Fife Council leader expresses concerns over public sector reform plans

In his leader’s report to go before Thursday’s Fife Council meeting, Councillor Ross said the programme announced by First Minister John Swinney goes “significantly beyond” principles that have been discussed through COSLA.

“COSLA has been working constructively with Scottish Government for some months on the public service reform agenda,” stated Cllr Ross.

“COSLA Group Leaders and Presidential team met with the Deputy First Minister in August to discuss this and the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service Reform, Ivan McKee MSP, attended the full COSLA Leaders meeting at the end of August.”

He said a joint statement with the Scottish Government was agreed by COSLA and a range of principles had been agreed on. These included that change is required and the status quo is not serving our communities and a shared commitment to prevention and improving outcomes rather than pursuing short term efficiencies alone.

There was also recognition that local government must be a full partner in reform across the wider public sector and support for strengthening Community Planning Partnerships as the principal mechanism for place-based collaboration.

Cllr Ross continued: “The measures announced in the Programme for Government on public service reform go far beyond and clearly breach these broadly agreed principles.

“Firstly, it is proposed that the 14 existing territorial Health Boards will be scrapped and replaced by two strategic boards, one for East and one for West Scotland with separate arrangements for the Islands.

“This would include the abolition of Fife NHS Board, which would undermine the principle of strengthening community planning partnerships and the culture of collaboration we have built in Fife, with knock on negative impacts on service delivery including council services.

“However most worryingly the First Minister indicated that he saw changes to social care being led by the NHS, with no reference to the current Health and Social Care Partnerships.

“Indications from civil servants are that it is envisaged that there would be a wholesale transfer of social work services to the NHS, which seems to most in local government a bizarre proposal that would break the link between many aspects of jointly provided local services, giving governance for Social Work to a part of the public service that has no experience or organisational capacity in delivering these services.”

Cllr Ross is uncertain what the programme for government would mean for Fife Council.

“The First Minister talked about some authorities being too small to be strategic or too large to be local,” he continued.

“It remains unclear which authorities he is referring to or what size he would see as appropriate. Rather than accepting the asymmetric principle (apart from for the Islands) he seems to be abandoning the principle of making any changes based on consensus and raising the spectre of a wholesale reorganisation of local government.

“It is unclear what this might mean for Fife but I would argue strongly that Fife as an authority works well – particularly when working with a co-terminous NHS – being large enough to act strategically but being well connected locally through its Area Committees.”

In announcing his Programme for Government earlier this month, Mr Swinney said they would undertake “radical and widespread public service reform” which would put the individual at the heart of the changes.

He stated: “We will require all public services to make a decisive shift to prevention and early intervention.

“We will simplify government, remove barriers to progress and make sure every pound of investment is focused on frontline service delivery.”