Analysis: Culture of spending is now a distant memory

Published on Tuesday 28 June 2011 19:07

THE stark financial challenge faced by politicians has been clear for some time. The salad days of early devolution, when the money kept rolling in, are over.

But the expensive system of public services which our politicians decided to buy with all that cash is not. It doesn't take a financial genius to work out that something has to give.

The report by the Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services, chaired by Campbell Christie, does not offer a check-list of policy prescriptions for finance secretary John Swinney to square the circle. Instead, it proposes a longer-term culture shift in the way public Scotland operates.

The task, it concludes, is to get the public sector focused on "outcomes". Too much money has been spent in recent years dealing only with the consequences of failure, says Christie (what it describes as "failure demand").

More focus now needs to be redirected to "preventative approaches" which tackle those failures at source, and stops them happening. An example might be more funding into early years teaching - in the hope of stopping unruly three-year-olds becoming the vagrants of tomorrow.

Crucial to this, Christie says, is the need to break down the institutional walls which currently stop public servants from seeing the big picture. They also need to think bigger and consider the role of the voluntary and private sectors in delivering services. The hope is that, in the long-term, this effort will reduce demand, thereby cutting costs, keeping the public finances afloat.

The need to do this is pressing. "Measures aimed at reducing public spending quickly are essential or total Scottish public spending will exceed revenue," the report notes bluntly.

However, some critics were already attacking the report last night for its woolliness. A report last year by Nesta (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) on the same subject explicitly recommended that money should be taken away from acute hospital care and invested in preventative ideas. This is the consequence of such "outcomes based" approaches. The Christie report, however, shies away from anything so controversial.

For supporters of Christie's reforms, their hope is that the report will galvanise the public sector into action - with the unsustainability of the current set-up acting as leverage.

Politically, however, next year's council elections, the European elections after that, and the small matter of an independence referendum in 2014 or 2015 may well end up taking precedence.