Scotland's Public Service Reform Strategy: Delivering for Scotland

Part Four – Our commitments

Foundations

To deliver change we need to address some fundamental systemic barriers that underpin all three pillars - leadership and culture; accountability and incentives; the need for more empowerment; and structural complexity.

Workstream 1: Leadership and Cultural Change

Leadership and culture are critical to any change programme, Public Service Reform is no exception. While Scotland’s public sector culture and ethos can be its biggest strength it can also be a barrier to reform. Scotland’s public service leaders need to:

• think and act strategically, focus on the ‘bigger picture’, the long-term and improving outcomes;
• trust each other and be trusted by peers, colleagues and communities; and
• collaborate, making the best use of our collective resources and be open to doing things differently and better.

We are committed to creating the conditions for excellent, collaborative, public service leadership.

We will:

• Develop a shared statement on public service leadership describing the expectations we should aspire to for ourselves and for each other and strengthening peer accountability.
• Work in partnership to develop and implement a collective approach to recruitment, promotion and performance management across public services that supports and requires shared leadership behaviours, including collaborative working.
• Provide and align leadership development and support focused on developing the skills, behaviours and capabilities for the leaders of today and tomorrow, driving change and continuous improvement through collaboration and partnership.
• Building on the Reform in Action case studies, identify and publish ‘best practice’ guides to support learning and continuous improvement across public bodies.

Workstream 2: Accountability and Incentives

We recognise that our current system of accountability does not enable the ways of working we want to see. We have to fundamentally rethink how we hold organisations and leaders to account. We need to empower leaders to operate with appropriate control and monitoring, but within a framework that enables them to act and take risks, creates the right incentives for change and builds a culture where trying, testing and learning is the engine for improvement.

We will:

• Refresh and renew the National Performance Framework in 2025. This will ensure a clear connection between outcomes, ways of working and accountability across Scotland.
• Re-design our approach to accountability across Scotland’s public sector to enable collaboration, and the investment of resources and capacity in collectively achieving priority outcomes. We will engage closely with Audit Scotland and other scrutiny partners to build on their expertise and work closely with colleagues across the system to deliver the necessary change. This will align to the work to develop a new monitoring and accountability framework with local government, as set out in the Verity House Agreement.
• Undertake a review of reporting and scrutiny requirements on Scottish Government and public bodies to improve efficiency and effectiveness and ensure a focus on outcomes that aligns with the refreshed National Performance Framework.

Workstream 3: Empowering People, Places and Communities

Scottish Government is committed to the principle of subsidiarity: supporting decisions to be made as close as possible to where they will have effect. This is reflected in the Verity House Agreement with local government and our commitment to participative decision making and including the voice of lived experience in policy making. We will enable communities and places to shape the services that matter most to the people who live there. We will require all public services to consider how they work through a place frame, and change their actions accordingly. We will also empower those who work in public services to bring forward opportunities which can improve services. We recognise that those on the front line are best placed to identify improvements to services.

We will:

• Work with local government and public bodies to conclude the Local Governance Review. This includes Democracy Matters - agreeing blueprints for innovative democratic decision-making arrangements at community level.
• Empower local government and health partners to strengthen and streamline local decision-making through the development of Single Authority Models in three rural and island local areas, resulting in improved service delivery, better outcomes for communities and a shift towards more preventative public services. We will promote and share learning to inform local governance reform in other geographies.
• Take forward the findings of the review of parts of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, to strengthen the community asset transfer process to further empower communities and ensure that assets support wider economic, social and environmental outcomes.
• Work with regional and local partners to identify how best to formally devolve further elements of decision-making and delivery to Regional Economic Partnerships (REPs), and present options before the end of this Parliament.
• Implement, in partnership with Trade Union colleagues, processes to enable staff to bring forward improvement opportunities and appropriately recognise staff who take up that challenge.
• Identify the right support to empower staff to develop those ideas, giving them the tools they need to implement change.
• Review our ways of working, and policies that support them, to ensure we can deliver services more effectively and efficiently.

Workstream 4: Ensuring the Right Delivery Landscape

Reform will also require integration of services and approaches. This may mean structural change – reducing the number of public bodies - but only to deliver better outcomes: structural change itself is not the goal. Significant benefits can be gained from public bodies working more closely together and sharing services without the disruption and cost associated with restructuring, for example in clusters.

We will review the current public service delivery landscape (131 public bodies and 50 government directorates). We will:

• Identify duplication across public bodies and work with those bodies to share processes/services.
• Expand and deepen the ‘clusters’ programme with public bodies to facilitate greater efficiency and integration. We will publish the network of clusters.
• Consider the appropriate interface between public bodies and Government in terms of policy/delivery split and remove duplication where it exists.
• Where necessary, identify and implement changes to the status of public bodies where this prevents them delivering to best effect.
• Use the Ministerial Control Framework to continue the presumption against the creation of new public bodies by assessing and challenging any new proposals.
• Support and encourage an entrepreneurial mindset within public bodies.
• Remove, amalgamate or change the number of public bodies where doing so will increase efficiency, remove duplication and improve service delivery.

