Hansard

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.]