A chance to reform public services: can we get it right this time?

The Herald Scotland

6 hours ago

The autumn political conference season in the year before an election is always one to watch. It's when near-final manifesto pledges — focus-grouped and thrashed out over the summer — are given a public airing to see how they fare against the prevailing mood. Crucially, it also gives parties time to finesse or abandon them altogether if the response is less than enthusiastic. By the time spring conference season rolls around, campaigning is in full swing and everything becomes about the pitch to voters.
This autumn's season will arguably be one of the most significant in the post-devolution era. Current polling points to a much broader split in representation at Holyrood in 2026 than we've seen before, and there's a growing sense that every vote is up for grabs. The public mood increasingly demands action over loyalty — something we haven't seen for quite some time.
Read more by Calum Steele
As things stand, the SNP is still on course to be the largest party at Holyrood, albeit a much-diminished force compared to its 2011 peak. Labour — still a long way off the halcyon days when they boasted of weighing the vote rather than counting it — will be buoyed by their recent success in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, and are starting to believe they're no longer just there to make up the numbers. Meanwhile, the emergence of Reform will almost certainly see the new kid on the block hosting its own conference, creating a dilemma for many organisations and businesses now furiously debating the optics of attending — and how such a move might be perceived.
However it's sliced and diced, the very nature of devolved politics leaves little room for genuine originality. With the overwhelming majority of the Scottish budget directed straight into public services — and with increasing welfare responsibilities now falling to Holyrood — tinkering at the edges is all we're likely to see in reality.
That's not to say we won't hear grandiose pronouncements about changing how 'we' do things. (No one wants to use the word 'reform' any more, lest it boost the algorithms that propel Farage's party further into public consciousness.) This probably explains why the Christie Commission of 2011 seems to have been dusted off and turned into a talking point again in recent weeks.
As far as aspiration goes, the Christie Commission is right up there. In fact, I can't think of a single person I've met who disagrees with its principles. Christie rightly identified massive inefficiencies in public service delivery and emphasised the need to shift spending away from ever-growing demand and towards preventing that demand in the first place. Few disagreed on the what — the how was never addressed.
The First Minister has already cited the creation of Police Scotland as an example of the kind of reform Christie inspired. This is, of course, as politically courageous a claim as it is an inaccurate one — police reform was already well under way before Christie was even established. But it illustrates just how far apart political interpretations of 'successful reform' are from public perceptions. It also assumes the public has forgotten what that reform was actually supposed to deliver.
When Alex Salmond ran the temperature check on a single Scottish police service at the SNP conference in October 2010, he declared: 'If it comes down to a choice between cops and bureaucracy, between bobbies on the beat and the boundaries of police authorities, then with me it's simple — it's policemen first — safety first — communities first — bobbies before boundaries.'
John Swinney is right that £200 million has been cut from the annual cost of policing, but beyond saving money, police reform brought leadership chaos, consecutive years of accounting failures and bailouts, catastrophic headlines, and several years of political pain — before finally settling into a model that delivers a much-diminished quality of service across the country, far removed from how it was sold.
John Swinney (Image: PA)
It's inevitable that this summer recess will see parties of all stripes grappling with questions of structural reform — particularly across local authorities and health boards. How these deliberations manifest at the conference lecterns later this year will largely determine the direction of travel for the post-2026 parliament.
Structural reform holds many appeals for politicians. They look at the number of chief executives and the size of management teams replicating much of the same functions and see easy wins in cutting their number. They'll claim procurement benefits and economies of scale, while ignoring the chaos increased centralisation always causes — simply hoping that service improvement will follow. The Police Scotland experience suggests those hopes would be very misplaced indeed, as new, more expensive bureaucracies emerge to replace old ones, and those actually delivering services are jettisoned to make way for shiny new corporate functions measuring them.
We can debate whether Christie failed because it was designed for an ideal world rather than the real one, or whether Christie was failed by the very institutions it aimed to inspire — who simply ignored it and carried on as before. Either way, it has not delivered the outcomes that the fanfare surrounding its publication promised. The reasons for that are not structural. Almost all of them come down to failures in leadership — and unless politicians are prepared to tackle that problem, the only thing that will change is that our public services will become centralised beasts, even further removed from the communities they are meant to serve. The fall out from that would be a price no government could survive.
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both