Pillar 1: Prevention

4.1.1. Where we are now

Prevention is about intervening early to make long-term, population level change to improve lives. It means stopping (preventing) the establishment, or escalation, of problems that lead to negative outcomes for people.

Prevention also supports fiscal sustainability. Evidence shows that effective prevention can dramatically cut demand for expensive acute or crisis services [Box C], with a median return on investment of more than 14:1⁶. Focussing on prevention can make services easier to plan and afford.

Box C: Prevention is Effective

There is good evidence that intervening early - particularly investment in early years childcare, education and family support (primary prevention) is cost-effective, for example the ‘Heckman curve’ visualises that investment in children is most cost-effective when they are young, benefiting growth and reducing inequalities. In health policy, prevention that focuses on changing the environment (primary prevention) rather than individual behaviour (secondary and tertiary health behaviour interventions) is cost-effective in terms of improving health outcomes. For example, the introduction of minimum unit pricing (MUP) was estimated to have reduced alcohol hospital admissions (4.1%) and deaths due to alcohol (13.4%) from 2018 to 2020. Smokefree legislation (smoking ban) reduced admission for child asthma (18%) and heart attacks (17%).

We know there is commitment right across the public services system to a preventative approach, and many examples of success, but we have not made sufficient change to ensure our system is prioritising prevention.

We must change how our system operates to invest in the most impactful approaches to deliver on prevention. We know that demand within the health service and social protection will become unsustainable in the medium term and will require ever greater proportions of the Scottish Government’s budget to meet demand⁷.This is untenable. However, not all of this demand is fixed; much of the demand is preventable.

Illustrative modelling of the avoided public spending that could be achieved through improving how existing systems and investments deliver prevention suggests:

• The whole-system cost of poverty, including the increased public spending on health, education, criminal justice and housing, that results from poverty, is projected to reach £11.1bn by 2035/36. Reducing overall poverty by a quarter (which, based on the latest statistics, is equivalent to reaching the Scottish Government’s target for child poverty by 2030) could avoid £2.9bn of public spend and halve the projected fiscal gap by 2035/36.
• The public spending cost of smoking is projected to reach £2.5bn by 2035/36. Achieving the Tobacco and Vaping Framework target to reduce population smoking prevalence to 5% by 2034 could avoid £1.6bn of public spend and reduce the projected fiscal gap at 2035/36 by 26%.
• Obesity is projected to cost the health service £1.3bn by 2035/36. Reducing Scotland’s obesity rate from 32% to between 28% and 22% by 2035/36, which would bring Scotland’s obesity rate in line with rates seen in Canada and Finland respectively, could avoid between £130m and £380m of spending within the NHS, and reduce the fiscal gap at 2035/36 by 2-6%. The wider cost avoidance beyond the NHS would reduce this even further.

The impact of prevention in these examples is likely to be higher in reality given the projections don’t account for the impact on the economy and tax revenues. For full information on the projections and limitations see Annex A.

4.1.2. Where we want to get to

As a public services system we will understand what demand is preventable, what the scale of the cost to acute/crisis services is, and have the strategic capability and joint commitment to bring together all partners to intervene early to tackle the root causes of that preventable demand.

4.1.3. How we will measure success

We will measure preventative spend by Government and track that the proportion of spend on prevention increases and the resultant spend on acute/crisis decreases.

4.1.4. How we will deliver

There is a considerable body of academic evidence that sets out the barriers to creating a truly preventative system, which reflects our analysis. This includes: lack of shared policy making and budgets (collaboration); lack of clarity about responsibility (accountability); difficulty in providing evidence for intervention(s), that savings are not immediate, wider system costs such as to businesses and organisations (i.e. regulation); and, finally narratives about individual responsibility. Through the workstreams described in the ‘foundations’ section and the workstreams set out below we will deliver the change required.

Workstream 5: Understanding and mitigating demand drivers

Improving our understanding of the major drivers of demand, and taking action to manage and mitigate that demand, is fundamental to delivering a sustainable shift to prevention.

We will:

• Improve our evidence base for understanding what is driving demand for services, and identify issues that the public service system must address.
• Improve our understanding of the impact on the economy of preventative approaches and use this to enhance our collaboration with businesses to deliver reform.
• Build on our learning from service change and successful preventative innovations to improve our understanding of collaborative models that drive change and apply that learning to tackle other complex issues.
• Set out costed proposals to tackle the key drivers of demand.

Workstream 6: Preventative budgeting

Current budgeting processes are a key barrier to shifting resources to preventative spend. We know that working within individual service or organisational spending limits does not allow the space to invest in prevention while managing existing need. We know that investment in one area often leads to demand reduction in another.

We will:

• Re-design our approach to identifying, tracking and monitoring preventative spend and set out how this will be utilised in future Budget processes.
• Change how we budget, and any other necessary processes, to allow resources to move between portfolios, organisations and services in order to share resources and collaborate across boundaries, where required, to support upstream investment, identifying where financial support is required to support the cost of change.
• Develop our Invest to Save Fund to support the move to preventative investment.

Examples of live and upcoming preventative programmes

These programmes take a preventative approach by tackling the root causes of poor outcomes. Evidence demonstrates these issues, such as experience of poverty and poor health, drive poor outcomes and preventable demand for services.

Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan

Too many children in Scotland live in poverty. Experience of poverty negatively impacts the life chances of children and our economic prosperity, and increases demand on public services.

The Scottish Government is committed to meeting the ambitious targets set in statute to significantly reduce the number of children living in poverty by 2030, including that fewer than 10% of children should live in relative poverty in Scotland by 2030. We will develop and publish the next Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan (2026-2031) by end of March 2026; setting out how we will work with partners across Scotland to deliver change, building on the current Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures which sets out how we will work with partners across Scotland to deliver change.

Scottish Attainment Challenge

Closing the poverty related attainment gap is a long-standing ambition of the Scottish Government, with £1 billion committed to this through the Scottish Attainment Challenge, including £130 million per year going directly to schools through Pupil Equity Funding. This aims to improve outcomes for children and young people and break the cycle of poverty; and in the short term it is directly increasing families’ incomes through local examples of income maximisation advice and family learning initiatives – exemplified in the 2025 Pupil Equity Funding report.

Related areas of work to improve school attendance, which has dropped significantly since the pandemic, and to improve outcomes for children and young people who require additional support for learning also benefit from the Scottish Attainment Challenge, recognising the intersection across poverty, additional support needs and absence.

Early Child Development Transformational Change Programme

The programme aims to improve early child development by integrating and overseeing policies, with a focus on prevention to achieve healthy child development. We know that what children experience during their early years, and parents’ capacity to provide nurturing care lays lifelong foundations for health and life skills. Children in our poorest areas are more likely to have development concerns at 27-30 months than those in our more affluent areas. These inequalities can last throughout people’s lives. The initiative seeks to identify and address policy and implementation gaps through evidence-based approaches and system-wide collaboration.

Population Health Framework

Scotland's Population Health Framework - gov.scot sets out how the Scottish Government and COSLA, in partnership with the NHS and partners across business, the community and voluntary sector and communities themselves, can increase the positive effects that social, economic and environmental factors have on population health in order to build a Scotland that positively supports health and wellbeing.

Under the Framework, we will take a whole system approach to creating a more prevention focused system by strengthening how national and local partners work together to drive collective accountability to improve population health and reduce inequalities by reorientating resources towards prevention.

Supporting Healthy Weight in Scotland

Almost a third of adults in Scotland were living with obesity in 2023 – up from 25% in 2003. Economic analysis commissioned by NESTA estimated the annual full cost of obesity in Scotland in 2022 at £5.3 billion – equivalent to 3% of Scotland’s 2022 GDP. Evidence on the action required to reduce obesity at a population level points to a whole system package of measures being necessary⁸. The Population Health Framework commits to a new two-year Healthy Weight Implementation Plan to take forward these actions.

Shifting the Balance between Custody and Justice in the Community

A priority programme within the Vision for Justice, the focus is to promote system improvements that help to reduce reoffending and ‘shift the balance’ between the use of custody and justice in the community. The work of the programme is in alignment with the National Strategy for Community Justice Delivery Plan. While prisons will always be needed for those that pose a serious risk of harm, there is clear evidence that person-centred, community-based interventions are often more effective in reducing reoffending and supporting rehabilitation than short term custodial sentences. This in turn can lead to fewer victims and safer communities.

Pillar 2: Joined Up Services

4.2.1.Where we are now

We know that services are not delivering for people consistently enough. We know that a complex local delivery landscape and the complexity of the policy landscape are elements of the system that contribute to this challenge:

• The Covid Recovery Strategy (2021) identified a number of practical issues including: lack of flexible funding; disproportionate reporting requirements; competing priorities; and barriers to data and intelligence sharing.
• There is a substantial cost (human and financial) of passing people from one siloed service to another. This includes repeated and costly assessments and requiring vulnerable people to tell their story over and over again. This means resource is not being directed to helping those people, but to assessment, support and administration. This is stressful and difficult for people trying to access help and makes the jobs of public sector workers harder, not easier.
• Often specialist staff are the first port of call for dealing with complex cases; there is insufficient investment in generalist staff who can build relationships with people, really understand them and their needs, and help people access support (including drawing on specialists, as needed).
• For some people, use of public services is intense, with days shaped by chasing help from different organisations or schemes that are not integrated. We know that is really hard when those individuals are facing adverse circumstances and often have complex and interconnected needs. We want services to organise around the individual or family to better address those needs. Such services are place-based and person-centred [Box D].
• The third sector often provides a huge range of services from specialist to generalist support. It is often more trusted by people enabling stronger relationships to be built that help to understand need more deeply. However, short term static funding, limitations in procurement, and declines in private giving and volunteering present real challenges. At the same time the sector tells us they can feel disconnected from how services are designed and delivered, and are regarded solely as a provider, despite its knowledge, experience and significant ability to leverage in capacity and capability.

Box D: What do ‘person-centred’ services look like?

