New report highlights the actions needed to transform Scotland’s public services.
Scotland’s third sector are a vital part of public life and should be involved earlier in discussions about public sector reform and public services, a new report has said.
On Tuesday the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) published ‘Public service reform in Scotland: how do we turn rhetoric into reality?’
The paper highlights where action is needed to transform Scotland’s public services, reiterating the deep-rooted challenges faced by Scotland’s public services as they strive to balance rising demands, squeezed budgets, and an organisational and accountability complexity that often complicates efforts to innovate and collaborate effectively.
The report, RSE in partnership with Audit Scotland, seeks to move beyond diagnosing the well-established challenges to providing realistic, impactful solutions that can turn the rhetoric of reform into a reality that benefits all citizens.
To give communities control over the decisions that affect their lives, the report highlights the importance of engaging the public and third sector more deeply in the planning and implementation processes.
Such partnerships are seen as essential to designing reform that responds to local needs and supports meaningful change.
The authors wrote: “The need to think beyond the public sector when planning and delivering activities designed to improve outcomes within communities was highlighted. It was noted that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, third sector organisations were as vital as local authorities in delivering public services, displaying an agility and understanding of local communities that Scottish Government lacked.
“Despite its central role in delivering the national pandemic response, the roundtable noted the widespread feelings of lack of parity of esteem between the third sector and local government partners and highlighted longstanding concerns about how late and short-term funding of third sector bodies can impact on the viability and sustainability of some critical charitable and advocacy organisations.
“Participants shared multiple examples of exciting projects that are taking place across Scotland where agents of the state are enabling communities and individuals to do for themselves what they increasingly accept the state and public bodies cannot do well.
“The roundtable reflected on what they saw as an increasingly common set of assumptions amongst those responsible for planning, overseeing, or delivering public services, namely: that government needs to ask itself some fundamental questions about where its role should begin and end in providing services, as many communities and third sector bodies may be better placed to meet the needs of local communities.
“It was suggested that giving communities more voice and agency could lead to better problem-solving and more efficient spending.”
The report also underlined the benefits of the third sector during the Covid-19 pandemic.
They wrote: “Shifting into more positive territory, participants reflected on how during the Covid-19 pandemic, public bodies and their partners in the third sector and within local communities truly “disobeyed boundaries” and delivered service changes and transformations at a pace and scale that would have been unimaginable in normal times.”
Reflecting on insights from the Christie Commission’s 2011 report, which called for systematic public service reforms to address fragmentation and inefficiencies, the report reiterates the call to implement the ‘4 Ps’—people, partnership, prevention, and performance. Yet translating these principles into meaningful improvements in local communities continued to be a formidable challenge.
A number of changes are needed to transform Scotland’s positive rhetoric of public service reform into reality.
A key recommendation is to declutter and redesign accountability structures to enable more collaborative leadership models.
Additionally, the report called for a unified national and local government strategy that drives and sustains outcomes at each level.
Creating a culture that values innovation and actively manages risk is also critical to the success of these reforms, the report says.
In line with this, reform requires new governance models that reward actions based on the Christie Commission’s principles, which foster an integrated and sustainable framework for success.
Finally, building mechanisms for promoting and sharing best practices across Scotland will ensure that successful initiatives are recognised and adopted elsewhere, encouraging widespread improvement and innovation in public service delivery.
The RSE said: “The insights gathered in this report mark a fork in the road for Scotland’s journey towards effective public service reform. Scotland has the opportunity to lead by example, proving that with the suitable structures, accountability, and culture, public service reform can evolve from rhetoric into reality and strengthen communities across the nation.”
