By John Knox
“She’s going down,” Ernest Shackleton told his men as he ordered them to abandon their ship, Endurance. They had indeed “endured” the Antarctic winter of 1915 trapped in the ice when their leader was finally forced to adopt a Plan B. We are still waiting for our own leaders to adopt a Plan B, and meanwhile the watchword is “endurance” as we face a winter of many discontents.
It is clear from the UK party conferences that there is to be no end to the age of austerity. The government cuts are going ahead and the private sector is still iced up in near-zero growth. To add to the gloom, the trade unions are planning a series of demonstrations, and balloting for strike action, over pay freezes, job losses and increasing pension contributions.
We now have to see what the Scottish parties will make of all this in their upcoming conference season. And, more importantly, we have to see what the 32 local councils will do in the face of the biggest freeze in their budgets since devolution. It is the councils, after all, who will have to do most of the cutting and most of the after-care.
Nearly £500 million has been cut from council budgets, 5 per cent, and the council tax has been frozen hard, like the Antarctic ice. The unions are predicting that 10,000 jobs will have to go and many council services will sink like the good ship Endurance. They are calling for a Plan B in which the government spends more now to get the economy back into growth and pays off the debts later by taxing the rich and the avoiders. Alex Salmond has his own Plan MacB in which we spend more now and the future will look after itself in an independent Scotland.
There is however a Plan C emerging. It is to centralise the public services like police and fire and – only hinted at so far – care services and education. The thinking from the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives is that centralising services will save money by avoiding the duplication of back office functions such as personnel management, wage payments, insurance, training and procurement. In the case of police and fire services, the government estimates a single force would save £130m a year in the long run.
But Plan C, to my mind, is either cunning or concerning or just plain crazy. Cunning, because it is a power-grab by Holyrood, replacing local councils in effect but keeping them as a human shield when things go wrong. Concerning, because centralisating usually turns out to be an expensive business and when mistakes are made at the centre, the whole country suffers not just one council area.
And crazy because, ultimately, the same amount of work has to be done – streets patrolled, fires put out, elderly folk looked after, schoolchildren taught. If there are savings to be made in personnel management or procurement etc, then they can be made locally – it is called “efficiency”. Any worthwhile computer system would allow a local manager to shop around or manage his wage bill and learn lessons from his colleagues in other councils.
We all have our own Utopia. Campbell Christie has his, it is called the Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services. This worthy report laments the fact that “the public services system in Scotland is often fragmented, complex and opaque”. It finds it too top-down, unresponsive to the needs of individuals and communities and too short-term.
But the Commission has largely been ignored. Partly because it failed to provide a route map to its solutions and partly because it did not recommend what was expected of it, namely more centralisation. Instead Dr Christie’s Utopia seems to consist of many smaller councils (he points out that in Scandinavia there are three times as many as in Scotland) tailoring services to individuals – particularly the disadvantaged – and a massive transfer of resources from acute services to preventive measures: from hospitals to care in the home, or from universities to early learning, or from prisons to community service.
It is true that the finance secretary John Swinney did allocate an extra £500m to preventive measures, but that is over three years and is 0.5 per cent of his budget. Clearly Mr Swinney is not heading for the same Utopia as Dr Christie – or if he is, he is travelling at 0.5 mph.
The other parties are not going anywhere fast, either. Labour just want to go on with the system as it is, but with a third fewer cuts. The Conservatives want to privatise as many services as possible and leave the rest to local boards of enterprising individuals. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens are keen on local co-operatives and charities running services. And indeed I share their enthusiasm.
But my Utopia lies much further away. I would like to see our existing councils given back the services they once ran at a local level and given the freedom and the budgets to do their own thing. Let local managers manage. Local Health Partnerships, for instance, are showing the way forward, where health boards and local councils are working together to integrate hospital care with care in the home and care in the nursing home.
In the longer term, I would like to see the 14 regional health boards abolished and their staff and budgets passed to local councils so that health can be integrated with care services, social work, education and sport.
I gather that the councils in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles are experimenting with what they call “a single public authority model” in which the council takes responsibility for all public spending in its area. This makes sense. It should end the “silo mentality” so heavily criticised in the Christie report.
In the long run, I would like to see this devolution applied to Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Water, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Scottish Natural Heritage, Visit Scotland, Scottish Sport and the 20 universities and 41 colleges. This would be a huge shift in power, responsibilities and resources, away from Holyrood and out to the districts. But it is what devolution – or “subsidiary”, to give its European name – is all about. The central government should be there just to regulate, inspect, advise, crisis-manage and make the overall laws. The councils’ job is to “do”, to actually deliver the public services to their people, efficiently with local knowledge and sensitivity.
It’s also a matter of quality jobs. There is a talented and experienced workforce out there in the 32 councils which is being second-guessed – or worse still, directed, by a highly paid bureaucracy at the centre who have no hands-on experience. I am not saying that each council should work away in its own “silo” – there can be cross-border co-operation where it is sensible. Smaller councils may want to join forces for certain purposes. But it should be on an ad hoc basis and only when it suits each council.
Happily, there are already signs that my Utopia is not far away, like the twigs brought back by Noah’s dove. Even in the justice secretary’s plans for a single police force, there is an admission that each council will have to have its own superintendent – in effect, its own chief constable. Many of the great quangos of state have local offices. The government has tried intermittently to end the ring-fencing of budgets so that councils can order their own priorities. It is just a pity that when they do so, they are criticised for creating a “postcode lottery”.
So there is my alternative to Plan C. Let us call it Plan D, for devolution. It does not have to happen overnight, it is more a direction of travel. But I believe it would keep employment up, job-quality up, and deliver better public services. It could be done within existing budgets – indeed it has to be so in this age of austerity. It might even be a rescue plan, as daring as Shackleton’s and almost as dangerous. But remember, the ship is going down and something has to be done.
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