Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2026 [Draft]
We will come on to waste in a moment—I have some suggestions to make in that regard—but I refer Mr McKee to today’s Accounts Commission report on local government, which highlights the scale of the cuts that the Scottish Government has passed down to councils over the 19 years that it has been in power. I hope that that is not a model that the Government intends to follow.
Looking at this whole agenda, we cannot ignore the fact that the SNP has now been in power for almost two decades, so it has had 19 years to start addressing the issue. As my colleague Meghan Gallacher reminded members just a few moments ago, the Christie commission reported on it in 2011. Fifteen years on, we are still hearing about the need to make progress on the same themes of prevention, joined-up services and efficiency, but little progress has been made. The Government can talk a good game, but it needs to start actually delivering.
The SNP has promised before now to shrink the state, but instead it has grown bigger and more expensive. In June 2025, the then finance secretary, Shona Robison, set a target to reduce the public sector workforce by 0.5 per cent a year, but, by the fourth quarter of 2025, the head count, at 601,600, was higher than it had been in the previous year. She had already pledged to reduce the public sector workforce in 2023, but it has continuously increased. The devolved civil service alone has grown by almost 60 per cent since just 2018-19.
What should the Scottish Government do? In the spirit of being helpful, let me give the cabinet secretary some practical suggestions as to the way forward. First—and this is in line with the comments made by Michael Marra and other members—there needs to be a comprehensive assessment of the number of public bodies in Scotland and whether there is any duplication or room for rationalisation. Even the Information Commissioner has said that he is astonished at the number of public bodies in Scotland and that he keeps finding new ones that he did not know about. Whatever the value of their work, each one of those independent bodies needs to have its own board, chief executive, finance director, human resources functions, audit and reporting. When we produced our manifesto just a few weeks ago, we identified that, in the field of economy alone, there were more than 100 different organisations offering business advice. Therefore, we need a simplification and rationalisation of the landscape, and considerable savings could be made if we went down that route.
Secondly, the Scottish Government needs to reconsider its policy on no compulsory redundancies, because relying solely on voluntary severance means that the public sector could be left employing people whose jobs have effectively disappeared and cannot be redeployed elsewhere into valuable roles.
Thirdly, we need to look at the whole public sector estate and assess whether there can be much better sharing of resources. We want to see more public servants back in the office, working on a hybrid model, rather than the default being just working from home. However, even with that, we have substantial buildings sitting underutilised, and we could see significant rationalisation and cost saving through sharing. That sharing should not just be done at a Scottish Government level—it could also be done with local authorities or, indeed, UK Government bodies and agencies. We could start with international offices, for example.