“Person-centred services” is often used but not necessarily subject to a shared definition. Recent work⁹ by the Office of the Chief Social Policy Advisor identified four essential features:

• Holistic – starts from an understanding of a person and their needs.
• Ethical – adhering to a strong set of ethical principles.
• Assets based – building on the strengths of a person and their informal networks.
• Relational – recognising the importance of building relationships and trust

‘Person-centred’ is an umbrella term which also includes ‘family centred’ or ‘person led’ approaches. Often, person-centred services are also: intensive, ongoing, preventative, bespoke, local, provide choice, address power imbalances and take risks.

4.2.2. Where do we want to get to?

We will change our model of service delivery, particularly for people with the greatest disadvantage or most complex circumstances, to integrate support, and empower the front line to bring together all the resources people and families need to thrive. This will build on the lessons we learned from the pandemic and the way we worked together.¹⁰

Box E: Integrating services locally to support children facing disadvantage

In Glasgow, a specific focus on system changes in relation to looked after and accommodated children has seen dramatic improvements with consistent reductions in the number of children in formal care from 1,469 in 2016 to 572 in May 2025; a reduction of 897 and 61%. This has been achieved with intentional focus on strength based, anti-poverty and trauma informed approaches around early intervention and prevention. Shifting the focus to the needs of families, increased investment in Health Visitors, Family Nurses, and Intensive Family Support to drive transformational change. Above all better and more sustained longer-term outcomes for children. Aligning funding and support for families has also improved those outcomes for children, young people, and their families, while securing £29.8m in savings and £70m in cost avoidance.

A range of evidence shows this sort of service delivery can reduce duplication and cost in the system¹¹¹², including work in Glasgow to support children growing up with disadvantage [Box E]. It also means people receive more impactful help, sooner, preventing problems getting worse and meaning they don’t need expensive crisis help in the future. Where that change has been delivered, we will work together to ensure savings are recycled back into a place (not necessarily an organisation) to support the cost of further change.

4.2.3.How we will measure success

We will:

• Measure the impact of services against required outcomes.
• Measure cost reductions and cost avoidance generated by service change, and the proportion of those savings invested in further change.

4.2.4. How we will deliver

We will address systemic failings across our public sector delivery system through focussed workstreams to:

• simplify our policy and programme delivery landscape;
• enable effective sharing of critical data; and
• ensure better integration of services at a local level and support the third sector to be a key delivery partner.

Box F - Model for integrating services: Whole Family Support

As part of our commitment to simplification and supporting local, collaborative leadership, we are working with partners to enable greater local decision making and flexibility to support families at risk of poverty. This means local partners can use the resources they have in the way they find most effective to support families in their area. At the same time, Scottish Government is bringing together its policies, funding and reporting systems to make it easier to respond to what families need.

In the first phase we are working with six local authority areas to test, refine and embed the approach. This work is person-centred, place based and preventative, bringing together all of our resources to work with children and families to enable them to thrive. We will evaluate and consider how this model can be applied to other intensive users of public services who require holistic support (for example those facing multiple and severe disadvantage, often adults facing homelessness, offending and substance dependency). Whole Family Support will be the lens we use to simplify our social policy and support families. We will develop a simpler and more consistent approach to bring support to families to help them thrive.

Workstream 7: Simplification

Complexity of processes, structures and reporting requirements is a key barrier to effective and efficient service delivery. A programme of simplification is needed to strip away unnecessary complexity and streamline service delivery, driving a more consistent approach to how we support people in Scotland.

We will:

• Rationalise our policy landscape: strengthening collaboration and integration within Government to converge and simplify the programmes and policies that aim to change services for people, particularly those who are disadvantaged, building a common approach across Scotland.
• Review and simplify reporting requirements on delivery of individual activities in favour of reporting against agreed priority outcomes.
• Develop and publish data that improves our understanding of performance against key priorities.

Workstream 8: Data sharing and data usage

Data sharing is essential to integrate service delivery, but there are a range of systemic barriers that prevent organisations from making the most effective use of existing data to support people, communities and places.

We will:

• Explore new approaches to data sharing and protection across public services, helping lawfully balance risks against the benefits of sharing data.
• Work with local partners to identify and break down the data barriers that prevent the delivery of Whole Family Support approaches. This will ensure that more households can benefit from holistic support and get the support they need as quickly and easily as possible.
• Build maturity of data sharing- and consuming-organisations, with common digital components that encourage Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data. This will put evidence behind targeted services and preventative support, especially for those citizens who need it most while avoiding disparate crisis interventions.

Workstream 9: Local integration - strengthening Community Planning and realising the potential of the third sector

To deliver locally integrated services we must work across organisational and sectoral boundaries to enable joint planning based on the best local evidence and data, provide all partners with clarity of purpose and shared outcomes, and prevent fragmentation and duplication of services across multiple partners.

This approach must recognise and build on the dedication, skills and expertise in the third sector. The sector is hugely diverse and includes over 40,000 organisations and a contribution to the economy of £8 billion¹³. Its accountability is ultimately to its beneficiaries but many organisations seek greater opportunity through partnership to provide the local, relational support needed that can transform outcomes for its beneficiaries. When facilitated to do so it can leverage in independent funding, complimentary volunteering and grass roots community knowledge grown from the trust built with the communities it serves.

Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) are key to providing collaborative leadership to deliver better outcomes for people and places. CPPs are unique to Scotland and provide the structures needed for collaboration and to create joined-up services. We will optimise the potential of CPPs to drive change in the near term.

We will:

• Strengthen expectations for joint working to meet the needs of communities - this means all partners are expected to share resources, blend capability and capacity, prioritise prevention and improve community and wider participation.
• Simplify the policy landscape to have fewer but more meaningful asks on CPPs and make it easier for CPP partners to share data to improve collaborative working.
• Work with regulatory and audit organisations to shift accountability mechanisms to both incentivise and require collaborative working.
• Work with CPPs, the Scottish Community Planning Managers Network and the Community Planning Improvement Board to build the collaborative systems leadership, culture, infrastructure and capabilities to deliver this.
• Trust and listen to local organisations, building on their tacit knowledge, to understand the priorities and concerns of local people and communities.
• Develop work with third sector Interfaces (TSIs) to strengthen third sector engagement with service re-design, collaborative commissioning and system leadership.
• Continue to improve the operating conditions for the third sector through Fairer Funding arrangements.

Workstream 10: Digital Public Services

Increasingly public services are delivered ethically and inclusively through digital channels, while preserving other routes of service delivery. Building on past Scottish Government led programmes –for example R100 driving fibre and mobile networks deeper into rural areas - technologies such as Low Earth Orbit satellites will help ensure all communities in Scotland can access digital services.

Even services that are fundamentally person to person are supported by technology, such as arranging a hospital appointment, creating the record, and organising any follow up. Other services, such as applying for a PVG certificate, already offer a modern digital process with little human intervention, making the process fast and efficient.

Our mechanisms for Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance, through the Scottish AI Register, are supporting burgeoning capabilities for developing AI to fit Scottish public services and exploit Big Data.

We will:

• Publish the refreshed Digital Strategy which will set out how we will accelerate the digitisation of Government.
• Move more correspondence onto digital channels, The NHS Digital Front Door, using the Scottish Government’s new secure Mailbox service, will be piloted from December of this year. By 2030 25% of all Scottish Government, agency and NDPB correspondence will be digital saving at least £100 million a year.
• Alongside Mailbox extend the use of ScotAccount which has already transformed service delivery for Disclosure Scotland with more than 9,000 new secure, privacy enhancing identities created every week.
• During this financial year, pilot a Scottish Government app as a gateway to personalised public services. The first use case is likely to be proof of age.
• Continue to use CivTech to drive innovation in the public sector by delivering new, better products and services quickly and cost-effectively.
• Use geospatial data from satellites and LiDAR surveys to reduce the requirement to visually inspect the natural and built environment, reducing the cost of regulation and grant management, and improving the accuracy and timeliness of information.
• Identify and deliver efficiencies in public service operations from using Artificial Intelligence (AI); predicting demand, monitoring outcomes for prevention, as well as targeting human interventions for maximum effectiveness.

Examples of live programmes delivering more joined up, preventative and person-centred services

Eradicating child poverty is the Government’s national mission. No child should have their health, opportunities, development, or wellbeing curtailed by the wealth of their family. The following programmes work to deliver for children and families; and under the Whole Family Support approach will work together to align support to families who need it.

‘Getting it right for every child’ (GIRFEC) is our long standing, national commitment to place rights and wellbeing at the heart of all policies and services which provide support for children and families. It underpins the delivery of high-quality holistic, multi-agency universal and targeted support, and a shared approach to planning across services.

Keeping The Promise Programme

Care experienced young people face particular challenges. Their outcomes in life are unfortunately significantly worse than the wider population. This not only perpetuates the disadvantages they face it also means significant resources are deployed in support that could be more effectively used preventatively. Keeping The Promise is our programme to address this challenge. Keeping The Promise requires action across government to improve experiences and outcomes for children, young people, adults and their families who are currently in or on the edge of care; young people who are moving on from children’s care services; and action over the longer term to improve the level of support for families from birth through to adulthood, and keeping families together where it is safe to do so. We will do this by implementing the recommendations of the Independent Care Review and delivering the commitments set out in the Keeping The Promise Implementation Plan by 2030.

Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF)

The Scottish Government’s commitment to the WFWF Programme recognises that a fundamental change in the system is required to deliver our vision for family support in line with our Vision and National Principles and to Keep the Promise. The WFWF Programme is enabling the system change required at the local level, principally through existing Children’s Services Planning Partnerships (CSPPs), to ensure that every family gets the right support, at the right time, for as long as it is needed. The WFWF does not mandate a specific approach but instead enables local areas to respond to local need. By the end of the Parliament we will have invested over £148 million through WFWF to transform family support.

Fairer Futures Partnerships

Through the Fairer Futures Partnerships (FFP) programme, the Scottish Government is working with eleven local authority areas to test and scale innovative approaches to tackling child poverty. While each partnership is tailored to meet the specific needs of local communities, all include a focus on designing holistic, joined-up services that can meet the needs of families in or at risk of poverty. Continuous learning and evaluation are a critical feature of the programme, with a view to further scaling of successful approaches. Consideration is currently being given to a sustainable approach to expanding the FFP programme during 2025/26.

