bodies, unions and workers regarding its plans for the public sector workforce; notes that, if Scotland’s economy had grown at the same rate since 2012 as the UK overall, it would be £8.5 billion larger, and calls on the Scottish Government to prioritise the delivery of economic growth in all parts of Scotland to create jobs, boost incomes, reduce poverty, and allow for greater investment in, and reform of, public services, including transforming the NHS and social care system to meet the needs of people and communities, and embracing the power of digital technologies.”
[Interruption.]
Mr Marra is seated and has concluded his remarks.
15:24
What a pompous and insensitive title for a debate. We have heard lofty speeches about “Wha’s like us?” at a time when people are stuck in ambulances outside accident and emergency departments and are waiting in pain on ever-longer NHS waiting lists; when children from poor backgrounds are stuck in poor educational outcomes; when people who are desperate for a home see the SNP Government slash the housing budget; and when the drug death rate remains the highest in Europe.
This debate is a sign of a Government that has lost touch with the lives of ordinary people and their struggles. The debate is not about public service values: it is all about the SNP Government setting out its excuses and providing cover for what will be a savage budget ahead. Ministers are hunting for everyone and anyone as the cause of what is a financial predicament of their own making. Brexit, the Tories, the pandemic and probably, somehow, also the Welsh Labour Government and Keir Starmer are all to blame, according to the SNP, as the true cause of the SNP’s own mismanagement of the public finances and failure to reform public services.
I have a test. The more the SNP people hunt for blame, the more we know the deep financial hole they are in. I agree that the Conservatives have been a terrible Government, and I agree that Brexit is damaging, too, but those are not new revelations. They have not just happened: we have known about them for some time.
Why is the SNP suddenly surprised and panicking now? We have heard for years the warnings from the Christie commission, Audit Scotland and the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Take the Scottish Fiscal Commission. It warned in May 2018 that the Scottish Government was facing a £1.7 billion shortfall in public finances over the following five years. The commission said back then—five years ago—that expected wage growth reductions would result in a significant drop in income tax revenues, as Scotland’s economy would lag behind that of the rest of the UK, with growth remaining below 1 per cent a year until 2023—which was last year.
The Auditor General warned at least as far back as 2018—again, five years ago—that the NHS was not in a financially sustainable position. He repeated his warnings in November 2022. He said that
“Failure to make the necessary changes to how public services are delivered will likely mean further budget pressures in the future”.
Now, Scotland’s NHS boards are forecasting a deficit of £395 million this year. Way back in 2011, 13 years ago, the Christie commission warned about the need to increase preventative spend to stop demand swamping public service capacity.
Will the member give way?
No.
Despite all those warnings, which stretch back years, it is apparently now someone else’s fault. The panic among SNP ministers has been concerning to observe. I have never witnessed them cutting budgets to such a degree in-year in the way that they have done in this financial year. Who has suffered? It is colleges and universities—twice—and farmers, because of what has happened with farm support.
The flexible workforce development fund is gone this year. Even the NHS budget was not safe.
Will the member give way?
No.
In total, that is £525 million—[Interruption.] Members should listen to this. A total of £525 million has been cut in this year’s budget. The budget for education is down by £165 million, there is a £145 million cut to the transport budget and the NHS has had a £70 million cut. Those are all in-year cuts. That is chaotic management of the public finances.
There has been no substantial reform of public services during the SNP’s tenure in office. Take education. John Swinney’s proposed education bill was stripped out and abandoned, and the last remnants of its measures—the regional improvement collaboratives—have just been torn up by the new Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills. Jenny Gilruth has also delayed scrapping the Scottish Qualifications Authority, and the Hayward reforms—on which we will be having another debate in the next few weeks—are delayed, as well.
On health and social care, the big answer from the SNP was the national care service, but it has been delayed and watered down. The SNP will also scrap its previous supposed reforms to health and social care partnerships.
At the Education, Children and Young People Committee, we looked into regionalisation of colleges. I found it very difficult to find any significant benefit from the changes. The colleges are now shadows of their former selves.
Of course, there was also police centralisation, which the cabinet secretary was boasting about, but it resulted in there having been three chief constables in almost as many years. The control-room centralisation was rushed, and we must remember the tragic event of the crash at the side of the M9, which led to the deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill. That was a direct result of the hasty kamikaze approach to centralisation of control rooms. What happened was unforgivable: it was not something to boast about.
This is plainly not a Government of competent reform. It too often ducks reforms—probably because, when it does try to introduce them, it mishandles them. The real proof must lie in the outcomes: a yawning poverty-related attainment gap, many councils across the country declaring housing emergencies, the highest number of drug deaths in Europe, record long NHS waiting times and the high rate of delayed hospital discharges. That is not a record to boast about.
We move to the open debate. I advise that we have some time in hand, so there is plenty of time for interventions, should members wish to make them.
15:30
I thank the Government for securing this debate on a hugely important subject that is often overlooked but is critical to the success of our public services.
I welcome the Government’s openness, which its motion mentions, to receiving constructive suggestions on measures that could be adopted to move the agenda forward. This is a real opportunity to articulate Scotland’s public service values and how they inform our approach to delivering for the people of Scotland. It is good that, as we move through the process, we have such a vision.
So far in the debate, much has been said about the Christie commission. This afternoon, I read back through its report, which has the four clear principles of empowerment, partnership, prevention and efficiency. Although some reform has happened since its publication, those messages still clearly resonate and form a solid basis and guiding principles for moving work forward.
I will address a number of issues, starting with finance. Finances will always be challenging; that is the nature of the environment in which we live now. It will be so in the future, and it has been the case in the past. The post-2008 crash was recognised as being part of the backdrop to the Christie commission’s work. The commission also recognised that additional funding was only part of the issue and was not itself the solution. It identified that up to 40 per cent of public sector spending was on cure rather than prevention, which could be reduced by shifting the focus to preventative measures in a much more structured way. That number dwarfs anything else that we might talk about in budget discussions, and would give us much to go on if the measures were to be approached in the correct structured way.
The second matter that I want to raise is the art of the possible. It is often the case that we lose sight of that in arguments about numbers and budgeting processes. However, it is instructive to reflect on the Covid experience. We should not forget that, for all the challenges, difficulties and hurt that we went through in the pandemic, it showed what partnership working could deliver and how we could turn up the dial on speed and make things happen quickly and efficiently, when we have to. It is important that we do not lose sight of that. I worry that, to a great extent, we have done so.
We must accept it as part of our culture that things can be done differently. Such culture change is central to progressing a meaningful public sector reform agenda. We do not often recognise that the Government’s role is to enable such change, but also to lead by example and to make the areas over which it has control run as efficiently and effectively as possible. That amounts to a structured change-management process in a complex organisation: that is what it is. Those of us who have experience of doing that in other environments recognise that such a process cannot be done ad hoc or piecemeal, but needs to offer a clear process that is followed through. It is also not a big top-down change. That is expensive and time consuming, and it goes against the Christie principle of empowerment.
The Tory amendment falls into the trap of asking for a complete review of everything, which would take many years, cost a lot of money and not deliver very much at the end of it. The approach should be much more about creating the right environment, simplifying the landscape and recognising that complexity is the enemy. We now have 129 public bodies on the list. I have not checked how many there were in 2011, when the Christie commission’s report was published. It might be instructive to look at that to see what the direction of travel is, and whether we are making progress or going backwards.
Clarity on accountability is critical. We start from a good place. We have a very effective and well-documented national performance framework, which lays out what we are trying to deliver and whether we are making progress on it. However, without clarity right through the system on who is responsible for what, we fall into the trap of having something that is everybody’s responsibility becoming nobody’s responsibility. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
Does Ivan McKee agree that the point that he has raised about cluttering, with all the different bodies, hardly helps with clear lines of accountability? Is that not just a fact of organisational life?
That is exactly the point that I was making.
My next point is about empowerment, listening to front-line staff, the public and service users, and recognising the power of micro improvements in a culture of continuous improvement. Often, we think that things should be imposed from the top down and take a long time because the big bang is the best solution. A culture in which staff feel empowered to make changes on the ground on a daily basis, and in which members of the public feel empowered to raise issues where they see service delivery not working effectively and in a joined-up way is hugely important.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the culture too often in the public sector is that the system knows best, whether that be the management system or, indeed, the computer system. In recent days and weeks, we have seen the damage that can be caused when something that does not obviously pass the common-sense test is taken forward and people do not step in to blow the whistle. People did not do that with the problems with the Post Office.
