Now Scotland's census is being outsourced – it is time to reclaim public policy-making

Scotland's census is being designed and shaped by a private sector business consultancy – as is revealed in today's Herald after a tip-off from Common Weal. The National Records of Scotland have issue a £75,000 contract to Deloitte to begin preparing for the 2031 Scottish Census.

There is much that causes alarm about this affair. For a start, this has been done under a 'framework agreement'. The concept behind the outsourcing of government work is easy to challenge but it is at least consistent – that if you can make multiple suppliers compete for contracts then you can get the maximum value and quality of work by driving up the market.

However framework agreements entirely undermine the philosophy of outsourcing. These are contracts where you bid to get all future contracts, sometimes for as long as 20 years. That is not using the market power of the public sector to drive up quality from the private sector, that is the temporary mass privatisation of public function into a private company.

It therefore means that this was a no-bid contract – Deloitte just gets the contract automatically, along with the payment. This also means that Deloitte gets all the other contracts that come from the National Records of Scotland automatically and without bid.

And yet that means that big proportions of the core policy work of one of Scotland's most important and most historic agencies has been put significantly under control of a private interest. And it is a private interest which has been fined repeatedly for malpractice – almost all of it benefiting big corporate clients.

It is also questionable why the same partners involved in the last, failed census are being invited back. The 2021 Census was in effect the first in modern peacetime which did not initially achieve sufficient enough returns to get reliable data after its first deadline. Deloitte was also involved in that process yet has been brought back again.

The problem of private sector interests writing public policy is continually growing in Scotland. No politician has ever stood on a platform advocating the privatisation of large chunks of the function of the civil service so there is absolutely no democratic mandate for this practice. It has been agreed almost wholly between civil servants and the private sector.

And of course senior civil servants often take up lucrative roles in the private sector after leaving the civil service, meaning there appears to be at least a significant risk of conflicts of interest. Many of the most significant problems in Scotland can be traced back to undue closeness between big business interests and senior levels of the civil service.

There are simple solutions to this. The outsourcing agenda is purely ideological and can be halted at any moment. This should happen; core public policy should be developed free from commercial conflicts of interests, internally and always only for public benefit.

Unfortunately one of the outcomes of the outsourcing agenda has been the withering away of capacity in the civil service. That creates a circular argument in which decision-making has to be outsourced because there isn't the internal capacity. There are then two solutions to that.

The first is quicker; create and quickly recruit to an internal, publicly-owned consulting company. The capacity which is used in the private sector to create policy and simply be brought into the public sector through a staff recruitment process and a prohibition on outsourcing policy.

In the longer term, we need to rebuild the general capacity of the civil service. In fact Common Weal would go further and split the civil service into policy-making and policy-implementing functions. We would then second policy-making staff into 'policy academies' which would specialist in different policy areas, be attached to universities and would be open-access for those with ideas and thinking.

These would then feed back options and recommendation to Ministers who would choose between them and then pass this on for implementation. For more information on how Common Weal would develop public policy, look at the Democracy chapter of Sorted.