School Age Childcare Programme

The School Age Childcare Programme’s vision is that Scotland will have a system of accessible and affordable school age childcare, providing care and activities before and after school and during the holidays for primary school children from low income families – and that children will access food alongside this offer.

We are taking a people-centred and place-based approach to improving outcomes for families most at risk of experiencing child poverty. Parents and carers will be able to take up, sustain or increase their hours of work. For children, inequality of access to activities will be reduced.

To do this, the Programme: funds early delivery of childcare and activities to improve short term outcomes for families; maximises existing funded services and financial supports for families; and, uses learning from delivery, evaluation and engagement to design policy which supports further expansion.

No One Left Behind

A key route out of poverty is supporting people into employment. No One Left Behind is the approach to provide devolved employability support between Scottish and local government. It aims to deliver an all-age, place-based, person-centred model of support in Scotland. The No One Left Behind approach sees a move away from national contracted provision to a model which empowers Local Employability Partnerships to lead the design and delivery of services in each area. Through No One Left Behind, 73,470 people started receiving support from April 2019 to September 2024. 22,782 people have entered employment, with over 29,000 people achieving other positive outcomes. The No One Left Behind Strategic Plan 2024-27 outlines the key priorities for devolved employability services over the next three years.

The following programmes are currently working to support people facing trauma and crisis.

Person-centred and trauma informed justice

A priority programme within the Vision for Justice, it aims to embed trauma-informed practices that will ensure that our justice services can: recognise the prevalence of trauma and adversity; realise where people are affected by trauma and respond in ways that reduce re-traumatisation.

We will achieve this by:

• implementing the Trauma Informed Justice Knowledge and Skills Framework across the justice system;
• improving communications with witnesses and people affected by crime;
• widening the victim statements scheme;
• expanding access to pre-recording of evidence; and
• establishing a national model for Restorative Justice.

Working in collaboration with our partners across the justice system and supported by the Victims’ Taskforce to ensure the voices of those affected by crime drive our delivery on these aims.

Bairns’ Hoose

Bairns’ Hoose provides Scotland with an opportunity to provide a genuinely child-centred approach to delivering justice, care and recovery for children who have experienced trauma, including, but not only, child sexual abuse. The Bairns’ Hoose Pathfinder phase was launched in October 2023, with the announcement of six Pathfinder and four Affiliate partnerships.

Mental Health Framework for Collaboration

The Scottish Government Mental Health Framework for Collaboration provides a strategic foundation for improved partnership working across agencies in support of people experiencing mental health crises. The framework encourages joined-up approaches, shared understanding, clarifying roles and responsibilities across sectors, including health, social care, policing and the community and voluntary sector. The Collaborative Commitments are supported by a three-year delivery programme (2025–2028). The intended outcomes of this collaborative approach include a reduction in the use of emergency and crisis services where appropriate, improved access to timely and appropriate mental health support, and enhanced confidence among professionals in responding to people in distress.

Pillar 3: Efficient Services

4.3.1. Where we are now

People rightly expect all parts of the public sector to be focused on efficiency and freeing up resources (people, time, money) for service delivery. Delivering best value [Box G] is a basic requirement of all public service leaders.

There is already significant ongoing work focussed on driving efficiencies within Government and across the wider public sector which have secured cost avoiding and cash releasing savings, we expect this will reach £280 million for the two-year period to the end of 2024/25.

We will go further. Public bodies should work together – within and between portfolios – as the norm: sharing services, cooperation, and identifying and stripping out duplication should be considered core business. This means making the system – not just individual bodies - more efficient and effective, alongside partners including local government.

Box G - Best Value Duties

Scottish Government and public bodies all have a duty to deliver Best Value.

The duty of Best Value is as follows:

• To make arrangements to secure continuous improvement in performance whilst maintaining an appropriate balance between quality and cost; and in making those arrangements and securing that balance.
• To have regard to economy, efficiency, effectiveness, the equal opportunities requirements, and to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development.

Local government is subject to a similar duty under the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 therefore there should be a shared understanding across Scottish Government, public bodies and local government.

4.3.2. Where do we want to get to

No system is ever as efficient and effective as it can be. The principles of continuous improvement mean continually seeking out and delivering changes which make things better, easier, simpler or more cost-effective. We work together to create a culture of transparency, improvement and constructive challenge, and work as a system to focus on delivering public value.

4.3.3. How we will measure success

Over the next 5 years we will reduce annualised Scottish Government and public body corporate costs by £1 billion, representing around 20% of the identified public body corporate and core government operating costs.¹⁴

4.3.4. How we will deliver

This strategy brings these existing workstreams together into a comprehensive programme and initiates new workstreams where necessary. We will work closely with public bodies as key colleagues and partners in driving efficiency and as part of this commitment to working together, we will hold an operational summit in 2025 to share best practice and identify next steps. We recognise the need to balance the use of the ‘Once for Scotland’ approach to cost saving with the need to empower local service delivery. We will use this summit as an opportunity to co-design our approach with operational leaders to get that balance right.