It is really important to remember that poor public service delivery makes inequality much worse. That point has already been made in the debate. Making public services excellent and more efficient is the best way to tackle inequality. Frankly, the middle classes will always find a way around poor public services. Unfortunately, it is those who are most challenged economically who will fail to do so. It is important that we recognise that delivering effective and efficient public services is the best way to tackle inequality.
Vested interests exist, of course. The approach needs to be not to ignore them, but to identify them and align them where possible or to tackle them where necessary, and not use them as an excuse for poor delivery.
I will say a few practical things in my closing remarks. We recognise that duplication exists, but there are no mechanisms in place to allow things to be brought together and duplication driven out of the system across Government. Multiple agencies work in the same environment. Our having a mechanism to do that is hugely important.
The Deputy First Minister mentioned consolidation of estates. I welcome the focus that that is getting. It is disappointing, to some extent, that the Glasgow hub is being taken forward. That investment is wholly unnecessary, given the significant surplus of estate that already exists across the wider public sector in Glasgow. Getting the local authority, other agencies and the Government to bang their heads together and talk about what they have in respect of spare capacity would mean that we would probably not need the hugely expensive Glasgow hub, which is, unfortunately, a pet project of many people in the civil service. I see no progress—maybe there is; the minister can let us know about it—on the opportunity to make use of the spare capacity at Victoria Quay, which is 80 per cent empty, for supporting business, culture and technology development in that part of Edinburgh.
Digitisation is hugely important, but it is important to recognise that it is not a big-bang solution. That harks back again to the Post Office experience. Digitisation is part of the solution. It is very important to deliver it, but it is only part of what needs to be a wider culture of change in management and process.
Finally, 10 years is a long time, and I think that that timeframe creates complacency: people can afford to kick the can down the road. As I have said, the Covid response shows what is possible in short timeframes. We need to be able to drive change on an on-going basis, with quarterly results.
I have said a lot in a short time. As always, I am very happy to engage with ministers to add value to the improvements.
15:39
It is always a pleasure to follow Ivan McKee, because he is an SNP member for whom I have enormous respect. I say that sincerely. He has led organisations. He has led and managed businesses, so when he talks about culture and transformation, it is worth while for everyone in the chamber—especially those on the Government front bench—to listen to what he says.
I wanted to intervene on my colleague Sandesh Gulhane. I did not realise that there would be so much time for the debate when my intervention was not possible. The point that I wanted to make to him is that the Green Party’s Patrick Harvie is today claiming credit for the widening tax gap between Scotland and England. There you go! There is the SNP for you in this Government; the Greens are claiming credit for that particular piece of nonsense.
I agree with Michael Marra that this Government has no appetite for reform of any kind. There can be no doubt that there is a serious need for reform in the Scottish public sector. However, we are stuck with an SNP-Green Government that will never tackle the big issues because it just does not have the appetite for it. The people who know that better than anyone else are the people who work in our public services. They come to their work, every day, frustrated by the stress of delivery failures that make their lives, and the lives of the people whom they serve, worse.
Willie Rennie went after the Government on its record in his speech, but I thought that, untypically, he was too generous. The fact is that this set of ministers lacks the competence to deal with serious reform, but he did not mention competence. They just cannot do it. They do not have it in them. It is all just too hard for this group of ministers.
That is why so many of our public services, from councils to the NHS, have turned inwards. They are now obsessed with how things are done, and with a great morass of corporate governance that is all about covering backs and finding new ways to refuse to do things. They have become obsessed with reputational protection and, indeed, with public relations.
That is the product of the mismanagement and lack of leadership over the past 17 years by the SNP-Green Government, which has compounded the decline of our public services that, frankly, started under Labour and the Liberal Democrat coalition of 20 years ago.
It is also why we have ended up with so much secrecy. Organisations have lost their candour, and nowhere is that more evident than in the area of whistleblowing. I want to make some serious remarks about whistleblowing, because it is something that I think that we, as a Parliament, should take a lot more seriously.
In March last year, we observed whistleblower awareness week. We had a meeting in Parliament, attended by parliamentarians from every party bar one, including members who are present in the chamber this afternoon. We listened together to public sector whistleblowers telling their stories and it was a traumatic experience, both for those who were telling the stories and for all of us who were listening. It was raw, authentic and distressing.
Whistleblowing is a public good. We should hold those who whistleblow in high esteem. They are heroes who uphold the public good, but too often management sees them as some sort of affront to the organisation and its reputation. It deals with the whistleblower as a problem to be solved, rather than addressing the issue that the whistleblower has raised. Human resources procedures and legal devices are thrown at the whistleblower because they had the temerity to raise their hand in the first place and point out a genuine concern.
There are many examples of mistreatment of whistleblowers in the Scottish public sector services. Nobody in the Parliament should assume a superior attitude about the treatment of whistleblowers in any branch of Scotland’s public services.
In NHS Scotland, there are cases of grotesque victimisation and the misuse of executive authority. We have health boards where we know that there have been widespread cases of bullying. In one health board, senior clinicians have retired and left the service because they felt that they were asked to do things that were unethical, being subject to what some called emotional blackmail that caused them to suffer extreme mental stress. In one case that I am aware of, a senior clinician took his own life, such was the horrendous experience that he was enduring.
In Police Scotland, there have been outrageous examples of misogyny in the way that women police officers—highly professional and accomplished women—have been dealt with by the senior officers. Police officers have been bullied because they raised concerns about their safety and the inappropriate behaviour of other officers.
The culture in our education system also leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot tell members how many teachers I have spoken to who have said that they fear speaking up about what is really happening in the classrooms of our country, because they feel that their careers will effectively then be ended. They are marked out as troublemakers, and when they raise concerns about what is happening with school discipline, their ability as teachers is questioned. When they speak out, their comments are ignored and deliberately struck out or withheld from the minutes of meetings. They become marked. It is career inhibiting, if not career ending.
That is but the tip of the iceberg. People who have come forward to serve in the NHS, the police and our schools deserve our respect and support. They need to know that the Parliament has their interests at heart. Those who come forward with issues should be thanked and listened to, not sidelined and mistreated. They should not be threatened with legal sanction, harassed or blackmailed for their efforts. Members of the Parliament will know—they will have been told and they will have seen—that that is the experience of far too many people in our public services. We owe it to the people who work in public service to have an honest conversation about the culture that they experience in the workplace. In large measure, that is what I took away from Ivan McKee’s speech.
We need to start with culture; culture eats strategy for breakfast. We might want to change things with strategic ideas, visions and objectives, but if the culture is not right, none of that progress will be realised. We owe it to the taxpayers of this country, who feel that they are being short changed by the services that they expect to receive when they need to use them, to speak up on their behalf. It is time for us to establish an independent office of the whistleblower, sitting outside any public services. It should be an arm’s-length entity that is answerable to the Parliament and provides a safe harbour for whistleblowers. It should be somewhere that they can go in confidence, be treated with respect and have their concerns listened to and addressed, as appropriate. Public service begins with the transformation of organisational culture towards a culture of transparency and candour. That transformation begins with the creation of an environment in which every employee’s opinions and concerns are not only noted but respected and acted on.
Mr Kerr, please bring your remarks to a close.
I will.
The people who work in our public services know how to fix the service delivery problems that they experience every day of their working lives. We need transparency and accountability. Those are the values that we should be reinforcing through the debate.
Thank you, Mr Kerr.
May I conclude?
I have been very generous with the time, Mr Kerr. I am now going to call the next speaker.
On a point of order, Presiding Officer. You interrupted me. I had an important addition to make to my remarks.
Mr Kerr, please resume your seat for a second. Thank you very much.
Further to your point of order, I said that I wanted you to bring your remarks to a close. You continued and continued, and I had to intervene to effect that very result, because I have to protect other speakers’ speaking time as well. [Interruption.] Mr Kerr had a very generous allocation above his six minutes. I think that we have heard the general gist of Mr Kerr’s points put extremely well. [Interruption.] Mr Kerr has a further point of order.
