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Plenary, 24 May 2007

24 May 2007 · S3 · Plenary

Item of business

Approach to Government

Brownlee, Derek Con South of Scotland Watch on SPTV

If that was an example of the new politics, there will be many demands that we go back to the old. I noticed that, for all Wendy Alexander's demands that we have consensus, there is not much consensus between her position on tolls and the Howat report and the position on which she fought the election only three weeks ago.

However, I will deal with the current Government rather than the previous one. I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for giving us the opportunity to outline our approach to a new Government and how we will deal with issues. Before turning to specifics, I will first advance two general principles under which the new Government should operate. First, value for money should be at the very heart of what the Government does in a way that, as most us would acknowledge, was simply not the case under the previous Administration. Secondly, there must be openness, because greater scrutiny leads to better decisions and greater public confidence in what the Government is doing. In fact, the two principles are linked, because greater openness will of itself be an additional pressure on the Government to achieve greater value for money. That is one reason why I am grateful that the cabinet secretary has done what his predecessor failed to do in ordering the publication of the Howat report. It is a pity that the public did not have an opportunity to see that report before the election, but the fact that they and the Parliament will now have the opportunity to scrutinise it is certainly progress.

Given all his responsibilities, it is debatable whether the cabinet secretary in his first few days in office has fully digested all the implications of the Howat report and what it means, or could mean, for how the Government operates. Whether or not he has had the opportunity to do so, the Parliament has not had such an opportunity, and there will be no such opportunity today. Therefore, before the summer recess, the Executive should initiate a debate in Executive time on the report and what it means. Important issues are involved, and we must ensure that, in the spirit of consensus, we can all properly scrutinise what the report means for the Government.

I will briefly touch on some specifics in the report. Members might remember that, before the election, the Government parties routinely attacked the Conservatives' and the nationalists' spending plans. When he was defending his failure to publish the Howat report, the former First Minister said that the Conservatives' and nationalists'

"spending plans would not stand a day of scrutiny, never mind a year".—[Official Report, 28 September 2006; c 28020.]

April was an intense month of scrutiny, during which the Conservatives' plans held up rather better than those of the Labour Party. Now we know that at the same time that Mr McConnell was defending his failure to publish the Howat report and was attacking the Conservatives and the SNP, the Howat team

"faced difficulties in assessing the implications of switching or reducing spend in any programme."

The report found that

"The limitations of the SE's financial planning and management systems mean the assessment of the effectiveness of budget performance needs to be treated with a degree of caution."

It also found

"voluminous evidence of monitoring and measuring inputs",

but not of spending being linked to outcomes. In relation to education, it discovered

"an attitude in more than one area that regarded budget lines of single-digit millions of pounds to be ‘trivial'",

which was a mindset that

"does not engender confidence in general cost control practices."

On health, which is the single biggest item of expenditure in the Scottish budget, the report said that

"it remains difficult to assess whether the NHS in Scotland is delivering value for money".

Those are reasons enough why the previous Administration refused to publish the Howat report before the election.

However, that is just the start. I turn to one area that Mr Swinney alluded to in which the Conservatives have long advocated change. We argued for the mutualisation of Scottish Water not only during the election campaign that we have just had, as the Liberal Democrats did, but in the election campaign before that. As Mr Swinney said, the Howat report suggests that ministers should consider mutualisation in order to save £183 million a year, but what did ministers in the previous Executive do? In response to a question that I asked in the chamber on 15 March, Sarah Boyack confirmed that the previous Executive had not even reviewed Scottish Water's structure. The Howat report was not only suppressed, it was ignored.

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Plenary, 24 May 2007

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