Workstream 11: Data collection

Without accurate data we are unable to identify where to focus our efforts and to assess whether we are making progress. But data collection also needs to be proportionate, minimise administrative burdens and be automated where possible. This workstream will ensure we gather proportionate data to drive change.

We will:

• Collect and publish information on corporate function costs of Scottish Government and public bodies and use that information to drive efficiencies, in particular working with groups of public bodies to understand what is driving costs and where there is duplication.
• Set financial targets, including for Scottish Government operating and staff costs, and track and monitor the delivery of these across our efficiency programmes and across portfolios.

Workstream 12: Workforce

Workforce reform – not only management - is critical to us achieving our ambition to reform services. We will work with delivery partners, staff, and unions to ensure we have the right number of people, in the right roles, with the right incentives and empowerment to deliver change.

We will:

• Develop a workforce management policy and governance framework, including the impact of projected demand for public services on workforce size and shape.
• Develop best practice workforce planning guidance including highlighting existing service demand, capability building and budget scenario planning, allowing for a more data-driven approach.
• Strengthen leadership capability on workforce planning and organisational restructuring and re-design to support delivery of our workforce plans.
• Promote best practice guidance for workforce change, including tools such as redeployment, severance policy, etc., including principles of using such schemes, guidance for staff and union engagement, and case studies of other organisations.
• Evaluate the productivity of public services and its impact on workforce as a result of business improvement activities across public services.
• Publish workforce data and trajectories creating greater transparency on the size and shape of the devolved public sector workforce in Scotland.
• Take steps to reprofile our public sector workforce; further detail will be set out in the Fiscal Sustainability Delivery Plan.

Workstream 13: Digital skills and resource

Efficient deployment of digital skills and resource is critical to us delivering our objectives, but often this resource is not coordinated well across the system, nor utilised in the most effective or efficient manner. We will optimise our approach through continued implementation of our Digital Programme.

We will:

• Manage and control digital spending at a Government level to give visibility on total digital spend and to help direct and leverage that spend in the most efficient way, reducing duplication or crossover and ensuring ensure efficient use and re-use of digital assets.
• Make sure that the digital projects we take forward are the most important projects that will have the biggest impact in terms of efficiency and quality of service delivery.
• Reuse common platforms and components to reduce the cost of delivery. By increasing the use of shareable data, infrastructure and architecture we will ensure effective public services are tailored to users and pre-empt demand.
• Work towards more central management and direction of our digital workforce to ensure that the right people are working on the right projects.
• Accelerate the delivery of a strong, digitally skilled workforce through our Scottish Digital Academy. This will include the development of a capability toolkit to assess the current skills of our workforce and identify any gaps.
• Develop courses on leadership and transformation to support leaders to integrate and oversee the delivery of digital products and services, equipping them with the skills to lead change, build high-performing digital teams, apply user-centred approaches, and deliver better outcomes.

Workstream 14: Shared Services

Digital Shared Services enable an efficient ‘Once for Scotland’ approach for the delivery of corporate services. We have recently delivered new HR, Finance and Purchasing solutions for the Scottish Government and a suite of public bodies in Scotland. It is our intention that we onboard additional suitable organisations, to deliver further economies of scale.

We will:

• Continue to develop and optimise the HR, Finance & Purchasing platform to drive adoption and wide operational benefits.
• Identify and onboard a small number of new public sector customers to the shared HR, Finance and P2P platform in 2025/2026.
• Further develop our shared services thinking and propositions across a range of services, with a view to offering solutions that public sector bodies can take value from in the future.
• Work towards building shared services at greater scale, in pursuit of overall efficiency gains.

Workstream 15: Scaling Intelligent Automation

The Scottish Government Intelligent Automation Centre of Excellence is transforming how public services are delivered - deploying AI enabled automation technologies to unlock capacity, reduce costs and improve the experience for citizens and staff. This goes beyond routine processes, addressing complex, cross-cutting operational challenges and enabling more responsive, data-driven public services.

Since 2021, this work has delivered cost avoidance of between £15 million and £21 million, while increasing compliance, improving data quality and expanding operational capacity.

We will:

• Expand Intelligent Automation as a shared service through a scalable hub-and-spoke model across core government and key public bodies.
• Launch a national collaborative procurement framework to give the Scottish public and third sector, easier access to automation expertise and reusable solutions.
• Support delivery bodies to redesign how services are delivered – improving productivity and tackling headcount pressures sustainably.
• Build the workforce capability and shared infrastructure needed to scale innovation safely, ethically and effectively.
• Identify opportunities to pilot the use of AI technology in public sector processes.

Workstream 16: Expansion of National Collaborative Procurement

The Scottish public sector spends over £16 billion each year on the procurement of goods, works and services, approximately 10% of this spend is through collaborative agreements established by the Scottish Government on a Once for Scotland basis.

We will:

• Increase cost avoidance and cashable savings to up to £300 million over a two-year period by working with the public sector to increase usage of existing national collaborative agreements and to identify areas where new agreements could be developed.
• Work with our suppliers to identify opportunities to harness new technologies to increase efficiency.
• Maintain open dialogue with our customers (government and public sector bodies) to ensure that our frameworks continue to deliver the right services and products to meet the future needs of the public sector and the people of Scotland.

