CIPFA in Scotland conference news, March 1-2 McCabe demands more accountability

8 Mar 07
Public sector managers are to be made more accountable for the advice they give to elected members, Tom McCabe, the Scottish finance minister, has disclosed.

09 March 2007

Public sector managers are to be made more accountable for the advice they give to elected members, Tom McCabe, the Scottish finance minister, has disclosed.

He told the CIPFA in Scotland conference in Glasgow that there was insufficient transparency in some of the advice professional managers give to politicians.

He said: 'As senior managers you have a responsibility to deliver robust advice to your political masters and be accountable for the effective delivery of your organisation.

'I am determined to strengthen the accountability of the managers of the public sector, while ensuring that those same managers have the necessary safe space to be confident in offering that advice.'

McCabe later told Public Finance that the Executive was actively considering introducing legislation requiring council chiefs to be more accountable, though he was not specific about what form that might take.

During a question and answer session, he confirmed that he is looking at the 'anomalous' situation in which council chief executives can be held legally responsible for decisions taken by elected members.

Ronnie Hinds, the chief executive of Fife Council, told the minister that chief executives had to sign letters of assurance to ministers on child protection, yet decisions on the appointment of senior child protection officers were taken by elected members.

McCabe confirmed he was reviewing the accountability role of both senior officers and elected members.

Hinds later said he welcomed this and added: 'Local authority chief officers have no difficulty with the concept of being held to account for the advice given to their councillors or with providing proper assurances on the services delivered by their councillors.

'But that needs to be accompanied by a clear and coherent framework of responsibility for the recruitment and management of staff, particularly senior managers.'

McCabe also told the conference that the case for public sector reform was 'unequivocal.'

He emphasised that ministers did not intend to impose a 'top down' approach. But he warned: 'There are some inescapable realities here. If people aren't prepared to come with us we are going to have to drag them along.'

Historian defends growth of the public sector

A leading historian has dismissed criticisms that Scotland is too dependent on the public sector as 'wrong-headed' and 'a nonsense'.

Tom Devine, the professor of Scottish history at Edinburgh University, was replying to critics who have equated Scotland's emphasis on the public sector with former Eastern bloc communism.

He told delegates: 'The criticisms are based on ideology, prejudice and a false reading of historical accounts.'

Devine took particular exception to the published views of Niall Ferguson, a Glasgow-born academic now based at Harvard University, who has described Scotland as 'the Belarus of the West'.

Such views, Devine said, painted an unrealistic picture of Scotland apparently declining from 'Victorian glory to provincial mediocrity'. In fact, Scotland's success in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was based on a 'Frankenstein economy' that was bound to fail eventually.

Problems north of the border had been unfairly attributed to the growth of the public sector, which represents nearly 50% of Scotland's gross domestic product.

'The growth of the state was not the cause of Scotland's problems, it was a result,' Devine argued.

He pointed out that the countries agreed to have had strong economies from 1991-2007 – such as Norway, Finland and Sweden – all had the same or even higher levels of public expenditure as a percentage of GDP.

Hutton calls Downing St petition a 'futile' move

The use of the Downing Street website for consultation on the government's plans for road pricing was 'hopeless and futile', Will Hutton, chief executive of the Work Foundation, told the conference.

In a video presentation, he said that between elections, managers and ministers needed to be in constant dialogue with citizens to determine what services people wanted.

In the case of the internet petition on road pricing, it had been devised as a way in which a listening government could show its commitment to democracy.

Hutton, a former editor-in-chief of the Observer, added: 'This is a hopeless and futile way of encouraging deliberative democracy.'

He argued that, in a consultation of this kind, alternatives had to be put forward so that it was possible to find out if there was a better way forward.

The conference, which debated public value, was told by Harvard University's Mark Moore that it was a 'great tragedy' that public officials and politicians could not work more closely. 'Too many things divide them,' he said.

PFmar2007

Did you enjoy this article?

AddToAny

Top