I have to declare that members should refer to my entry in the register of interests. I am the director of a not-for-profit company, WhistleblowersUK. It is important that that is put on the record. Perhaps, if you had allowed me to say that, the matter would have been done and dusted long ago.
Well, that could have been said during the member’s speech, but it is now on the record. It is time to move on to the next speaker, who I am sure members would all very much wish to hear. I call Mr Mason, to be followed by Mr Rowley.
15:48
Thank you, Presiding Officer, for your kind words. I was waiting quite a long time for Mr Kerr to finish.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak in the debate. There is probably a lot that we can agree on, including the three key missions of equality, opportunity and community, as well as ensuring that public services remain fiscally sustainable, improving outcomes and reducing inequalities in outcomes among communities in Scotland. The challenge is how we go about all of that.
One of the themes that I will look at is whether we could reduce the number of organisations in Scotland. Surely one of the advantages of being a smaller country is that we should be able to do things with simpler structures and fewer organisations. That is why I have a concern about the growing number of commissions or commissioners, and the Finance and Public Administration Committee is to carry out an inquiry into that. I note that Mr Kerr wanted to add yet another body. In paragraph 114 of its response to the committee, the Government says that it has an assumption against the creation of new public bodies and it is my hope that Parliament will also take that approach.
We have already brought the police into one body, as has been mentioned, and we did the same with the fire and rescue services. There has been some recent discussion about health boards, with the suggestion that they could be reduced to three in number. I wonder whether we could reduce them to just one, although that is just a question.
The idea of single island authorities also sounds very attractive to me. We have long needed better integration between health boards and councils and the health and social care partnerships or integration joint boards have moved that programme forward. However, that has meant that, where we previously had two organisations, we now have three; one of my fears when we first heard about the National Care Service Bill was that we were going to end up with four. I say again that Scotland is a small country and that we have the opportunity to do things more simply, which means a yes to more integration and partnership working but surely a no to having more organisations.
The motion mentions prevention and early intervention and I think that we are all supportive of that. Policies such as the 1,140 hours of early learning and childcare are a good example of that. If we can support children and families better during the early years, it is highly likely that their outcomes will be better later on. I suggest that the fire service has also been a success story. There are fewer fires and less loss of life due to fires because of much good preventative work.
However, it must be said that we have struggled to achieve major change in the health sector. There is still a major focus on hospitals and secondary care, including on ambulance delays and waiting times at A and E. Those are all important, but that means that we tend to lose focus on general practitioners and other aspects of primary health care and prevention. Much of that depends on finance. If we had a period of budget surplus, we could invest more in preventative spending, but when budgets are tight, as they are at the moment, it is difficult to disinvest in hospitals to switch the money to community spending instead.
The finance committee, which has public administration as part of its remit, has been looking at public service reform. We had thought that the Government was going to set out clear targets for reducing the number of public sector workers, but it has seemed more recently that each organisation in the public sector will have to reform itself, within its own budget limits. That approach leaves each body managing a trade-off between the number of staff and the pay increases that it can afford.
As the committee has also heard, the previous police and fire boards would not have amalgamated to become Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service without clear leadership and direction from the Scottish Government and from Parliament.
The committee had also expected to be given more detail about future years when this year’s budget was published. I understand that we are now due to get that in May, when we get the new medium-term financial strategy.
There is the on-going challenge of whether to provide universal support and benefits or to target those who need the most support. The committee has, to some extent, looked at that and the issue was raised at our public engagement session in Largs in August. It seems to me that there is broad acceptance that school education and the NHS should be free to all at the point of use, which may in part be because they have been around for so long. Ideally, and if we had enough money, I would like to see most services being universal, with no need for means testing or targeting, but money is tight right now and I think that we should target those who are most in need.
For example, the retail and hospitality sector has been asking for non-domestic rates relief to be more like the system in England. However, some parts of that sector are doing extremely well and have no need for such support, so I think that the Scottish Government’s approach of targeting those that are most in need—including small businesses and businesses on islands—is the right one. Even that is not perfect and there will be anomalies, but I think that that is better than providing either no support at all, or support across the board that is not always needed and is unaffordable.
Public service reform is only part of the answer. We must try to engage the wider public in debate about which public services they want and how much they are willing to pay. Public services can be provided by the public sector but also by the private or third sectors. I was very taken by the briefing for today’s debate from Social Enterprise Scotland, which made the point that there is room to look at new models and to democratise public bodies, such as ScotRail and Scottish Water, by having customers and employees on their boards.
Some workers in the private sector provide an excellent public service. For example, postmen and postwomen go beyond the call of duty by checking up on older people, which reduces isolation; and bus drivers can be incredibly helpful with people who do not have good English or are unfamiliar with an area.
In conclusion, I very much agree that we need to emphasise values as we look at public sector reform, but I also think that we should not be afraid of being radical and of taking a long-term view as to what is best for Scotland.
15:55
To say that I was flabbergasted when I read the Government’s motion for the debate today is an understatement. The SNP is either in denial or completely delusional about the state of Scotland’s economy and public services. I believe that it is clear to anyone in this country who has been paying attention that Scotland is in a worse state now than it was when the SNP took power 16 years ago. Therefore, it is completely ironic—but predictable—that the SNP Government has decided to bring MSPs to the chamber today to request congratulations for the dire state of Scotland’s public services. I have no doubt that, with the support of the SNP’s partners, the Greens, the motion of self-congratulation will be passed today, but the only people they are fooling are themselves. The majority of people in Scotland will not be fooled, because they have witnessed the deterioration of their public services at first hand, so they know how disingenuous the motion is.
Just yesterday, I read in The Scotsman the words of Dr Lailah Peel, an A and E doctor working in Glasgow, who said that “the last thing” she would want
“is for any of my loved ones to be in A&E”.
She said:
“To put it in perspective, imagine your Granny or another elderly relative needing to go to A&E ... You call an ambulance, that ambulance is going to take longer to come out.
Then they’re going to sit in that ambulance outside of A&E for however many hours, and they’re going to eventually come in and they might sit in a corridor for however many hours, and then they’ll get seen by a doctor and then they’ll be waiting on a trolley for another however many hours.”
To go back to the self-congratulatory motion, how does that situation equate to success in health?
Dr John-Paul Loughrey, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said that, at some emergency departments in Scotland, only 20 per cent of patients are being seen within the Scottish Government’s four-hour wait target, adding that many NHS workers are looking for exit plans as people are leaving shifts in tears.
What impact will that have on our already short-staffed and exhausted NHS workforce, which is shouldering the repercussions of this Government’s failure in workforce planning? What impact will it have on my constituents, who are already having difficulty in accessing the medical care that they need, or the one in six Scots who are currently on ever-increasing waiting lists?
Also yesterday, I read that, over the past six years, the number of elderly people who have died while waiting for social care in Scotland has more than doubled. Donald Macaskill, the chief executive of Scottish Care, said:
“I have lost count of the number of social care providers who have said that a service user was supposed to come in, but they’re dead.”
He went on:
“It is an unforgivable scandal that people are not experiencing the quality of life that they could.”
He added that shortages of staff to perform assessments was likely behind the increase in deaths, as was
“the fact there seems to be a total inadequacy of resource going into social care”.
Yet this Government seems to believe that its proposed national care service—nothing more than a centralised procurement system that further removes power from underfunded local authorities and has been widely condemned by key stakeholders—is the answer to those issues although it is not scheduled to arrive until 2029, which is halfway through the next parliamentary session.
Is this the “ambitious public service reform” that the Scottish Government believes should be supported in today’s motion? Unless the region that I represent is uniquely unlucky, I am confident that the cabinet secretary’s inbox, and those of her colleagues, much like mine, are increasingly overwhelmed with contact from constituents who are desperately trying to access public services that are similarly overwhelmed or simply non-existent.
How does the cabinet secretary explain to those who are struggling with access to public services across Scotland that the SNP-Green Government thinks that it is doing a great job? It is clear that this Government has spent 16 years engaged in short-term thinking for long-term problems, with the full extent of its ambitious reform proposals boiling down to little more than centralisation and budget cuts.
