Simon Watson: Curbing antisocial behaviour cuts demands on services

MONDAY signalled the start of a new age in public finances: the age of austerity. The £6 billion cuts announced by the UK government are clearly only the beginning.

Although a massive sum, this is less than 4 per cent of the UK deficit of 156bn. Things are clearly going to get a lot tougher before they get any easier.

Given the scale of the challenge, it is frustrating that the debate about how we improve the health of our public finances has been almost entirely centred on cutting services. Much of the election was spent arguing about how deep, how quick and how broad cuts should be, yet another crucial part of the discussion was missed. If we really want to tackle the gap between government income and expenditure, plans for cutting services need to be mirrored by efforts to reduce demand for services. Cutting service supply without reducing the service demand people place on them is a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment.

Ballooning spending is often a consequence of failures in other areas of policy. Take the cost of alcohol misuse on our health and police services. According to Dr Harry Burns, Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, alcohol misuse claims twice as many lives in Scotland today as 15 years ago. But the cost of alcohol misuse cannot be reduced by cutting health or police budgets. By the time people arrive at hospital with alcohol-induced injuries, whether from Saturday night violence or cirrhosis of the liver, it is very difficult to cut the costs of treatment.

We can only cut the massive costs of dealing with alcohol misuse by cutting the demand placed on our public services through effective programmes of education, purchase restrictions and personal responsibility. We need to be looking to where we can "bend the spend" to make sure that we are funding preventative work – which is always going to work out cheaper in the long run.

The same principle holds true with services for vulnerable children. Cutting social work spending will not reduce the number of children needing help. We need to understand that early parental support, substance misuse services and education are keys to cutting later demand for crisis support.

Many topics of public policy discussion are over-hyped, over-sold and under-delivered, but clearly the government's budget woes are not merely political hyperbole. The normal civil service response to demands for belt-tightening is to look to trim budgets without fundamentally altering spending patterns. However, projections from Dr Andrew Goudie, the chief economic adviser, show that departmental public spending in Scotland will not return to 2009 levels for 13 years. Government departments may be asked to reduce expenditure in some areas by about a fifth. This is cannot be executed by fiddling at the margins, freezing pay or top slicing.

National and local government need to look at both sides of the supply-demand equation. There is a danger that efforts to prioritise protecting "front-line" services will result in cuts to preventative services. But cutting spending on early intervention and support may simply cause greater, and more costly, problems down the line.

Meeting the challenge of tackling the deficit gives us a real opportunity to reshape the focus of public service delivery, reconciling long-term prevention and short-term intervention. In short, we need to make some of our social problems redundant before making people redundant.

• Simon Watson is head of developments at Barnardo's Scotland