Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2026 [Last updated 19:16]
I will say two things in response to that. First, I am sure that the cabinet secretary is a keen advocate for that, but I would believe him a bit more if we had not gone for 20 years without the Scottish National Party substantially reforming the public sector. There have been some reforms, but they clearly have not met the trends or achieved the scale of transformation that is required—I will come back to that.
Secondly, I am afraid that if we do not have an idea of what is going on, that will result in a management consultancy strategy that is not very likely to gain public buy-in. All we had from the cabinet secretary were some adjectives for what reform could look like, instead of a description of the shape of services that we absolutely require.
I will give the example of health service reform. The recent division of boards into two regions—east and west—has been put in place without any real explanation. It came as a huge surprise to leaders in our national health service and it was imposed without any form of consultation with the trade unions. It did not meet fair work principles from the outset—it is a good example of how not to do reform. Whether there was a case to do it is not the question; the process that the cabinet secretary set out in the strategy and in his speech was not followed, and on that basis, we are concerned about it.
The cabinet secretary knows that I fundamentally believe in the empowerment of citizens. I have told him that my vision of a future Scottish state is very much one in which citizens are empowered, where they own and have control of their data and understand what is happening. However, that requires a broader vision of technological implementation, which I find lacking in the strategy.
Willie Rennie was right to talk about prioritisation. If we do not understand what success would look like, it is really difficult for Parliament and the public to see whether any of this is working. We need the Government to tell us something specific—what a service will look like or that a service will cease to exist—so that it can hang its hat on that and we can understand whether it is making progress, instead of its just talking about the fiscal savings. I think that that is at the heart of this.
Change is, of course, not cost free. When the United Kingdom Labour Government was elected in 2024, I met the then Cabinet Secretary for Finance and said that that moment, with the significant increase in public investment, was a unique opportunity for rapid change. She looked at me as if I had walked out of a spaceship instead of the lift to the ministerial corridor because the very idea was a completely alien concept to the SNP. That is because the SNP was elected in 2007 on the basis of no reform, and it has pursued that for 20 years.
We could say much more about this agenda. It is a huge challenge. I absolutely agree with the cabinet secretary about the preventative aspect. Delayed discharge has cost this country billions of pounds because, under this Government, there was no reform of health and social care when it was clearly needed, on the basis of demographic trends.
I will close by talking about the two practical things that we have asked for in our amendment. The first is
“a timetable for the reduction in … public bodies”.
After five years, I still trip over new ones every week, and I have no idea what they actually do.
Secondly, we are looking for an understanding of the displacement effect of the withdrawal of public capacity in our third sector. It is vital that the Government explains that. Those are practical things that the Government could be doing right now to set the framework on better footing. I look forward to the other contributions in the debate.
I move amendment S7M-00309.3, to insert at end:
“that the Scottish Government’s approach to public service reform should align with the principles of Community Wealth Building, Fair Work and the European Charter for Local Self-Government and the need to encourage economic growth, and calls on the Scottish Government to produce a detailed timetable for the reduction in the number of public bodies as part of a drive to reduce broader waste and to produce a holistic assessment of the impact of the public sector reform programme on Scotland's vital third sector.”
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