I believe that people up and down Scotland are desperate for a change in approach, a change in attitude and a change in focus. If we are to deliver the public service reform that Scotland so desperately needs, ultimately, the people of Scotland need a change in Government.
16:01
I am pleased to contribute to today’s debate on Scotland’s public sector values.
There is no doubt that Scotland’s public sector is currently navigating one of the most challenging financial climates since devolution. The impact of inflation, the tragic conflict in Ukraine and a severe cost of living crisis have exposed Scotland’s public services to significant economic vulnerabilities, exacerbated by harsh Tory austerity choices and a hard Brexit.
Brexit has been devastating. According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the real gross domestic product of the UK has decreased by a staggering 2 to 3 per cent. In 2023 alone, Scotland experienced a reduction in devolved spending power amounting to around £1.6 billion. That is a substantial consequence of a decision that voters in every local authority area across Scotland rejected.
Despite challenging circumstances, Scotland fights to remain resilient. We have heard many negatives today, but there are some positives. The attainment gap for literacy is closing for our primary school learners, unemployment is at 3.8 per cent and our core A and E facilities have consistently outperformed others in the UK for the past eight years.
I take pride in our Scottish Government’s unwavering commitment to prioritise public services, in stark contrast to the UK Tory Government’s approach of cutting taxes at the expense of public services. The Verity house agreement marks a significant step towards achieving optimal outcomes for our citizens, and it empowers local government to use its wealth of local knowledge to enhance the delivery of our public services. With increased empowerment over local decisions and the introduction of legislation such as the visitor levy and council tax premiums, local authorities will have greater autonomy to generate revenue to meet local needs.
What does Stephanie Callaghan say to the local authority leaders whom I have spoken to who say that the Verity house agreement is not worth the paper that it is written on?
That is certainly not the evidence that we, in the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, hear directly from them.
That collaborative effort between national and local government, operating within a shared framework and aligned policies, only enhances our capacity to deliver sustainable and person-centred public services. Although that will continue to be challenging, keeping the needs of our citizens at the core of that shared partnership and of what we are thinking will be the key to success.
The third sector—or, more accurately, the community and voluntary sector—plays a pivotal role in delivering public services, yet its contribution is sometimes overlooked. When I met the chief executive of Voluntary Action North Lanarkshire recently, its emphasis on the big wins for small investments in the sector resonated deeply with me. The contributions of the community and voluntary sector include its crucial role in priming our economy for growth by providing essential skills and workplace training and by delivering high-quality services in health, social care, education and more. That sentiment is reinforced by the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s report “The economic contribution of the third sector in Scotland”, which hails the sector as
“a significant player in the Scottish economy”.
Social enterprises have also played their part. In 2021, they provided nearly 90,000 full-time equivalent jobs and £2.6 billion in gross value added to the Scottish economy. However, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and others have suggested that clarity on whether social enterprises are classed as third sector would be helpful as we consider service reform. It would be good to have a comment on that.
I want to talk about a local example, the MorphFit Gentle Movement Project. It is based in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and delivers inclusive exercise plans and lifestyle interventions for people who would otherwise struggle to access exercise at all. MorphFit focuses on supporting the ageing population, those who are experiencing isolation and those who are caring for others. It receives referrals from local GPs and health and social care partnerships, among others. It supports up to 60 individuals every week and has built a real community, which has expanded into arts and other projects. Residents tell me regularly that it has been absolutely life changing for them. It is the person-centred delivery that makes a difference in people’s lives.
It is imperative that we provide sustained support for third sector organisations and uphold the recognition of them as not just service providers but integral sources of positive social and wealth generation.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that I support Scottish independence. Today, we have heard a lot of negatives and a lot of urging for us to spend more money, but where is that money going to come from? Some people might be surprised that I did not vote SNP until 2015, after decades of voting for the Labour Party. However, my principles and values have always been rooted in social justice, including our duty to look after each other, respect others as equals and value our local communities. That chimes with the three key Scottish Government delivery priorities—equality, opportunity and community.
Although Scottish independence has often been portrayed as being about flag waving, nationality and disliking England, that is not my experience at all. For me and many people like me, independence is all about creating a Scotland that looks after everyone who lives here, from cradle to grave. It is only with the powers of independence that we can fully unleash the talents and resources that will allow industry to thrive and that we can truly invest in those precious public services that uphold Scottish citizens’ rights and prioritise happiness and wellbeing. That is the kind of Scotland that I want to live in.
I will close with a recent quote from Scotland’s First Minister, which I could not agree with more:
“independence is urgent ... precisely ... because the cost of living is at the very top of people’s concerns”.
16:07
I start by paying tribute to all our public sector workforce, in everywhere from the NHS to schools to the fire service. They deserve our praise, but more than that, they deserve a Government that is prepared to meet the promises that it has made and that treats them with respect. The motion does not do that.
I want to speak directly to our communities, who are being let down. I understand that it is they who suffer long waits in our health service, cannot access community facilities and see no future in the education system. It is our communities who suffer as the mess deepens and deepens. We need action, and that action needs to work for our communities and our dedicated workforce.
Before my colleagues on the SNP benches start to jump up and down at me, I want to make this point: I am no friend of the Tories. I believe that the chaos that has been created by Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, on top of the constant Tory attack on working-class people, means that the Tories have undoubtedly contributed to a raid on our public purse.
However, to be clear, our job in this place is not to deflect and not just to blame—it is to deliver on the commitments that have been made and the services that are required. The reality is that, if we do not reflect on our own actions and our own contributions to the problem, we will never seek to find the solution; we will just absolve ourselves of the responsibility.
The reality is that this tired Government, as it enters its 18th year, must be prepared to acknowledge its failures. Currently, it just grasps at straws, such as trying to build a set of “values”—as it describes them—out of the wreckage of Scotland’s public services.
The Government’s motion seems to be about dressing up brutal cuts in the language of reform and values; it is about window dressing rather than substance. If we are absolutely honest, everyone in the chamber knows that, even those who sit on the Government benches. For 17 years, no priority has been given to our public services.
Carol Mochan talks about some of the pressures on Scotland’s budget. Does she anticipate that an incoming UK Labour Government would continue to hold to its plans to stick to Tory spending priorities for the first two years?
I think that the member will know from my words in the chamber that I expect delivery for our communities, and that is what I expect from a Labour Government.
If we strip away the spin, we can sense what really lies in store here in Scotland—funding cuts for the whole public sector and considerable job losses across the country.
The Government wants to focus the debate on what someone else has done, but it needs to face up to its lack of long-term planning, leadership and decision making. As we have heard, the Finance and Public Administration Committee has been critical of the Scottish Government’s lack of strategy and leadership in the area of public sector reform. In its pre-budget report, it stated:
“the focus of the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme has, since May 2022, changed multiple times, as have the timescales for publishing further detail on what the programme will entail.”
Multiple changes and a lack of decision making are a common theme for this Government, and that is undeniably a problem for Scotland and its communities, because it leads to anxiety, a lack of productivity and a country that looks to be in decline rather than one that is surging into a new year with confidence and purpose. That lies at the door of this SNP Government.
Over the past year, I have spoken to workers in every part of our public sector, including local government, colleges, the NHS, our emergency services and schools. Conjuring up new public service values is of little comfort to them. What they need is investment and leadership, and for the work that they do to be valued through proper planning, proper investment and proper pay.
Will the member take an intervention?
I want to make progress.
If I speak to constituents, they say the same thing. They see a lack of investment in the public sector, particularly in their communities. They see a Government that is not capable of tackling NHS waiting lists or reducing the attainment gap.
I thank Carol Mochan for giving me the opportunity to ask about the point that she has just made on pay. Would she not recognise that we have delivered—quite rightly—pay deals that are not only deserved by our public sector workforce, but which are in advance of any other pay deals anywhere else in these islands? That is an important part of investment in our public services. Our investment in pay has been beyond anything that has been seen anywhere else in these islands.
That is what I expected from the cabinet secretary. I have spent hours on picket lines in Scotland, so she should not pretend that we have a comprehensive plan for where we are going. I will accept good pay and pay increases for all our public sector workers, but let us be honest about some of the other stuff that we need to do. In the college sector, for example, we are nowhere near where we should be.