Workstream 17: Commercial Value for Money

The Commercial Value for Money (CVFM) programme provides commercial expertise across in-scope Scottish Government expenditure to secure increased value for money through the delivery of monetary efficiencies and better policy outcomes. We will focus on grant spend, scrutinising third party costs and delivery approaches, aligning spend, cross-Scottish Government training and guidance and optimisation of the Grant Fund Manager Dynamic Purchasing System. We are forecast to deliver around £19 million in cashable savings and nearly £1 million in cost avoidance by March 2027.

We will:

• Compile a register of grant funding programmes currently in operation across Government and public bodies, and build on our CVFM programme to make the landscape more straightforward for users and reduce delivery costs.
• Where appropriate, our CVFM programme will align and consolidate spend, deliver commercial scrutiny of costs, and empower grant funders to increase competitive tension in grant spend ensuring grants go to those organisations who demonstrate they can use it to maximise impact on service level improvements.
• Develop and implement performance monitoring and reporting to show the effectiveness of Scottish Government and Public Body spend on grant programmes.

Workstream 18: Single Scottish Estate

We will continue to reduce the size, cost and emissions of the public sector estate and deliver over £50 million of benefits from the Single Scottish Estate (SSE) programme by 2028. Co-locating to make more efficient use of estate will give the public access to more services in one place and reduce administrative costs.

We will:

• Continue to improve the property data held to support proposals and decisions.
• Progress current and planned Location Based Reviews, including Glasgow and Edinburgh and develop a toolkit to allow any stakeholder to progress consistent with the SSE approach.
• Ensure we move towards a smaller, better estate portfolio where co-location and Net Zero remain key considerations for all property decisions.

Examples of live and upcoming programmes delivering more efficient and effective services

While there is important work in hand to deliver efficiencies in a cross-cutting way as set out in Pillar 3, there are also public services working to complement that activity, making changes to service provision to optimise efficiency and effectiveness so that people get the service they need and deserve.

NHS Operational Improvement Plan

The NHS Operational Improvement Plan aims to improve the experience of people in accessing health and social care services. It will:

• improve access to treatment through reducing waiting times;
• shift the balance of care within health and social care;
• improve access to health and social care services through digital and technological innovation; and,
• ensure we work with people to prevent illness and more proactively meet their needs.

Health and Social Care Renewal Framework

The Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework (SRF) - gov.scot sets out a long-term strategic intent to renew health and social care services. It provides a high-level guide for change, to ensure the sustainability, efficiency, quality, and accessibility of health and social care services in Scotland.

The Framework is based around five key principles for renewal:

1. Prevention: Prevention across the continuum of care.

2. People: Care designed around people rather than the ‘system’ or ‘services’.

3. Community: More care in the community rather than a hospital focused model.

4. Population: Population planning, rather than along boundaries.

5. Digital: Reflecting societal expectations and system needs.

Criminal Justice System Efficiency

We want our criminal justice system to work better for everyone who experiences it. This includes cases reaching an outcome as efficiently and effectively as possible, fewer witnesses having to come to court. Everyone will be better informed about what’s happening throughout. Here increased use of digital technology will help the system to recover from the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and be efficient and effective.

The outcomes for this Vision for Justice priority programme are to:

• Reduce delays in the time cases take to progress through the justice system from start to finish;
• Improve the experience of the people involved while the case is underway;
• Improve access to information to support appropriate, early decision-making and reduce uncertainty in how processes will work; and
• Increase the use of digital to deliver better, user-centred and more efficient services, using flexible, reuseable, and scalable technology.

Education Reform

Education reform will support service improvement and efficiency:

• The establishment of Qualifications Scotland and the independent Office of the Chief Inspector of Education supports the improvement of outcomes for children and young people, and enhances support for those delivering education.
• Education Scotland is refocused to lead curriculum design, delivery and improvement including the provision of resources to support high quality learning and teaching.
• Across the Education Reform programme, a Digital Strategy will support digital improvement and investment across new and reformed education bodies, this will be aligned to the national priorities set out in the refreshed Digital Strategy for Scotland. Beyond that there will be a targeted programme of business improvement over the next five years.
• Future activity will build on the Curriculum Improvement Cycle and Qualifications and assessment reform to support the knowledge and skills required for the 21st Century.

Reform of Post-School Education and Skills

Subject to legislative processes, we will deliver a simplified post-school funding body landscape that is sustainable and efficient. We will consolidate apprenticeship funding within the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) by March 2027 and student support funding within the Student Awards Agency Scotland by March 2026. This will help to reduce complexities and provide greater clarity around the roles and responsibilities of each public body. We will also strengthen SFC’s ability to monitor the financial sustainability of post-16 education bodies, ensuring public money is being used effectively.

Introducing a new Scottish Government-led approach to national skills planning, and strengthening regional skills planning, will ensure that post-school provision becomes more responsive to Scotland’s strategic skills needs and priorities.

Together, these changes will help to lay the building blocks for a post-school education and skills system that is simpler, clearer and more efficient and which meets the needs of learners and the economy.