Yes, we need public services reform – but are our leaders up to it?

To be clear I have little (nay, no) regard for the Reform UK company masquerading as a political party. Nor do I particularly care which populist is appointed by its directors to lead it, but my sense of foreboding that when it comes to reform – of our public services – the current crop of leaders simply don’t have what it takes to get the job done, increases each passing day.

Now I have to confess, whilst my dislike for Reform UK is verging on guttural, my antipathy towards the terminology of “reform” as a trojan horse for scything cuts has me positively apoplectic. If we cannot be honest with the public about what reality looks like, how can we expect the public to understand it, or those in lofty positions of power to deliver it?

Read more by Calum Steele

• 2024 was the year women showed us the way to a better world
• Another year of buzzwords and broken promises from Scotland's top cop
• Politicians and police chiefs put public at risk as thugs rampaged

Anyone and everyone in political or public office has danced around this subject for years. Audit Scotland, who no more care about the actual delivery of public services ahead of making sure the money is being properly accounted for, have warned about the need for unspecified reform for years now. The outcome? No change other than calls for more urgent reform whilst actually delivering none – and all set against an oversight backdrop which keeps pretending it is up to the scale of the challenge – whilst being merrily led by the nose by those failing to deliver on it.

It would be easy to point to the Police Scotland project as an example, so I will. Reform in policing has seen hundreds of police stations close, hundreds of thousands of calls not being answered, thousands of crimes not being investigated, and around a thousand fewer officers than a decade ago. In return we are told of transformation as the bean-counting capability has improved (at a cost of millions), the upcoming ability to send evidence, digitally, through that new-fangled gizmo known as the internet will speed up access to justice, and the ability to choose a “gender-neutral” police baseball cap shows how truly progressive our police service has become.

This is what your “reform” looks like, and very little of it is about the actual service you get. So successful has it been in fact that fewer people want to join the police than ever before. Of those that do, more fail to make the grade than ever used to, or need to be given remedial classes on how to write reports as their language skills aren’t up to scratch. The public have enjoyed the benefits too. Crime detection rates are falling, anti-social behaviour and violent crime rising and the smell of cannabis thick on almost every street in the country. What’s not to like?

But that comes nowhere close to the whole story. Whilst this depletion in service has happened against a backdrop of reduced funding, it has not been cheap to deliver such mediocrity. Reform above all else means the creation of very expensive “change management” bureaucracies, accompanied by some very expensive change management salaries and even more expensive consultancy – paid for of course by shedding lower-paid workers who did the actual job.

No one should buy the spin that some internal changes deserve to be hailed as major reform. Innovation and modernisation are facts of life – yet in the public sector we are somehow expected to worship progress like it’s the second coming.

It’s true too many people are turning up at hospitals with coughs, sneezes, cuts and bruises that once upon a recent time would have been treated at home. Too many of our children are taught that to fail at anything is a precursor to a mental health crisis, and not simply a fact of life which they will overcome unscathed, learn from, and be stronger for. And yes, too many people are too feckless to deal with the most basic of domestic mishaps without calling on councils for an emergency service, or believe dislike of anything amounts to something to annoy the police about.

Public sector workers on the front line know know where organisational weaknesses and shortcomings lie (Image: PA)

Scotland has no shortage of public sector workers, and even in these straitened times, plenty can be found at the front end – delivering actual services to the public. They know where organisational weaknesses and shortcomings lie within the police, health service, local council, and elsewhere – yet precious few of them will be called upon to help shape their future services; for it’s a depressing reality that too many vested interests rely on defending the expensive, bureaucratic “change” behemoths they helped create.

Health, education, policing, and so much more need a brutal injection of honesty – almost more than they do cash. Not the honesty that there’s too much work for too few people for a) that’s a given and b) no one really cares, but the honesty that the fixes to many of the challenges can’t be found in endless policy papers and circular meetings, or in the reports of the professional bureaucrats called upon as fig leaf for the ideas vacuum which exist at the top of many of our public sector organisations.

There is a public sector gravy train in Scotland and it has no shortage of passengers. As calls for reform will only grow louder, hundreds more are rubbing their hands at the prospect of getting aboard. The test for our current crop of leaders is whether they have the courage to admit the failures of the past and keep them off, or see them simply as a price worth paying to ensure the great reform pretence continues unreformed.

Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both