The reality is that we cannot have a debate such as today’s without talking about local government. I do not have much time left, but the Government’s disdain for local government is there in plain sight and must be overcome. The Verity house agreement has been mentioned; we know that councils and COSLA are concerned about that. COSLA has said:
“The Budget as it stands leaves not a single penny for transformational Public Service Reform—there is very limited scope for a focus on ‘Spend to Save’.”
The Deputy First Minister has been unable to give councils or trade unions any idea of where the cuts that we have spoken about will be made.
I ask the Government to speak less about values and to consider more closely what value it is providing to the voters who stood by it for a number of elections only to be left with public services that are on the brink of collapse.
16:14
This is a useful debate for us to have as we head into the second half of this parliamentary session, particularly in the current financial context. Although public sector reform should not just be based on affordability, we cannot ignore the fact that budget availability is one of the deciding factors in our decision making.
I am a fan of a big state. I think that Government should be the expression of the popular will of society. It is where we share power and resources to do transformational things, in particular to protect our most vulnerable neighbours and our planet. Big challenges, such as the deeply embedded inequality that is present in the UK and the climate crisis, require a big, co-ordinated response of the kind that only Government can lead.
I want to see a bigger state in Scotland doing more to meet the needs of people and planet, but I do not just want what we have now on a bigger scale. We need far more efficient and accountable service provision. The kind of Scottish Government that the Greens want would inevitably require a larger staff head count, for example, but we recognise that the level of output from the Scottish public sector over the past decade has not grown as much as the head count. That is not a criticism of staff themselves. Those are issues of structure, process and culture, and not the individual competence of civil servants and officials.
That is very clear in the gap between intention and delivery that is identified by Audit Scotland. We are all—every party—good at ambition, but ambition is far easier than delivery, so that is not a surprise. Whether it is in councils, Government, health boards or other public bodies, we all recognise that delivery, although rarely as bad as it is made out in debates in here or in sections of the press, is not always meeting our aspirations.
There is no singular solution to that, but I suggest that the following would help. First, there should be a rebalancing of resources from the Scottish Government centrally to its agencies and public bodies. We will not solve the delivery challenge by underresourcing those who are responsible for delivery. Pulling resources into the centre because agencies are perceived to have failed or be unreliable is understandable, which is why governance reform and clear ministerial direction for public bodies is critical. More resources alone for bodies that are not delivering is rarely going to be the solution and, in some cases, will be counterproductive.
Will the member give way?
I think that we have heard enough from Mr Kerr.
In some areas, funding is not the issue at all. Take the SQA, for example—a body that has failed to deliver what we would all expect of it. The issues there relate to governance and culture. The education reform bill, which will replace the SQA with a new qualifications body, will be one of the most important bills in this session.
It is critical that the weaknesses in the SQA’s current governance structures and culture are not replicated in the new body. We must not see a repeat of a board with just one current teacher but three management consultants. Corporate governance skills are important, but the SQA and some other public bodies are getting the balance wrong and leaving the boards with an inadequate understanding of the policy areas for which their organisation is responsible. I suggest that that is leading to their being unable to scrutinise effectively the decisions that those bodies are making and the way in which they are discharging their duties.
I whole-heartedly agree with Mr Greer’s assessment of the SQA. We are now three years on from the fiasco of the exams disgrace that happened to young people in this country. We were told at the time that the SQA would be scrapped. The Government’s motion runs directly counter to the track record of getting that work of reform done.
I understand entirely Mr Marra’s desire to see that work take place as quickly as possible. I will come on to the fact that there is a tension between ensuring that we are undertaking good quality work, particularly legislative work, and the need to do so at pace. In particular, when we are abolishing and replacing a body as significant as the SQA, it is right that the cabinet secretary has decided to take the time to consult the workforce directly.
I have mentioned before my belief that the new qualifications body would be better served by a board that includes a substantial number of current teachers and lecturers, as well as students, parent and carer representatives, children’s rights experts and others. If that had been the case with the SQA, I sincerely doubt that we would have ended up in the appalling situation in which the Equality and Human Rights Commission had to take enforcement action after discovering that no equality impact assessments had been conducted for who knows how long.
The other key element to successful replacement of the SQA is an overhaul of its organisational culture and, specifically, its management culture. The SQA has developed a deserved reputation for hostility to question and challenge, particularly from teachers. The structure of the new organisation can address that, in part by baking in consultation and co-design processes, discussion forums and a range of other mechanisms.
However, just creating the space does not guarantee that that purpose will be fulfilled, certainly not if the ivory tower culture of SQA management transfers over. Considerable work was done at the point of establishing Social Security Scotland to ensure that it had the right organisational culture. That approach, or something similar, should be taken to the reform processes that are taking place in this session of Parliament.
One other success story, which I do not think we talk about enough in Parliament, is Screen Scotland. It was set up as a unit within Creative Scotland and has had a transformational effect.
Ten years ago, our film and TV professionals were embarrassed by the state of the sector. Now, we have world-class studios that are booked out and are turning business away. The value of film and TV to our economy doubled from 2019-2021; the sector is employing record numbers of people in a vast range of roles; and our international reputation is rapidly growing. The team at Screen Scotland have been critical to all that. I still think that further reform is required there—perhaps we need a body that is independent from Creative Scotland—but we should look to the success of establishing that screen unit in dealing with public sector reform in other cases.
I do not have much time left, so I will race through a few more points. I mentioned the importance of consultation and co-design, but—as I said to Mr Marra—there is a challenge in respect of the tension between the demand on public bodies to be more nimble in responding to change and the need to take the time that is required to make the correct decision. Sometimes, however, simply explaining why a process is what it is and why it is taking so long is all that is needed to maintain stakeholder buy-in, at least for a time.
We need to see far more collaboration, starting with the basics of sharing data. The David Hume Institute reckons that our economy owes us £2 billion every year as a result of public data in Scotland not being accessible. The Government and a handful of councils operate open government licences; I have persuaded two more councils and four colleges to adopt that approach, but others need to do the same.
We need to ask why we have an Ethical Standards Commissioner for Scotland and a Standards Commission for Scotland, when one body could fill both those roles and save on operating costs. I am completely unconvinced by the argument that merging councils is a solution to anything, when they already feel so remote to the communities that they serve, although sharing services has potential. I am concerned by the constant suggestions that the NHS needs fewer managers, when it is already undermanaged in comparison with many other healthcare systems. Clinicians already do too much administration, so getting rid of more admin support staff will not help with that, even if it makes for easy headlines.
We should make more time for debates such as this on a regular basis. Public sector reform is a key topic that cuts across every portfolio and affects the lives of everyone in Scotland. This afternoon, we have had the opportunity to begin scratching the surface of what more radical and substantive reform could look like. Some members have taken the opportunity to do so, but sadly others did not. I am still completely unclear as to what the Opposition’s alternatives are to any of the reform programmes that the Government is taking forward, but I would welcome the opportunity for us to have more debates on public sector reform on a regular, or at the very least an annual, basis for the rest of the current session of Parliament.
16:22
I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the importance of continued investment in delivering and reforming public services for Scotland’s people and communities.
Although things have undoubtedly been challenging for quite some time—since the beginning of Tory austerity more than a decade ago, in fact—it is clear that the economic damage of Brexit, which means that up to £3.7 billion of potential funding for our public services has been lost, has piled on additional pressure. Much like the austerity agenda, it is the result of a political choice, which the majority of Scottish citizens voted against.
In speaking to the Scottish Government’s motion and legacy of successful public service reform in recent years, including the creation of health and social care partnerships and Social Security Scotland, I make it clear that, although outcomes have improved for many people and communities, in particular as a result of Social Security Scotland’s absolute focus on treating people with dignity and respect—which has been transformational and to which all parties in the Parliament have contributed—one person in this country not having their rights realised is one too many. We—all of us—need to focus on the policy implementation gap that is clear in several areas.
The slightly hyperbolic rhetoric from some Opposition colleagues might have us thinking that our country is in absolute tatters. That is both untrue and unhelpful when we are seeking to reform services, but it would be equally unhelpful for us to close our eyes to the very real challenges that our public services face and the impact that that has on many of our vulnerable citizens.
