Lesley Riddoch: Scotland needs professional help

We need to know who is running the show and we need them to become more involved and more visible, writes Lesley Riddoch

Good grief. Rangers may finally be sold. The last post-council election coalition deal has been done. The Scottish referendum consultation is over and the Queen’s Speech has been read. The French election has been won by anti-austerity socialist François Hollande and the eurozone has not yet collapsed. The Yes/No independence campaign has not begun … nor indeed has the summer.

There is a hiatus. Election fever is over. A focus on policy, not politics, beckons – at last. Constitutional debate has been using up all the oxygen in the room while social policy stagnates. Now there’s a brief window for policy innovation – and it’s up to the most reticent folk in Scotland to make the most of it.

Enter the professionals. Is 50p per unit the right level to set for the SNP’s pioneering minimum alcohol price? Will the public health levy – designed to claw-back supermarket windfalls – actually work? Currently it’s set to apply to large stores selling fags and booze only, so alcohol but non-cigarette-selling stores like M&S will be immune. Would it be a small (if inadvertent) victory if more stores follow their lead? Should Labour push for a tougher alcohol-only levy? Or is the Scottish Government right to think there will be enough outrage when prices rise without more grief from supermarkets?

It would be nice to think the months ahead might focus on the practical mechanics of how best to deliver the first national alcohol price-hikes in Europe. Instead we’re likely to hear a reheating of the tired, old quasi-moral argument about price rises punishing the blameless majority. It’s not that such an argument’s wrong – it’s just irrelevant because change is on its way. Can hand-wringing energy possibly convert into something more positive?

Likewise energy prices. The £4.3 million-a-year chief executive of British Gas-owner Centrica has warned of a possible £100 price rise on the average bill this winter. Reactions vary between despair, talk of the need for more insulation and futile plans to change supplier. There must be a better prospect for a country that may soon become a net energy exporter again.

But the highest energy prices in Europe won’t suddenly drop at a stroke with independence, so surely we should be trialling radically different energy solutions right now? City energy companies could cut the 20 per cent of unit prices currently paid to shareholders or invest in green district heating systems to boost jobs, cut emissions and create consistently lower prices for consumers.

Scotland is ideally placed to convert from the wasteful “Anglo-Saxon model” of one central heating unit per home to the European model of one power source supplying many homes thanks to our conveniently clumped urban tenements. The Scottish Government could trial such a system tomorrow in SNP-controlled, wind-rich, solar-power-blessed, south-facing, hillside-located and heavily tidal Dundee. Why not try it?

Ownership of land – “scarce” and therefore ironically expensive in this big, empty country – is strictly controlled in every other European nation bar our own. Using compulsory purchase to build affordable housing and considering a land value tax would remedy the enduring landowner/speculator stranglehold. It would also frighten the horses and that – for the SNP – is to be avoided. The prospect of independence is scary enough. So a root cause of unaffordable housing cannot be tackled head-on and the energy-sapping absence of real change in everyday life is all our youngsters can expect.

It’s like the Serenity Prayer in reverse – Scots endure things that can be changed and courageously tackle things that cannot. Perhaps the wilful refusal to contemplate radical policy levers arises from centuries remote from power. Perhaps a tradition of service to the British state has created an over-weaning respect amongst Scots for those who run things – the dominies, doctors, landowners, ministers, professors, editors and men who own football clubs.

These (mostly) public sector-employed professionals are generally distinguished by their relatively high wages and low public visibility. We need more from the experts. Scots need to know if our society is sustainable and we urgently need those running the show to get more involved.

Last week, for example, a report found patients still being treated for a single illness when a large minority struggles along with two or three. The professional term is co-morbidity. Yet “treating the whole person” has been a mantra in the NHS for more than a decade – so why is “the whole person” still being treated in bits? Despite some hand-wringing about lessons to be learned, no explanations were given.

“Bullying methods” were allegedly used within NHS Lothian to reach government health targets. We know two people have been suspended but we’ll probably never know more about life inside Scotland’s second biggest health authority. We need to.

Scotland needs time to focus on policy, not politics, or the referendum. But that can’t happen unless professionals open up and explain poor outcomes – however politically or personally inconvenient. Radical, vigorous, open policy debate free of sterile, manipulative party politics should be driven, by the most free-thinking, confident and capable people. Many of them are the folk shaping and delivering public services in Scotland today – not MSPs or members of political parties. Without the engagement of our professionals and their intimate knowledge of what does and doesn’t work, Scotland will stay bumping along at the bottom range of our capabilities.

It could be otherwise. This week, a Finnish prisons expert will tell a Scottish Parliament meeting how his country halved its jail population and prison budget without raising the crime rate. Last week, Dr Pasi Sahlberg described how Finland’s so-so educational performance became world-beating spending only the OECD average.

Both initiatives were led by “professionals”, not politicians, and backed, not savaged, by the Finnish press. How did they do it? According to Dr Sahlberg: “We stopped trying to do wrong things righter.”

In other words, Finnish professionals stopped trying to finesse policies that couldn’t work and took the initiative, advocating new ways of working that seemed scarily counterintuitive, potentially vote-losing and even “revolutionary”. When will Scotland’s professionals do the same?

• “Finns can only get better – lessons in penal policy” with Tapio Lappi-Seppälä on Tuesday 15 May, 18:00, Scottish Parliament Committee Room 2. Seats available via www.nordichorizons.org