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Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.  

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Dates of parliamentary sessions
  1. Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
  2. Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
  3. Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
  4. Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
  5. Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 5 May 2021
  6. Current session: 12 May 2021 to 25 November 2024
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Displaying 1319 contributions

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Finance and Public Administration Committee

Public Service Reform Programme

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

Absolutely. You mentioned 60 beds being removed. You are looking to reduce supplemental staffing support by half, which by my calculation would be 475 full-time equivalent positions. How can you do that without impacting on patient care, especially when waiting times are already increasing?

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

When is the next milestone? When will the OBR publish its next estimates?

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

So it is 1 per cent per year—that is what I was trying to get at.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Public Service Reform Programme

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

Can organisations make such a change voluntarily, or does this go back to the point that Michelle Thomson, I think, made—that it would have to be mandated from the centre before we would get real reform among those organisations?

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Public Service Reform Programme

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

How do we break that cycle? We hear from Government ministers that prevention and early intervention are key and are how we will make savings later, but I do not see a firm change to using the prevention model.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

My last question is around social security spend. We have seen that go up from about £3.6 billion in 2021-22, and it will be doubling by 2027-28. Behind that, there are two things. Inflation is obviously pushing the welfare bill up, but there are also new welfare commitments that are not matched, which do not come through in the block grant adjustment. How much is the spend on each of those? If we never had these new commitments, what would the social security bill be going forward?

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

I guess, therefore, that it is not so much a case of divergence, because you are predicting that the two figures are coming closer again. A difference of 0.6 per cent does not sound like too much of a big number. If the OBR revised its figure up to 2.6 per cent growth and the two figures came together, what would that do to our income tax take, or to the BGAs?

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

However, for the past five years, we have been lagging behind the earnings relative to the rest of the UK—

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Economic and Fiscal Forecasts and Medium-term Financial Strategy

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

So, looking forward, you do not have any estimates of the size of the public sector workforce.

Finance and Public Administration Committee

Public Service Reform Programme

Meeting date: 6 June 2023

Douglas Lumsden

I want to ask about shared services. Obviously, we have multiple health boards, 32 local authorities and the IJBs. Each has its own finance director, HR director and IT director. Is there scope in the public sector landscape to reduce the number of such roles and to consolidate into more of a shared-service model?