The Scottish Government's public sector reform agenda is starting to look like the definition of 'accident waiting to happen'. Common Weal recognises some of the positive motives behind the plans (genuine managerial bloat in parts of public sector governance) and some of the less positive ones (a need to reduce projected budget deficits).
But another leaked paper has raised serious questions about whether the execution of reorganisation is competent. Simply put, it shows that there is to be the biggest reorganisation of NHS governance in a generation yet there is no business plan to support it, no meaningful costings of the process and an exceptionally high assessment of the risk that this will fail.
Worse still, there does not seem to be much in the way of assessment of meaningful gain. It seems to be taken for granted that centralisation and merger is 'good' in and of itself and that any steps to get to that point are therefore 'necessary' whether they have been planned in advance or not. And that the costs incurred with 'inevitably' result in better performance.
This mirrors our concerns about what is happening with local government reform as well. As we have set out in detail in our parliamentary briefing on the subject, depending on which version of their objectives they are emphasising on any given day, the same plans can look like further centralisation or a step towards decentralisation.
But in either case they do not seem to have been properly modelled. For example, having raised concerns about the intention to 'dissolve' existing local authorities (a 'brute force' way to engineer mergers which has the merit of being fast and comprehensive but is also extremely risky) we have been told the intention isn't really to 'dissolve' them at all.
This gives us significant concern. A government is not a think tank. If it issues a paper indicating an intention to 'dissolve' a body and we cannot assume that 'dissolve' means 'dissolve', it becomes harder and harder to track the progress of the policy development.
There is always a substantial degree of in-process adaptation and improvisation with large policy development. It is impossible to know in advance all the issues which will arise as the project develops.
But without a clear plan to adapt and improvise around, project development either becomes chaotic (the 2017 education reforms), turns out to be infeasible (the version of a National Energy Company pursued) or wades into dispute which grinds the project to a halt (National Care Service).
Common Weal's concerns are simple:
At the moment the Scottish Government cannot articulate an real or measurable improvement that is being sought from reforms and has not estimated outcomes. This is being taken on faith.
The intention to merge structures has been set in stone before the processes involved in those mergers have been analysed, broken down or planned.
The one number that does seem to have come through strongly is the estimate of likely failure – which is high but appears to be being ignored.
As a result of all of this, the cost of the transition is unknown and therefore almost certain to spiral.
Each of these concerns feed into the others in a loop. It seems that the intention to press ahead with this really is set in stone and that suggests the Scottish Government is going to get back into a 'bluff and coerce' cycle where it hides problems, pretends they are aren't occurring and puts its effort into browbeating stakeholders into compliance with the process.
This was exactly the pattern with the National Care Service and that failed at a cost of £44 million, money spent on nothing much more than civil servant pay and extensive private sector consultancy. Yet the National Care Service was a minor project in comparison with what is proposed now and its development is much less potentially disruptive.
Common Weal is not against government reorganisation. We have plenty of criticisms of Scotland's unwieldy quango-and-consultant state. But blundering in without a plan is not the way to address it.