If you are serious about government waste, you need a coherent analysis

Sooner or later (generally sooner), most governments or parties challenging to become governments will start talking about reducing government waste. This is a helpful rhetorical argument because it appears to 'magic money out of the air' without the need for tax rises. The history of governments successfully achieving their waste reduction targets is very much more patchy. And that is generous…

So it is that the Scottish Government is now promising to cut a billion pounds of 'waste' from the public sector. There is reason to be sceptical that this is a realistic or deliverable pledge – and if they genuinely mean waste.

It is not clear that that is what the government is actually talking about. Waste is spending that does not add value, money spent on unnecessary processes or which leaks out from its intended purpose one way or another, legitimate or otherwise. It is spending that does not support the delivery of what it is notionally being spent on.

But if you reduce spending and it takes value away from the final, delivered outcomes then that is not a reduction in waste but rather simply a spending cut. The line between these two activities can be hard to draw, and it is not clear from the initial Scottish Government statement what side of the line it is on.

In fact some of the initial framing does sound rather like it is engaged in standard cuts. It seems to begin from the assumption that the outcome of this is going to be a significant reduction in workforce. That could be a reflection of improved process and the reduction in unnecessary activities, but it is every bit as likely to end up being a reduction in service.

This is particularly the case because the reality is that some of those in the Scottish public sector who are most responsible for diverting resources away from frontline delivery are those best able to defend their jobs. Senior and mid-level management will prove much harder to dislodge than low pay front line workers, yet it is at the higher levels that we find the waste.

The perception is made worse by the language used here. Efficiency of procurement, greater use of AI – these are the common preoccupations of those who seek to reduce the size of the public sector as an ideological policy goal. And yet if you want two examples of how to waste money, NHS procurement and virtually every IT system the public sector introduces would be good places to start.

This is because the kind of reductions the First Minister is talking about are not a change of course but a doubling-down on the existing path. In his speech announcing this he gives a single main example of how this has already been achieved – the centralisation of Police Scotland. It would be a brave politician who would stand up and defend that as anything other than a reduction in service.

The point is that this announcement appears to seek to reduce public sector waste by intensifying activities which have created the waste in the first place. And it is equally unclear that the Scottish Government even has a coherent philosophy of what waste is. Under the terms set out yesterday, buying busses from a Scottish bus manufacturer would be waste if cheaper equivalents could be bought from China.

So by that measure the loss of the Alexander Dennis company to England is a successful outcome of efficiency savings. It will cost much more than it saves in remedial action to deal with the job losses. But that is precisely the kind of short-term managerial thinking that has caused this problem in the first place.

There is a genuine problem with waste in the Scottish public sector and a lot of it is down to a system which has empowered the wrong people. Frontline workers are the place where we achieve efficiency by empowering them to make responsive decisions. It is when they are forced to implement decisions conceived by non-expert managers in board rooms that the waste creeps in.

Or to put it another way; up to about a third of the workload of a social worker is chasing missing patient case files, contacting different providers across the public and private sector which have varying disclosure requirements and piecing together a care package in a highly-fragmented system The changes being proposed in this speech appear to be driving towards increased fragmentation.

The people who will drive this will be management consultants and this fragmentation will be called efficiency on their charts. Sooner or later most governments will start talking about reducing waste. On most occasions the waste they will be trying to reduce will be waste exacerbated by a previous round of management-led waste reduction.

There is little in this speech to suggest it is a coherent, philosophically-driven understanding of why our system is riddled with waste and more a panicked reaction to political discontent with the administration. Common Weal has a coherent philosophy of efficiency which we call 'frontline first'. If resources are being absorbed before they are spent on those who need them, find out why and prevent it.