Scotland's Public Service Reform Strategy: Delivering for Scotland

Part Three – Public Service Reform in Scotland: What needs to change

We have listened to partners about the challenges they face and learnt from our experience of reform to date [Box A]. Alongside this Strategy we are publishing a document which sets out learning from over 25 years of preventative interventions in Scotland – this shows us that Scottish public services have successfully introduced innovative and highly effective preventative interventions across a range of policy areas. The evidence demonstrates the importance of joint working across boundaries, working from a robust evidence base, embedding co-design, and providing person-centred support. This evidence base has informed the development of the Strategy.

No one organisation can address the complex challenges that many people and communities experience, and the evidence shows that we can’t deliver better outcomes from silos. To deliver the change that is needed requires a radically different approach to collaboration and integration.

This has been brought together via a structured Root Cause Analysis to identify barriers, and what must change, to achieve the necessary pace and scale of reform. These are set out, in simplified form, in Diagram 1. We will address these through a coherent series of interlinked workstreams and programmes delivered with our partners, as set out in Diagram 2.

Building on the Christie approach to Public Service Reform, around which there is broad consensus, we will deliver a system that improves lives, reduces inequality and is fiscally sustainable. That means the public services system will:

• Be efficient and effective with the right-size delivery landscape.
• Better join up services and focus on helping people.
• Prioritise prevention.
• Empower people and communities to shape the services that matter to them.
• Be fiscally sustainable.

By delivering this Strategy we will significantly increase the scale and pace of change and create a system that is collaborative and integrated by default. We will change our traditional approaches to how public services are delivered, and how they work together. We will take the difficult decisions to apply resources at different points in the system – reducing investment in some areas and increasing it elsewhere – to maximise impact.

Diagram 1: Root Cause Analysis

What needs to happen to enable systematic change?

All of the below factors contribute to what is required for systematic change to happen:

Place

• We must strengthen local, joint decision making and sharing of power & resources
• People, communities & third sector need to be systematically involved in service design
• Delivery landscape should be simple and effective

Prevention

• Budget processes should enable preventative spend
• Short term demands better balanced with long term solutions to complex problems
• Demand drivers need to be well understood and evidenced

Partnership

• Leaders should be incentivised &empowered to act across silos
• Policy landscape should be streamlined
• Accountability structures should support and require joint working

Performance

• Requires focus on system efficiency
• Clarity on where 'Once for Scotland' makes the most sense
• Cost & performance data must be consistent and robust
• Data & digital tools should be embedded

People

• Duplication needs to be removed from the system
• Service delivery should not be fragmented; further service integration locally is required
• Data sharing should be proportionate, and the processes straightforward
• Services should be easy to navigate
  

The strategy can be summarised as:

Our Vision is of a Scotland where everyone has access to services that are efficient, good quality and effective.

The Public Service Reform Strategy sets out how we will signifi­cantly increase the pace and scale of reform to deliver that vision.

The workstreams fall into four sections:

Pillar 1 Prevention

• Workstream 5 - Understanding and mitigating demand drivers
• Workstream 6 - Preventative budgeting

Pillar 2 Joined up services

• Workstream 7 - Simplification
• Workstream 8 - Data sharing and data usage
• Workstream 9 - Local integration: strengthening Community Planning and realising the potential of the third sector
• Workstream 10 - Digital Public Services

Pillar 3 Efficient Services

• Workstream 11 - Data collection
• Workstream 12 - Workforce
• Workstream 13 - Digital skills and resource
• Workstream 14 - Shared services
• Workstream 15 - Scaling intelligent automation
• Workstream 16 - Expansion of National Collaborative Procurement
• Workstream 17 - Commercial Value for Money
• Workstream 18 - Single Scottish Estate

The three pillars are underpinned by foundations including:

• Workstream 1 - Leadership and cultural change
• Workstream 2 - Accountability and incentives
• Workstream 3 - Empowering people, places and communities
• Workstream 4 - Ensuring the right delivery landscape

National Government is a critical partner [Box B] in the public service delivery eco-system. It designs, develops and delivers services but is unique in that it has the ability to remove barriers, spread good practice, lead change and allocate resources. National Government’s role is also to provide leadership and strategic direction to drive the pace and scale of change. However, Government cannot deliver reform alone. We will enhance and accelerate our approach to engagement with partners and the public, and change how we collaborate and cooperate to deliver the system change required.

Box B: Our partners

Our system is broad and includes a number of partners in delivery with different accountabilities and responsibilities. This will mean changes for all of us.

Public bodies deliver a wide range of services including health, arts and culture, scrutiny, transport and built environment. There are 131 public bodies with a direct relationship to Scottish Government or Scottish Parliament. Public Body leaders, through forums such as the Non-Departmental Public Bodies Forum and Scottish Delivery Bodies Group, have a critical role to play.

Local government is an essential partner and there is a shared commitment through the Verity House Agreement to reform, working together on the basis of mutual trust and respect, and focusing on outcomes.

Trade unions are our key social partners and securing their views and input on reform is critical both in terms of their members’ working arrangements and the wider social implications. PSR will change how we work. Frontline staff will be at the heart of this transformation. Their role is critical in delivering reform and in upholding the shared commitment across the public sector - that services must work with people, not do to them; always striving to improve and focus on people and their needs.

To deliver effective reform we must recognise the dedication, skills and expertise beyond national and local government, and public bodies. The third sector and wider economy include essential providers, colleagues, partners, and in many cases deliver exactly the very local, very in-depth and relationship-based support we aspire to.

Communities have huge capacity to work together and with public services to build the support people need where they are. This means bringing communities into decision making about the services that affect them. It also means recognising that communities have the power and resources to deliver change - and are able to do things that public sector can’t do. In building community resilience, driving community led solutions and working with people, communities are and increasingly will be key to the reform of public services.

Structure of the Strategy

Throughout this document we use workstreams to describe work we will implement to remove systemic barriers, working horizontally across services.

Programmes are examples of work that is already in place to address specific issues.

This Strategy will tackle barriers to change across three pillars: prevention, delivering joined up services, and efficiency. These pillars are mutually supporting. Greater efficiency frees up people to deliver services differently. Better joined up services, operating across boundaries, are better able to help those who face the greatest challenges.

As part of our commitment to fiscal sustainability, each pillar seeks to reduce cost. These represent a scale of potential cost, over different timeframes:

• Through efficiencies we will save hundreds of millions in the coming 5 years;
• Through better joining up services, people can get the service they need more easily and quickly, reducing duplication, taking out cost and ensuring gaps are addressed; and
• Through prevention we will help people live healthier, happier lives, and can avoid spending billions trying to address economic and social problems caused by issues like poor health.