Christie throws down gauntlet to ministers on public sector reform

MINISTERS have "no excuse" for not leading radical reform of Scotland's public sector in the full knowledge that failure to do so will leave them bankrupt.

As revealed in The Scotsman yesterday, the Christie Commission, an independent report on Future Delivery of Public Services, has called for a major culture shift in public services, saying the entire 62 billion sector should focus more on preventing social failure rather than tackling the consequences of it.

It also said public servants needed to start working across bureaucratic boundaries to solve the country's ills.

Public sector chiefs and voluntary bodies were unanimous in backing change, saying the issue had already been ignored by politicians for far too long.

However, the commission stopped short of proposing specific policy moves, such as shifting cash from hospitals to preventative measures.

Commissioners also insisted their call to pull down institutional borders would not lead to compulsory redundancies for staff, although they said it was inevitable staff numbers would decline due to reduced budgets.

The commission spent nine months taking evidence on reform. In response, ministers said they were committed to delivering an "ambitious reform programme" but did not sign up to specific plans within the report.

The Christie team were told an astonishing 40 per cent of all local public service spending went on so-called "failure demand" - money reacting to social problems which, they believe, could be avoided if preventative measures were adopted.

The commission said far more effort should go, for example, on children's early years, supporting elderly people at home to keep them away from costly hospital stays and better public health policies.

The report said, while most of the policy debate had centred on the slowdown in government spending, the real challenge was a marked rise in demand, caused by expensive policies and an increasingly elderly population.

Launching the report, Campbell Christie, a former general secretary of the STUC, said it was a "political necessity" to adopt such reforms. "It will not be possible to duck away from the consequences of the growth in demand," he said. "The SNP government now has an overall majority. There are no excuses for further delay."

Public bodies backed the direction of the report, with councils saying they would begin immediately adopting its recommendations.

A spokesman for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said: "We will not be waiting for a government response. Instead, we will be moving forward immediately to do what we can at our own hand to act in the way that the commission suggests."

Ronnie Hinds, of Fife Council, who chairs the body representing local authority chief executives, said: "There is a recognition that we can't carry on in the same way. We need to work in a convincing way to show things can be done differently."