Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am tempted to ask you the same question in private and see what response I get.

I recognise your point that compartmentalisation is an issue, and part of it is about putting the right levers in the right places and ensuring that things are not split up. With that in mind, do we need a more fundamental reappraisal of what is under the control of local government? Douglas Lumsden alluded to the local governance review, which is about how local government engages with people and makes decisions, rather than what it actually does. You gave the example of the library, the sports centre, the primary school and the health centre all being in one place, and one of the best ways to make such things happen more often is to make sure that the decisions are all made in one place, rather than being split apart.

In line with my previous question, I will ask my next question in a slightly more impudent way. Why do we treat Douglas Lumsden’s and Liz Smith’s colleagues from 1994 with such respect and assume that Mr Lang’s local government reforms were perfectly formed and should remain unaltered by your Government—or, frankly, by the Labour Government? Should we not be asking much more fundamental questions? Is the solution not to push as much decision making as possible down to the local level and to give local government the powers that it needs to make those decisions properly?

Deputy First Minister, you have always struck me as someone who is frustrated with the pace of change. In your opening remarks, I think that you were hinting at something when you said that we should reflect on the fact that many of the things in Christie had not become as embedded, either institutionally or in policy terms, as we would have liked. Let me be expansive and ask you this question: if the 2007 John Swinney were able to travel here from the past, would he be pleased with what has happened or would he be frustrated with the lack of institutional change? Equally, if the 2021 John Swinney could provide that John Swinney with advice, what would it be?

I should have asked a bridging question, because there is an interesting point about the natural level in areas such as education and health, and whether it is the same.

Okay. I will challenge you on one point, Deputy First Minister. In response to Liz Smith—and you alluded to a similar point in your response to Ross Greer—you spoke about whether being accountable to ministers was a sufficient level of accountability for organisations, whether they are health boards or NDPBs. I would challenge you on whether accountability to ministers is the same as public accountability. With public accountability, there is an intermediary. We can hold ministers to account in Parliament, but we cannot hold health boards directly accountable. There is a difference there, and in some ways that is a frustration in our democracy.

To clarify, has that sum of money been allocated to those categories in advance? If so, do you have any indication of what the allocations are? Otherwise, are you implying that it is a contingency fund that is available for drawdown over the coming months?

Do you have that breakdown?

I am tempted to go off on a tangent and examine the aviation approach to risk, which I think is fascinating—it has lots of lessons. However, I will not do that.

I recognise that the answers have been expansive, but I will ask a second and final question, which I put to the whole panel. One thing that strikes me about Scotland in comparison with the rest of the UK is how little structural reform we have done over the past 20 years. Graeme Roy said that we have had 10 years to contemplate Christie and that, hopefully, we will get around to some change in the next 10 years. I know that I am paraphrasing you in an unfair way, Professor Roy, but there is a sense that that change has been very slow in coming.

I think that the UK has done too much structural change, but we have orphaned structures in the Scottish public policy landscape. For example, health boards are organised at a regional level of public administration that has not existed for 25 years, and that is odd. In fact, we are adding to that with health and social care partnerships. I do not think that Police Scotland was created for Christie reasons at all; it was purely about economies of scale. If we consider some of the handbrake turns that had to be done, that was about returning to community delivery because things had become very centralised.

There been very few examples of genuine public service reform, despite the changes that have taken place—devolution itself and societal changes. What is more, what has happened has not happened along Christie lines. Is that a fault? Is there a need to ask more searching questions about whether we have the right structures—whether they have adequate public accountability and whether they are delivering the outcomes that we have outlined? I would probably start with health—and, if you will forgive the pun, that comes with all the health warnings that come with discussing the NHS and health policy.

You are nodding your head most vigorously, Professor Mitchell, so I will go to you first.

One of the largest single increases is to the health budget. We can all understand the various needs of our health service and the demands that are being placed on it; nonetheless, that represents a 5 per cent increase or thereabouts in that budget. Can you provide detail on where that money will be going and what the priorities are for it, given that it is such a large increase in the health budget?

The figures are quite large. I assume that further breakdowns can be applied to these large sums of money. Seven hundred million pounds is about 4 per cent of overall health spending. I would hope that the NHS breaks down figures a little more finely.

You have all said that much of the work that we are talking about is not new and that some of the themes have been talked about before. I like to go back to the work of the Fulton committee on the civil service in 1966, because it talked about many of the same things, such as accountability and measuring outcomes. Therefore, such themes have been talked about for a long time. However, looking at the difference between public administration and the private sector, I wonder whether organisational reform, as opposed to structural reform, is an underexamined strand. In a sense, I am taking as read the points about measurement. I think that those are well made, and there is a lot of work to be done.

There is a case to be made for structural reform, which I will come back to in another question. However, many private sector organisations, particularly financial organisations—whether they have matrix structures or something else—have parts that run the organisation and other parts that are dedicated to changing the organisation. For example, you will hear a lot of banks talk about the “run the bank, change the bank” approach. Is that the sort of reform that we have not seen in the civil service? It is still very siloed, with delivery structures that follow those silos, as opposed to organising people around change. That would involve not necessarily a structural reform but a reform of the organisation itself—reform of the central civil service. Does that need to be examined? Are there lessons to be learned from the organisation of private sector bodies with regard to aligning the central administration along Christie principles?