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THE SNP’s Programme for Government has landed – and just about everyone in the country has something to say about it.
In no particular order, organisations and groups giving their take on John Swinney’s proposals in the last few hours have included: Consumer Scotland, Propertymark, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of GPs, the Child Poverty Action Group, WWF, UNISON, Unite, the Homeless Network, the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses, Amnesty International, the Institute for Public Policy Research, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Uplift, OneKind, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland – and of course every opposition party in the parliament.
The near-countless submissions have guaranteed one thing: whichever angle the media chooses to attack the SNP’s plans, there will be someone on hand to provide the quotes.
Here, let's focus on perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Programme for Government, the proposals to radically reform (read: cut down) Scotland’s public sector, and what it could mean for independence.
The Scottish Government is facing an estimated £4.7 billion public sector funding gap by 2030, and the goal of the reforms is to shrink those upcoming bills – or, as the Government terms it, “improve the fiscal sustainability of the public service delivery landscape”.
The Programme for Government outlines extensive ways in which Scotland’s public sector will be reduced and consolidated, including, but not limited to:
- Cutting NHS Scotland 14 territorial health boards down to just two.
- Bringing various environmental bodies – including Sepa, NatureScot, Zero Waste Scotland and potentially Scottish Forestry – into a single outfit.
- Integrating the Scottish Food Commission and the Scottish Pubs Code Adjudicator into Food Standards Scotland.
- And reviewing “all” of Scotland’s other public bodies for efficiency while “exploring the opportunities for joint working or merger”.
There is, the document suggests, not a single public sector body in Scotland which will avoid being reviewed, assessed, and potentially scrapped or integrated elsewhere. That will take some doing.
The ostensible reason for the reforms is, as mentioned, to save money. But the SNP Government needs to be doing something else at the same time: creating the institutions required for Scotland to be ready to become an independent nation.
In his foreword to the Programme for Government (which itself is five pages long), Swinney vaguely said that his administration would “take forward sustained actions to ensure the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine their own future through independence”.
For that to be true, the Scottish Government cannot simply take a “slash and burn” approach, with cost considerations before all else. Nowhere is that more true than at local government level.
Reports ahead of the Programme for Government suggested that the SNP would be looking at merging some of Scotland’s 32 local authorities (and a motion on the party conference draft agenda suggests similar).
But when the document landed on Tuesday, details were light.
“Rewiring the state requires decision-making and service delivery to sit at the level best placed to understand and improve people’s lives,” it reads. “Over the next three months we will convene a dialogue with partners across Parliament, local government, and beyond about the future of local governance in Scotland.
“This will include how resources may be pooled at a regional level while also strengthening community level governance, empowering people to influence local decision making.
“By the end of the year, we will seek a shared direction for reform – enabling the focus to move from debate to delivery and ensuring early decisions and progress can be made through the first Budget of this Parliament.”
So, there isn’t really a plan for how Scottish local government should look, only that it needs to change – and soon. The first Budget is just four months away.
As former MSP Andy Wightman said, Scotland already has “the most concentrated pattern of ‘local’ ‘government’ anywhere in Europe”. Denmark, for example, which has a similar population to Scotland, has 98 municipalities to our 32 councils. Norway has 357.
Cutting the number of local authorities to save money would put people further away from the decision-makers that affect them – and push Scotland further away from the European neighbours which the SNP often point to as exemplars. Is that not the opposite of the point of independence?
The Government’s task is not simply to make the state smaller. It is to make it capable enough to deliver, local enough to be accountable, and strong enough to sustain the case for independence that it wants Scotland to make.
As they embark on sweeping changes to Scotland’s governance systems, the SNP must be sensitive to that. They want voters to believe they can build a state, this is a chance to prove it.