Colleagues on the Education, Children and Young People Committee saw a stark illustration of that with regard to our disabled children and young people. Of course, as with everything, there are pockets of excellent practice, but it is not good enough if the rights of any children and young people are not being realised.
Colleagues on all sides of the chamber will be aware of the numbers of people in their constituencies who are not receiving their full entitlement to social care—care that is crucial to sustain them in a dignified manner in their own homes. Health and social care integration was absolutely the right thing to do. Again, there are pockets of excellent practice, and there is a skilled and committed workforce of people who do their very best to make the lives of citizens better. However, there is much to learn from what has not worked so well.
For the proposed national care service to succeed, there must be clarity on what its structure will mean from the perspective not of organisations or professionals but of those who are entitled to the services. For example, there must be clarity on how a disabled citizen who is assessed as requiring additional support in their home in order to be healthy and thrive will actually get it. When a citizen returns to their home after a serious operation and a professional assesses that they need adaptations to ensure that they are safe, there must be clarity on how those adaptations will be completed in a timely manner. It is no exaggeration to say that those are matters of life and death.
My constituents also want to be clear on whether key local services such as mental health support for vulnerable young people should be delivered on a project basis. Should boards be able to withdraw services with no consultation, no equality impact assessment and no transitional arrangements being in place? World-leading human rights-based approaches to policy and legislation are a wonderful thing to talk about, and we should be aspiring to them, but they must be backed up by delivery and access to redress when rights are not realised.
Further reform to public services will be necessary to ensure that they remain fiscally sustainable and to improve outcomes for all of Scotland’s people and communities. Public sector workers are key to the success. As I acknowledged earlier, they are doing an excellent job in some challenging circumstances. Showing how much we value them will mean continuing with fair pay and conditions.
The Government’s motion states that further reform will require a focus on
“prevention and early intervention, involving people and communities in the design of public services and embracing the power of digital technologies”.
As my colleague John Mason laid out, we all know intuitively that focusing on prevention and early intervention is the right thing to do, but we also have screeds of evidence that it will improve outcomes for people and be the most cost-effective way to operate. However, bravery will be required to deliver that, because investing additional resource in prevention and early intervention will often involve shifting resource from elsewhere. That is difficult in times of abundance, but it is even more challenging in the fiscal environment that we find ourselves in now.
I noted at the beginning of my remarks that the political choices of austerity and Brexit that were made elsewhere put our public services at risk. Those were choices that our citizens in Scotland did not vote for. Whatever constitutional arrangement Scotland has, there is a lot of work to do. However, it is crystal clear to me that, until Scotland’s independence is restored, we will always be at risk from political decisions that are made elsewhere. With the number of challenges that our communities face, that is frankly heartbreaking. I agree that independence is urgent.
We move to the winding-up speeches.
16:27
I have the pleasure of closing the debate for the Labour Party—the party that brought us the national health service, our social security system and many other key pillars of our public services, having first formed a Government almost exactly a century ago. The main achievement of that first Labour Government, which was elected on 22 January 1924, was the Wheatley housing act of 1924, which went some way towards rectifying the problem of the housing shortage that was caused by the disruption to the building trade during the first world war and the inability of working-class tenants to rent decent affordable housing. The Wheatley act provided public housing to council tenants, as opposed to the previous Government’s privatisation agenda. It subsidised the construction of more than half a million homes with controlled rents by the 1930s, when the subsidy to encourage local authority housing was abolished by the Tories.
What do we have a century on, in 2024, in the wake of a similar disruption—the pandemic? We have housing emergencies in Scotland’s two largest cities, a homelessness crisis and a cut to the country’s capital budget for housing. That is a shameful indictment. A century on, we have made little progress. Indeed, we are going backwards.
The NHS is another great institution of our public services—one might say that it is the epitome of public services—but this Government has failed the people who give it so much, and it has failed NHS patients, too.
The member mentioned the NHS and housing and talked about a time when the UK was on its knees. Does he agree that Keir Starmer should be looking back at that time and looking to invest in this country, should he become the next UK Prime Minister?
Stephanie Callaghan makes a fair challenge about being inspired by previous Labour Governments. Labour has been in Government for only about 30 years of the past century, so the opportunity to serve, from the end of this year, will be significant.
The national missions that Labour has outlined will supercharge that effort. We need to be bold and resilient and to show the necessary ambition to dig ourselves out of the vicious cycle that the country has been in for far too long—it has certainly been in it for the entirety of my adult life. I do not want to be part of a generation that is poorer than its parents. We need to build out of that.
Our healthcare professionals are in a similar position. They have no headroom right now. Every day, they tell us that they are overstretched. Mental health services are at breaking point. In Scotland last year, waiting times in accident and emergency departments resulted in 1,600 excess deaths. Astonishingly, the principle of free care at the point of need is no longer taken seriously, with almost one in six Scots being on an NHS waiting list. Some are counting down the days between having a treatable condition and having a terminal condition. The SNP Government has let down patients and the people who work in our national health service.
The most glaring sign that NHS workers feel undervalued is the swathes of staff who leave to head overseas. We have to not only retain staff but grow the national health service workforce in Scotland. Labour will increase the number of training places in Scotland and will aggressively and relentlessly focus on countering the reasons why we fail to retain staff.
Will Paul Sweeney give way?
I am happy to do so if I can have the time back.
Yes—I call the cabinet secretary.
Will Paul Sweeney at least acknowledge that NHS staff in Scotland are the best paid anywhere in these islands?
Yes—in relative terms, they are. However, that is not working well in absolute terms, as is demonstrated by the workforce challenges that we have in Scotland. The cabinet secretary should recognise those challenges with a degree of humility, because we are still not performing well enough and people are dying unnecessarily. That is not good enough on our watch.
The member for Glasgow Provan recognised some of the structural changes that are critical to any realistic change management programme, and I commend him for his speech. However, as was mentioned by my friend Alex Rowley, a member for Mid Scotland and Fife, the SNP Government has neglected public services across the board for years. The abject failure of the SNP Government, over 16 years, to reform Scotland’s public services means that they are crying out for investment.
My friend Carol Mochan, a member for South Scotland, highlighted the lack of focus, commitment and consistency that has characterised the Government’s programmes for many years. Indeed, it feels as though the Government is focused on public relations rather than on project management. Just one example that she cited was colleges.
Frankly, I find it risible that the Government’s motion claims that the Scottish Government continues to invest in delivering public services. When the Deputy First Minister set out the Scottish Government budget, just before Christmas, it did not sound, from where I was sitting, like a budget that was about promoting and advancing our public services. COSLA has since said that, as a result of the proposed budget, there will be
“cuts in every community in Scotland and job losses across Scottish Local Government.”
That is hardly the paragon of municipal socialism that characterised the first Labour Government.
Will Paul Sweeney give way?
Yes, if I can have the time back.
By and large, the quantum that is available to us is dictated by the decisions of Whitehall spending departments. The quantum is the quantum. The only way to increase that quantum is through limited levers, such as tax. Is the Labour Party’s position still that it is against tax rises to raise additional revenues? If so, is that not totally inconsistent with the point that Paul Sweeney just made?
It is about having fiscal rules that are characterised by discipline. The Government has been profligate with public expenditure.
I allude to the points of the member for Glasgow Provan about making capital investments that earn back income for the country. For example, colleges should make, not lose, money for the country by selling training programmes to industry, reinforcing our public services and stabilising our workforce challenges.
The Government does not seem capable of making such three-dimensional calculations and structures in its delivery of public policy. It is characterised by draughts players, not chess players. The SNP’s spin does not cut the mustard. The disastrous budget fails to invest in public services and will leave councils at financial risk. That is further evidence that communities across Scotland have been let down by the Government. Slow economic growth means that there is less money to spend on public services than could have been built up to reform them. If the Scottish economy had grown at the pace of the overall British economy since 2012, it would be £8.5 billion larger today.
The Scottish Government must prioritise economic growth across the country to ensure that the national health service is not stuck in a permanent crisis and that local councils are not left cash strapped.
I go back to the member for Glasgow Provan, because I was taken with his speech. He made important points on the complex realities of undertaking a change management process while adhering to the Christie principle of empowerment and the need to ensure clear lines of accountability and continuous improvement.
