MSPs cross swords on public service reform

13 Jan 15
Scottish ministers have defended their record in protecting public services, after a Holyrood committee report suggested that £500m, committed in 2011 for radical service reform, had achieved very little.

By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 13 January 2015

Scottish ministers have defended their record in protecting public services, after a Holyrood committee report suggested that £500m, committed in 2011 for radical service reform, had achieved very little.

The report, from the Parliament’s cross-party Finance Committee, was published on Monday evening, just hours ahead of a Scottish Government-led debate in the Parliament designed to show how the Scottish National Party government has sought to protect Scotland from UK coalition cuts.

Drawing on evidence from a range of bodies, including Audit Scotland, the report found that three change funds, set up in the wake of the Christie Commission to engineer a more preventive approach to spending on early years provision, care of the elderly and reducing offending, had demonstrated ‘a lack of measurable outcomes’ in respect of their declared policy goals.

‘In relation to each of the change funds and the role of Community Planning Partnerships, there is little evidence of the essential shift in resources taking place to support a preventative approach,’ the report says. ‘No examples were provided in the government’s response.’

Scottish Tory finance spokesman Gavin Brown called the report ‘a pretty damaging critique’ and claimed that the SNP’s referendum promises to invest in public spending as an alternative to UK austerity policies had lacked credibility even with oil prices running at $120 a barrel. With the price now headed for $45, he said: ‘It is a fantasy.’

Labour also joined the attack, with newly appointed infrastructure spokeswoman Mary Fee condemning year-end figures showing a £440m budget underspend at a time when hospital accident & emergency departments were ‘at breaking point’, teacher numbers at a 10-year low, and council services crippled by an ‘under-funded’ council tax freeze.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Liam McArthur claimed that the UK coalition’s austerity policies had put the economy back on track and would deliver an extra £238m to Scotland through the Barnett Formula as a result of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement decisions.

But Keith Brown, Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities, insisted that Scotland’s economic recovery had been impeded by UK spending cuts, and that these would continue regardless of which party won the general election in May, with some sources putting the volume of cuts still to come at £15bn.

Brown cited a recent Oxfam report, showing that just three families in Scotland owned wealth equivalent to that held by the poorest 20% of the population. Scotland, he said, was the world’s 14th richest country, yet a million of its people lived in poverty. Scottish ministers wanted to address that with an extra £2.4bn of investment a year but they lacked the powers to do so. 

He claimed that ‘a decisive shift to prevention’ in public services was evidenced not just in the change funds, but also in measures such as free prescriptions or free pensioner travel.  In addition, he said, Scottish ministers were spending £100m a year to mitigate UK coalition benefits cuts.  

Brown said Scottish ministers were also committed to decent pay and conditions for public employees and had, alone among UK jurisdictions, implemented a 1% pay rise for nurses. He condemned recent figures showing salary hikes of up to 13% for university principals when pay elsewhere in the public sector was at a virtual standstill.

‘Strong public services are the bedrock of a fair and prosperous society,’ Brown told MSPs.

 

 

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