Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2026 [Last updated 19:16]
Reforming our public services means making sure that they are sustainable for the long term. It also means ensuring that they are delivering what we need them to deliver, including healthcare that is free at the point of need. Poverty is expensive. Not only is so much human potential lost when children grow up in poverty, because they lack the opportunity to thrive, but their health outcomes are worse and social structures are more fragile. We all have to pay the costs of repairing that damage.
Although I am sceptical about the focus on AI in the Government’s reform strategy, I support the cabinet secretary’s emphasis on prevention. Preventing children from growing up in poverty will alleviate much of the strain on our public services down the line. Simple things such as ensuring that our children have enough healthy food to eat while they are growing up will lessen the strain on our NHS in the future.
I absolutely do not support Scottish Labour’s approach, as set out in its amendment, that a list should be created of all public bodies and that someone—possibly the cabinet secretary—should look down that list and, with a black marker pen, cross out organisations to satisfy that party’s desire to make cuts. The Scottish Greens believe that reform in our public services should be worker led. Reform should be designed by the front-line workers who deliver the services and by the communities that depend on them, not by someone sitting in St Andrew's house with a whiteboard and a black marker pen.
The Scottish Greens believe that public services should be under public ownership and should not be run for profit. We would bring more of Scotland’s buses back under public control, and we would support having publicly owned ports that could be key economic drivers of the energy transition to develop local supply chains, bring oil and gas workers into new opportunities and diversify our marine economy.
There is a larger conversation to be had about the responsibilities of the public and private sectors. For too long, private companies have generated profits while polluting our environment—pollution and litter that our councils and other public bodies have had to clean up at public expense. Industries should pay to clean up after themselves—that is, the polluter-pays approach. If the public purse is stretched, that is the first place that we should look for money. It might involve taxing polluters or using extended producer responsibility schemes such as the deposit return scheme, but in any case it is clear that we can no longer afford to subsidise polluters.
The same goes for carbon emissions. Through tree planting, peatland restoration and carbon capture schemes, the Scottish Government is spending—and will spend—a lot of money on desperately trying to pull carbon out of our atmosphere. It would be much cheaper to prevent those emissions in the first place, by removing the direct and indirect subsidies for producing them.
Of course, we would know more about who is receiving public subsidies and what they are doing with them if we had a complete land registry. It is a matter of urgency that Scotland’s land register be completed so that a comprehensive and publicly accessible online map can be created. I would be very interested to hear the cabinet secretary’s view on the importance of that aspect.
The Scottish Greens believe that public money can be spent more effectively if conditions are attached to it. We would make fair work first conditions mandatory for public procurement, grants and economic development funding, which would ensure that no company in receipt of public money could use exploitative practices such as fire and rehire or zero-hours contracts. The Scottish Greens believe that public bodies should have clear duties to protect the environment, build resilience to climate change and uphold human rights. Reform of the public sector must embed those duties throughout.
In the previous session of Parliament, I was part of the cross-party SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee. I would like to highlight to the cabinet secretary two of the recommendations that resulted from that committee’s work. One says:
“While the Committee was tasked with reviewing the SPCB supported landscape only, this small fraction of the public sector should not be seen in isolation from the wider public sector. The evidence is clear that many of the measures we are recommending in this report could also apply more widely.”
Another says:
“In particular, while we welcome the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme, we were surprised to learn about a lack of understanding of the functions and potential overlaps and duplication among the public bodies it funds. We therefore recommend that the Scottish Government urgently undertakes a strategic mapping exercise to identify the functions of all Scottish public bodies and where they overlap, to inform decisions on future size, structure, and coherence across the public sector.”