Richard Kerley: Centralisation claims don’t add up

Chief Superintendent David OConnor argues that 14 is the logical number based on police divisions. Picture: Jane Barlow

WE HAVE a thing about special numbers. In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 was the answer to everything; Chinese culture lays great emphasis on the number eight… and 14 may be the magic number for the Scottish Government and our public services.

The president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents had 14 in mind when earlier this week he called for changes to the number of Scottish Councils (there are 32), and health boards (14 now, previously 15), to reflect the 14 area divisions our single Scottish Police Force has now been divided into. His arguments for this? The police should not be the only service to face cuts, and the track record of the new force – over the past eight weeks – shows that huge efficiencies can be achieved through consolidation.

Clearly, as an evidenced police case, this is more Clouseau than Rebus, however, it has brought into the open a discussion that has been floating around for some time now, broadly coinciding with the early discussions to reduce the number of police forces (and the less publicised Fire and Rescue services) from eight services to a Scotland wide service.

This discussion is at present very lopsided and panders to a rather shallow set of assumptions about what different public services provide for all of us, how they are organised, and what might be the most appropriate ways to make them more effective, more economical where we can, and publicly accountable to us as citizens.

There are various strands to this debate, one is about centralisation and whether that is accelerating in SNP governed Scotland as much as it is sometimes claimed to be in Labour-run Wales and coalition ruled England and Northern Ireland. Well, it is a mixed picture and all four governments are centralising to some degree. If we focus on Scotland, since 1999 there has been an increase in the concentration of public services. The Lab/Lib Dem governments removed criminal justice from local government; and some transport functions. The 2007 and 2011 governments created the police and fire services. We now have regional groupings of further education colleges and the reduction in sheriff court numbers. All government arguments have claimed improved service provision to be at the core of this process, but cost saving has often been the major driver.

It is not yet possible to verify whether such cost savings have been achieved or will be, mainly because we don’t have solid base lines to work from or any distinction between cost saving and cost and service reduction. The main source of such “savings”, as might be made, will be through pretty hefty staffing reductions – as we have seen with police civilian staffing; uniformed officer numbers being sacrosanct. The Accounts Commission for Scotland has just reported on the heavy up-front severance costs that arise from such staffing reductions.

When it comes to costs savings versus good outcomes, the curious thing we can clearly observe from council benchmarking data is that there is no correlation between size of council, cost of service, what that service achieves and how valued it is by local residents. The only broad exception to this is that services in the three island councils, Argyll and Bute, and Highland are expensive. Elsewhere there is no common pattern. East Renfrewshire, the fifth smallest mainland council, is generally agreed to be good at education – parents in parts of Glasgow are very keen to get their children across the boundary into some very good high schools. East Renfrewshire spends less than the Scottish average on secondary and primary education and children there get the best Scottish exam results by a country mile, and it has the highest satisfaction rating for education of any council.

Across the board, the relationship between costs and effectiveness is devilishly hard to prove, so there is actually little argument to be found there for reducing the number of councils. Such promised cost reductions did not occur in the local government re-organisations of 1975 or 1995 either.

There is also a line of argument (from a small group of people) in complete contradiction to the “fewer councils” argument. They claim that the UK as whole, and Scotland in particular, has fewer councils overall than many countries elsewhere in Europe, and fewer councillors per 1,000 of population than those other countries. So for some there is a case for a greater number of smaller councils with a greater number of councillors who might arguable be closer to the community, more akin to volunteers, and unpaid.

It’s an argument – though not one that currently convinces me. France has 37,000 or so councils – nobody has an accurate count. I visited friends in France recently and their local swimming pool is run by a consortium of 21 councils, hardly a model of either accountability of efficiency. Additionally, in some such arrangements the “local” government often has very limited duties and powers. In any event, Scotland is not France, nor Denmark, nor Canada. We can learn from elsewhere but importing systems is not the answer. And what of the magic “14”? There are 14 police areas and there are 14 health boards, but all these boundaries do not coincide. And those boundaries are just lines on a map, redrawn at will by either a chief constable, or as in the case of Argyll and Clyde Health Board established when a board was abolished by ministerial decision by the then Labour health secretary. In a democracy, elected bodies are not generally treated in that way.

There is a debate to be had here, but to base it on numbers alone is blinkered and limiting.

• Professor Richard Kerley is at Queen Margaret University and chairs the Centre for Scottish Public Policy (CSPP)