We need micro and macro reforms, which I could go into in great detail. One example could be our efforts to recharge the commercial shipbuilding industry in Scotland, but that would require an entirely different speech.
Listening to and empowering our staff and workers on the front line is essential to reform. Mr Kerr, the Conservative member, made the point about culture eating strategy for breakfast.
The motion that has been presented by the Deputy First Minister is puzzling. It is devoid of reality and of humility, which is a fundamental prerequisite of any reform programme. The Deputy First Minister said that the SNP is investing in public services, but the budget slashed funding for public services left, right and centre. The spin does a disservice to thousands of public service workers who feel overstretched, undervalued and demoralised.
16:35
As this is the first debate in which I have participated since the passing of our former Labour colleague Hanzala Malik, I wonder whether I might begin with a tribute to him. When I saw that today’s debate was about public service values, I thought about how Hanzala Malik was, to me, the epitome of a politician who was one of the better public servants. He was a regular participant in what I call the “graveyard shift”, which is the Thursday afternoon debate. Colleagues who served in the chamber then will remember that he began every debate by saying, “Good afternoon, Presiding Officer. Good afternoon, everybody.” He would then enter into a spirited contribution.
He was never pejoratively partisan, and I always felt that he had the interests of the people he served at the forefront of his concerns. He left here to serve, again, in council. He was immensely proud of his roots, his community and his family, and I shall always remember him with great affection.
I echo Jackson Carlaw’s fine tribute to the late Hanzala Malik, who I greatly enjoyed working with, as a fellow representative of Glasgow. I pay particular tribute to him for his founding of the Glasgow City Heritage Trust, of which I am a trustee, and which does great cross-party work to protect Glasgow’s built heritage. I wanted to put that on the record.
We do well to remember those with whom we have worked over time.
I will make a couple of reflections. One is about age, really, as I approach my late 60s. The peer group that motivated me, as I came into politics, were all men and women who had served in the war, or who had learned of experiences from those who had served in the war. A real sense of duty and public service underpinned that. That was true not only of politics but of people who went into the national health service. They had seen the absolute worst of the world, and they were determined to build the best of a new world thereafter.
Although I do not want to generalise too much, when I look at things now, I sometimes wonder whether that top level, whether in public life or public service, has the same moral authority that it had in the generation that I grew up in the wake of. Sometimes, it seems to me that the moral authority now comes from those on the ground up, rather than from the top down.
When I was undergoing a cancer biopsy at the start of the Covid pandemic, nervous as I was, I was struck by the NHS staff who recognised who I was and asked whether they could meet me to say, “We just want to let you know, Mr Carlaw, that we will not let the country down.” I was very moved by that integrity and the sense of purpose that comes from so many of those who work in our public service, which is, to an extent, now let down by the chiefs. It seems to me that, too often, they seek to defend the indefensible and to find ways around taking responsibility or being properly accountable for what happens.
When I first came into this Parliament, I asked what the NHS compensation bill was. It had grown pretty quickly, and we were all pretty appalled. It had gone from £5 million up to £18.9 million in 2007. In the most recent year, the compensation figure was £109.24 million. It seems to me that there is a reliance on finding routes to absolve or to excuse responsibility, rather than to take responsibility.
The corrosive effect of that is that, further down the line—within our public services, in public life or anywhere—people will think, “Why should I bother? Why should I make all that effort if others can get away and excuse themselves?”
Will the member take an intervention?
Just before I take an intervention, I should say that it applies to politics, too. If members were to ask me, “What about Boris Johnson?” or, “What about the junior doctors and their leaders?” or if they want to talk about Sir Ed Davey or Sadiq Khan, I would say that the actions of all those figures in public life have led to a sense among people at the sharp end that it is they who are giving and showing moral leadership, which is not being reflected by those above them.
Jackson Carlaw’s remarks have been interesting—although I was not going to ask any of those things. I was wondering whether, more generally, the dialogue that we have in politics and in the media prohibits that kind of honest reflection on the part of leaders. I think that our discourse sometimes contributes to that. Does he agree?
Time is such that I will not be able to make as much of a contribution on as wide a range of areas as I wanted to cover this afternoon but, yes, I recall that, during the session from 2011 to 2016, members in the chamber were very reluctant to apply the word “crisis” to any of our public services. When an MSP said that the NHS was in crisis, there was a general feeling around the chamber that we could not indulge in that sort of hyperbole.
In the decade since, we have come to the view that there is a crisis in all our public services—whether in education, policing or health. That is not just here in Scotland. Let us be honest: it is also the case in Wales and elsewhere, too. Why? Back in 2007, we talked about the demographic changes that were coming in this country and which Michael Marra has reflected on. However, we sometimes do not accept what that means.
Alasdair Allan rose—
It means that we have a dramatically ageing population, and many of the benefits that the Parliament has rightly offered to people in Scotland, including free personal care, free transport at 60, free tuition and free prescription charges, cost even more with an expanding population, who will draw on and rely on them: an even bigger percentage of the population than was the case when those benefits were first introduced.
Will the member take an intervention?
That has to be funded within the budget settlement in Scotland, over and above all the other pressures that apply to every other part of the United Kingdom.
I will take an intervention from Alasdair Allan first.
I thank the member for giving way, and for the characteristically thoughtful tenor of his remarks.
The member points to the demographic crisis—let us use the word—that Scotland and other parts of northern Europe face. Does he also take the view that that must make us think about our policy on freedom of movement within Europe and from elsewhere?
I addressed the fact earlier that we had record migration into the UK last year, but not to Scotland.
I had hoped that this debate, on a Thursday afternoon, could be more reflective, whereas I thought that the motion invited a more controversial and spirited debate. Mr Marra very politely eviscerated the Government; Mr Rennie less politely eviscerated the Government—it did get rather heated. It seems to me, however, that if we recognise that we have a hugely ageing demographic, that such problems are common elsewhere and that we have advanced additional public services here in Scotland, it is not a weakness on the part of the Government to accept, after all these years, that not everything is right or going right.
If we are to make progress, at some point—as Alex Neil once recognised, when he was a cabinet secretary—it will require more of a collective understanding and acceptance of what our priorities are going to be and how we are going to address them. I am sorry to Mr Greer, but that must go beyond simply saying, “I want an even bigger state,” or, “I want a larger staff head count: it’s only gone up by 55 per cent,” and telling people, “You’ve never had it so rarely as bad as you think,” to paraphrase what I think Mr Greer said.
In closing, let me dedicate at least part of my speech, generously, to Ross Greer in this, the 150th anniversary of the year of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill, who has of course been such an inspiration to the notorious reputation that Mr Greer has managed to secure.
16:44
Presiding Officer, I apologise to you and to colleagues across the chamber for being slightly late for the beginning of the debate.
In such debates, I am conscious that we all have a vested interest in public sector services and their reform. We all make use of them, and will all be dependent on some part of our public sector at some point, whether it be, for example, our health service, our education system or our transport system. We all have an interest in ensuring that we have the most effective and efficient public services that can deliver the best outcomes for citizens across the country. Despite members’ political differences on certain aspects, we all share the view that we want our public services to be successful and effective.
Prior to this debate, I was reflecting on public sector reform. Discourse and debate on the subject often focus on the here and now—that is the bit that we experience in this chamber or that we witness as we move through this political space—but such reform and change have always been with us.
In the past 50 years, one of the most significant public sector reforms that has taken place in the UK was the introduction of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990. For members who are not already aware of it, that legislation was introduced at the start of my career in the health service. It was at the time when the UK Government decided to move away from institutional-based long-stay care for people with mental health issues or learning disabilities and other complex needs towards a community-based approach that also recognised the need for fundamental reform of service delivery in the future.
The legislation was also one of the most significant social policy changes that took place in that 50-year period. At the time, it faced a great deal of criticism. There were challenges to its implementation, where care was not delivered in the right way and the necessary funding was not provided to support the transition from institutional to community-based care, which was more expensive for individuals with complex needs. Notwithstanding those challenges, and the problems that occurred at that point, it was the right policy decision to take. Had such change not been progressed then, we would have faced even greater challenges in reforming the public sector later on.
