Jim Gallagher on the problems of framing public policy in Scotland – and where the voluntary sector fits in
Something in Scottish public life and politics really isn't working.
Scotland’s implementation gap - a huge difference between the statements of government and what happens in practice – is widely recognised.
A recent Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE)/Audit Scotland report focused on the gap between government’s stated ambitions for public sector reform and the changes which have actually taken place, and asked ‘how do we move from rhetoric to reality?’ and suggested how to start.
Scotland is not short of rhetoric. The think tank Our Scottish Future – where I sit on the advisory board - recently calculated the Scottish Government produced 1.4 new strategy documents per week, and about the same number of consultations.
But we are short of reform. Despite extensive rhetoric and an entire group of officials in the Scottish Government devoted to promoting public sector reform, meaningful reforms of how public services are delivered are thin on the ground. The idea of a national care service, which may have sounded like an attractive soundbite, but has apparently come to nothing, serves as an example.
Meanwhile, the measures of how Scotland is doing are getting steadily worst. Our life expectancy remains the lowest in the UK, and for the last three years has actually been declining, starting to do so before the rest of Britain.
Economic growth has been stagnant. In the last decade the UK economy grew by 14%, but Scotland’s only by eight per cent. The most recent data show that 23.7% of Scots of working age are economically inactive, compared to 21.8% in the UK. And inequalities are getting no better. For example, the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest areas of the country is now 25 years, having grown by three years since 2014.
Some public services seem to be struggling. Scotland's hospitals appear to be doing less for patients than they did before the pandemic, lagging behind England's in recovering from the effects of Covid.
The most recent data shows five per cent fewer elective inpatient admissions, nine per cent fewer emergency inpatient admissions and six per cent fewer outpatient appointments than in 2019.
And if the internationally recognised PISA data is anything to go by, our education system is lagging too, falling behind international comparators, while England’s has been moving ahead. Since 2008, Scotland has moved from being top UK nation to second bottom, barely ahead of Wales.
And despite the pressures on public spending, it's not really that we are short of money. Spending on Scottish public services by the Holyrood parliament is somewhere between 25 and 30% per head higher than the comparable spending in England. Nor is it a shortage of public sector staff: 23% of Scotland's workforce is in the public sector compared to 17% for the UK, and numbers have been growing recently. For example, the NHS in Scotland has 13% more consultants and 12% more nurses and midwives in 2024 than in 2019.
How to fix this? The RSE/Audit Scotland report offers some pointers. It observes wryly that a gap between policy and implementation may be as much a problem of poor policies as weak implementation.
If policy consists of little more than a speech and a soundbite, all the implementation skills in the world will be no use. But it suggests also that the key to success is freeing up local public sector leaders to reform and innovate.
All ideas do not come from the centre. Typically, few of the very best ones do, but instead from those dealing with problems on a daily basis and understanding what can really drive change.
A rare policy success has been the violence reduction programme that was started in Strathclyde Police before someone abolished it. But a central industry of endless consultations and strategy documents leaves little room for local initiative, and a decade-long policy of disempowering local government removes the capacity to innovate there. That must change.
Which takes us to the third sector. It faces tough budgetary times, no doubt. But as the RSE/Audit Scotland report points out, it is an important source on innovation and a key contributor to local policy development – where the centre allows that.
Successful public sector reform begins locally, even if it eventually rolls out nationally. The challenge for Scotland’s centralised political culture is to be brave enough to let that happen.
Professor Jim Gallagher FRSE is a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Law and is an honorary professor at the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews. He writes widely on devolution and constitutional issues. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His views are not necessarily those of the RSE and are intended to offer one perspective on a complex topic of public sector reform.
