I’ve spent almost 9 years in this sector now (a relative pup in comparison to others ), however in that short time I’ve watched the same pattern play out.
A new document gets published. The language is on point , prevention, integration, value for money, reform. Fast forward a few years , another document says almost exactly the same thing. I’ve sat in too many rooms where that language was spoken with total sincerity, by people who I know meant it, and watched it not happen anyway.
This isn’t a new government finding its feet. The current government has just won its fifth consecutive term at Holyrood , nineteen years in office. If reform hasn’t landed by now, that’s not a start-up problem. That’s a choice, repeated, parliament after parliament.
For the first time in a while, though, I have a small glimmer of hope this could be the year the system underpinning that ambition actually shifts enough to deliver it. I’ll be honest about why I think that: it’s necessity, not conviction. I’d like to believe otherwise, but I don’t. The pressure is now converging from multiple direction at once, a. Halle challenging budget position by the end of the decade, a watchdog running out of patience, a third sector stretched thin, and communities exhausted from the daily grind and struggle of the challenge they face. That convergence may finally force the system serving Scotland to move in a way that good intentions never quite have.
The Christie Commission set the diagnosis out in 2011 – invest early, join up services around people, fund what works. Nobody I know disagrees with that . I certainly never have. What I’ve struggled with, throughout my time in this role, is watching how rarely it translates into how money actually moves. Scotland doesn’t have a reform ideas problem. It has a problem turning what it knows into how it spends.
At the Wise Group, we work with people facing some of the toughest circumstances life can present. The organisations that make a real difference to those lives tend to be well formed , clear about who they are what value they bring, relational and by modern standards , relatively unglamorous. They’re efficacy and effectiveness is built slowly, through trust . In that time I’ve also watched good ones undone, not by failure of intent or impact but by a funding model that resets every twelve months regardless of what’s working.
Three warnings landed in my feeds this month that, together, set out what the genesis of reform actually has to mean this time.
Audit Scotland’s Auditor General said a goal for the end of this parliament isn’t enough , ministers need to show the costed, timed steps to get there. Without that detail, meaningful reform will be very hard to deliver. That’s the government’s own scrutiny body saying, plainly, that the current approach isn’t good enough.
CHAS, writing on Enlighten, made the distinction that , for me , matters most: public service reform and public sector reform are not the same thing. Their own journey , from standalone hospice charity to a genuinely embedded NHS partner, happened through trust and shared risk. I wish that were the norm rather than the exception that’s hiding in plain sight .
The Scottish Health Equity Research Unit made a point I think gets missed , often deliberately: prevention doesn’t just need new money, it needs government to be willing to stop funding something else to make room for it. That’s the hard part. It’s much easier to announce new spending than to end old spending, and most of what I’ve seen called reform avoids that entirely.
I recognise all of this in my own experience, including the uncomfortable parts. The good work I’ve seen tends to succeed not because a structure changed, but because someone took time to consider it , see its value through evidence and backed it consistently, measuring the outcomes it actually achieved, and crucially let that evidence decide what happened next. I’ve also seen good work fail simply because nobody was courageous enough or willing to make that call in time.
My hope for this Programme for Government is fairly simple, and I’m aware it’s not a new ask. Not more ambition , the ambition has been right for a long time, and this government has had five terms to prove it means it. What I’d like to see: delivery measured by whether people’s lives changed, funding that lets organisations plan beyond a financial year, and the honesty to redirect money away from what isn’t working and toward where the need is greatest , even when that’s a hard, unpopular conversation.
Nineteen years is long enough to have learned this the easy way. It looks like we’re going to learn it the hard way instead. If necessity is what finally moves this system, I’ll take it , but I’d rather it hadn’t taken this long.
Sean Duffy is Chief Executive of the Wise Group