That brings me to my point. There is a danger that we always characterise public sector reform as a failure. The reality is that such reform has taken place over many decades. It has had its challenges, but it has been necessary and the right thing to do. I will refer to a couple of examples of what I believe to have been good reforms that often go under the radar. In doing so, I will try not to focus overly on structural reform being the way in which we should deliver public sector reform; in my view, structural reform is often the easy part of it.
In his contribution, Ivan McKee said that the real challenge in public sector reform is cultural change—that is, the ability to change the way in which a service is delivered. I will give three examples of where no structural reform took place but where cultural change made a real difference to service delivery. One of the most notable examples of that in the past 15 years was the introduction of the Scottish patient safety programme, the aims of which were to address unnecessary deaths in our health service, to identify where they had occurred and to take action to prevent others from happening. The introduction of that programme did not involve changing health board boundaries or hospital management structures; it was about cultural change and empowering staff to take decisions and to make the necessary changes.
I put it on the record that I strongly agree with what Michael Matheson is saying. In one of my multiple previous lives, I delivered large-scale changes in corporate companies. The vast majority of such change programmes failed because of a failure to take cognisance of the prevailing culture. That is a well-known management statistic.
We very often focus on structural change rather than on some of the changes that have taken place in our public services over the past two decades. The patient safety programme, which we as a Government introduced, is internationally recognised as being one of the most comprehensive patient safety programmes of its type anywhere in the world. That was about enabling and empowering staff to make the right decisions.
Another aspect of public sector reform that is often forgotten but significant is the change that came from the challenge that was set out in the Christie report in relation to how our public sector operates and on the need to move from symptom management to being much more focused on preventative measures.
I will refer to the impact of that change on youth justice. As a result of the Christie report, we have gone from an environment in which Polmont young offenders institution was overcrowded to the point that it is now—or was—half empty. That is because of a change in approach, with a much more preventative focus taken to address offending behaviour at a critical stage. It was about moving away from a dependency on forcing people into the system and thinking that the system knows best and that putting them in jail would solve the problem to recognising that that approach is not very effective. It is much more effective if we can deal with things upstream and prevent crimes from happening in the first place.
The youth justice system provides a very good example of how we have been able to reform our public services without the need for structural reform; rather, the reform was done a much more meaningful way and has changed how those services are delivered.
I come to another area, given Campbell Christie’s background. Some members might recognise that I have a constituency interest in the way in which Scottish Canals operates and, previously, how British Waterways operated. The latter organisation often sat in the background and did little other than managing a bit of infrastructure in our country that not much use was made of. During his time as chair of that organisation, Campbell Christie transitioned British Waterways into Scottish Canals, and moved it from being an asset management organisation into being an economic development organisation, to help to use our canals to unlock potential in areas—and no more so than in my Falkirk constituency, with the Falkirk wheel. That development then flowed through into the Kelpies and has led to significant investment in, for example, Springburn.
In that example, we have a public service body that has taken a different approach. There was no structural change, but it recognised that it has a more important role to play than just managing the assets that it holds, and it is taking a much more holistic approach to how it can support communities.
I recognise the huge transformation that Scottish Canals has achieved, particularly in the Glasgow canal section of the Forth and Clyde canal. Does the cabinet secretary recognise that a large part of that was down to the structure of Scottish Canals as a public corporation and that changing it recently into a non-departmental public body has placed fiscal constraints on it that might challenge its ability to do those more entrepreneurial activities? Maybe we need to look again at the structure of the public corporation.
I recognise that. I made that point because a number of people have referred to the Christie report, and Campbell Christie was the chair of British Waterways when the UK Government decided to abolish it, leading to the creation of Scottish Canals.
I think that Paul Sweeney is referring to the issue of Treasury rules, which have led to the challenge that we have had to address. I know that that is not ideal, and that it places constraints on the organisation. However, I offered that up as an example of a very good public body that is making a real difference in communities—particularly in deprived areas—and that uses assets and unlocks them in a way that results in much greater benefit.
As Paul Sweeney will know, we have only to look around Springburn to see the real difference that the organisation has made to the area, or around Maryhill and the back of Firhill. Because of the economic development approach that has been taken, an area has been opened up that people would simply not have gone to previously. We have to encourage more of our public bodies to do that.
I want to address the challenges that we have around healthcare, which a number of members have referred to. I think that Jackson Carlaw and Michael Marra referred to the demographic challenges that we face. Some of the early policy options that were set out in the early part of this parliamentary session still have to be funded, such as free personal care. Decisions were made then, given the demographic shift that we face. We will face the same challenge in our health and social care system going forward. It will have to reform and change in order to meet demand. That is not just because of the demographic challenge that we face; it is because of the disease burden that we as a country face. That burden is estimated to increase by about 21 per cent over the next 20 years. We cannot simply think that we can continue with the existing model and that it will deliver for us. Right now, we have a health and social care system that—
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I will just finish this point and then give way to the member. Do I have until 5 o’clock, Presiding Officer?
Yes.
I will keep going, then.
I want to make this point because, if we look at the way in which our health and social care system has traditionally operated, over many decades and many Governments, its priorities have been secondary care, primary care, social care and then the individual—the patient. In reality, our system has to be completely flipped. It must be much more patient focused, social care focused, primary care focused and then secondary care focused.
That will require significant change to our health and social care system over the next decade, and we will have to address that if we are to meet the demographic challenge and the disease burden that we face. That will require, as Alex Neil said many years ago, greater collaboration and co-operation across the chamber. We must have a mature and reasoned conversation about what we can realistically provide and how that can be delivered in the years ahead. That will require us—dare I say it, Presiding Officer?—to take some of the party politics out of the decision-making process to ensure that we make the right decisions for the future and deliver better outcomes for those who make use of those public services.
The minister recognises two points. The first is that many of the problems in our health system, as well as in our social care system, come from the demographic transition that is under way. The second point is that that is long predicted. It precedes the advent of this SNP Government in 2007. We knew the demographic trajectory of this country, so why, nearly 17 years on, are we just having the beginnings, it would seem, of the conversation about trying to build that consensus, when we have known all along that it had to be done?
I do not think that that is a fair characterisation. Throughout my time in this Parliament, there have been various debates, discussions and attempts to engage in public sector reform and to have reasoned debate around some of the issues.
Let me take the example of delayed discharges, which is an issue that we are trying to deal with. That issue is not new to our health and social care system. [Interruption.] It is not new; delayed discharge is an issue that predates this Government and even this Parliament. There have been various iterations to try to address that. We have had the joint future agenda, and then we had structural change that introduced NHS trusts.
Will the cabinet secretary give way?
I will, if I can just finish this point.
We then had different approaches to try to deliver greater integration. Those have all helped to a small degree, but they have not been able to address the issue to the full extent that is required. That is why I think—I will come back to this point—that a national care service will be critical to supporting us in achieving that.
Would not the short answer to Mr Marra’s intervention be that the Government initiated the Christie commission, 13 years ago, and has spent the past 13 years implementing its outcomes?
I agree with that. I have made reference to a couple of issues in which we have made progress in relation to the Christie principles.
I turn back to the issue of the national care service. We need to get right that huge reform. It is important that we take the right time to manage that reform, because a top-down approach to the creation of a national care service will not work. We need to work in a collaborative and co-operative fashion, and we have taken extra time with COSLA and others in an attempt to achieve that. We have made progress. There is more that we need to do, but it is critical that we get it right.
Although I know the Labour Party’s criticism of the Government, I presume that it still supports the creation of a national care service. However, if we are to change the system so that the patient, social care, primary care and secondary care are our four key priorities, the national care service will be critical to supporting us in achieving that. That is why we need to get it right and to ensure that that engagement is progressed correctly.
We must always learn from the reforms that we have undertaken but that have not progressed as well as they could have done. I hope that the approach that we are taking with the national care service is seen as being a genuine attempt, and a recognition on our part of our need, to try to do that.
There is a need for us to significantly reform and change our public services. I put on record my huge thanks for the thousands of public sector workers across Scotland who work day in, day out to deliver excellent, outstanding services where they can. I recognise the challenges that they face, and we as a Government will continue to do everything that we can to support them in the important role that they play in Scottish society.
That concludes the debate on Scotland’s public service values.
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