Peter Jones: Change requires co-operation as well as courage

Fear and vested interests work in tandem to prevent any meaningful reorganisation of public services in Scotland

CAMPBELL Christie's commission on public services did an excellent job on describing what these should look like, but ducked the equally important question of how we might get them. The task ahead is heroic. Ministers, while politely thanking Mr Christie, must have silently cursed the fact that he provided little advice on the actions needed.

It's like being told that your house is a bit out of date and needs modernised to make it fit for 21st-century purposes. If fact you have got to take lots of it down and rebuild it, while living in it at the same time and, by the way, the fact you haven't got any money is a mere detail. You have to get on with it.

Change, big change, is what the Christie commission demanded. It has no doubt at all about the value of public services. I don't disagree. It said that they "enable many people to participate fully in society and promote economic development" and "contribute to a better educated workforce, a healthier population, a more vibrant and resilient economy and a well-founded sense of social cohesion".

And I approve of the commission's blue-print of the way services should be delivered: designed with the involvement of people who use them, built in an integrated fashion bringing together different skills from different agencies, aimed at preventing problems before they arise rather than just dealing with the consequences of those problems, and aimed at producing measurable outcomes. I am just hugely sceptical it will happen.

Take integrated delivery. Government and the public services it provides is an absolute leviathan. It is full of decades of embedded traditional thinking which instinctively resists efforts to jolt it out of the tramlines it happily trundles along. Other departments, other functions, other agencies are regarded with suspicion. Suggestions of collaboration are habitually seen as takeover attempts by people who just don't understand how things are done and would make a complete mess of trying to run anything out of their usual sphere of operation.

And yet the report repeatedly points out that in many cases neither the people who provide the services, nor auditors looking at them from outside, know whether or not these aims are being achieved. If we as taxpayers authorise politicians to spend our money to achieve a particular outcome, we ought to be able to find out what has and has not been achieved. But as Audit Scotland has pointed out in examinations of education, health and some other services, it is extremely difficult to get these answers.

Measuring outcomes inevitably involves extra work and bureaucracy. Just as inevitably there will be complaints that this distracts from the real task of service delivery.Teachers waged a war against testing and successfully persuaded the Scottish Executive in 2003 to abandon national testing for 5-14 year olds and to stop publishing league tables of exam results with the result that we now know less about educational outcomes than we used to.

One of the few areas where we do know a lot about outcomes is crime. There is no shortage of facts and figures about crime rates and whether they are trending up and down. But the perennial complaint from the police is that they are stuck in the office filling in forms and not out catching criminals.

It is not just because teachers and policemen do not want to be pen-pushers. It is also because measuring outcomes also measures the performance of the service deliverers. If you can spot where the outcomes are poor, there is a good chance that will be because the service providers are bad at their job. At best that will mean promotion prospects disappear, at worst it means the sack.

Quite right, you may say. But when you set that against the background that many of the 493,100 people who work for the Scottish government are extremely fearful, despite assurances of no compulsory redundancies, that spending cutbacks means they will lose their job, the real problem of introducing outcome measurement becomes apparent.

The other problem with outcome measurement is that politicians and, to some extent, the media are fixated on inputs. For as long as I can remember, political and public debate in Scotland has been focused on whether enough cash is being spent on something, if money is going up or down, and if the workforce is being grown or cut. If I had 1 for every time I have written the word "cuts" in my career, I could retire to the Bahamas. 1 for every "outcome", and I'd be selling the Big Issue.

Nobody thought to ask whether health service outcomes - the treatment received by patients - was any poorer as a result. If there is some hope for a positive result from the Christie commission, it is in its plea for measurement of outcome and the involvement of service users in design and delivery. The commission's verdict that "the philosophy and attitudes underpinning the design and delivery of public services have changed little since the birth of the welfare state" was damning.

So too was its opinion that "services often impair individual incentives and foster dependencies that create demand", a view of right-wing critics that was roundly denounced by the left during the Thatcher years. If this is now accepted wisdom, then there is hope.

But in a political environment that is dominated by shrinking budgets, a public sector workforce that is fearful for its income, jobs, and pensions, driving through change will be an absolutely enormous task and, given that the budget squeeze is now on us, an extremely urgent one.

That's why I suspect that ministers will be silently cursing Mr Christie.If the Scottish government is serious about implementing the changes envisaged, then ministers will be spending their summer holidays in an endless round of meetings and climbing through mountains of paperwork.