Policy Briefing: the Christie Commission on Public Sector Reform in Scotland, July 2011

Policy Briefing: The Christie Commission on Public Sector Reform in Scotland, July 2011

This policy briefing has been produced by the Independent Living in Scotland Project Team. The Disabled People’s Independent Living Movement in Scotland can use this briefing. It can be amended for local use, but please remove the ILiS logo and contact details if you do this and replace with your own.

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This briefing is about the Christie Commission on Public Sector Reform in Scotland. Itcovers the background to the Commission, the findings of it and what this means for disabled people and the Independent Living Movement in Scotland.

Abbreviations used in this briefing

ILM: Independent Living Movement

DPO: Disabled People’s Organisation

LA: Local Authority

The Christie Commission on Public Sector Reform in Scotland

The Christie Commission was set up by the Scottish Government in November 2010 to makerecommendations for the future delivery of public services in Scotland. ILiS responded to the consultation on public sector reform and this can be readhere.

The Commission was asked to:

address the role of public services in improving outcomes, what impact they make, and whether this can be done more effectively
examine structures, functions and roles, to improve the quality of public service delivery and reduce demand through, for example, early intervention
consider the role of a public service ethos, along with cultural change, engaging public sector workers, users and stakeholders

The Scottish Government’s vision for public services state that they should be:

seamless, responsive and innovative
democratically accountable and delivered in partnership
address the causes and respond effectively to increasing demographic pressures
support a fair and equal society and protect the most vulnerable in our society

To achieve this vision, a set of principles guided the Commissions work:

reforms must empower individuals and communities by their involvement in design and delivery
partnerships are necessary to integrate service provision
public expenditure must focus on preventing negative outcomes
the new system must reduce duplication and become more efficient

The Commission published their findings on the 29th of June 2011. You can read them in full here.

Summary of the findings of the Christie Commission

Public Service Reform

The Commission states that “the public services of the future must not only continue to provide a safety net for the vulnerable, but make a coherent contribution to a stronger, healthier, economically viable and more equitable society”. To achieve this, they recommend a reform programme that:

is built around people and communities
is collaborative to achieve outcomes
prioritises prevention, reduce inequalities and promote equality
improves performance and reduce costs

However, the Commission recognises that there are structural and economic challenges in achieving this.

It states that Scottish public services are short term in vision, complex, poorly coordinated, lacking in transparency, fragmented and often duplicate effort. They state further that provision is disempowering, things are done "to" people, not "with" them and the procurement at a macro level often reinforces the role of the biggest players.

In addition, they note that funding available to the Scottish Government will shrink over the next 20 years, at the same time demand for services will increase as the proportion of Scotland's population over 60 increases by 50%, and those over 75 by 84%. They note further that Scotland is particularly vulnerable to changes in UK policy and cites the current Welfare Reform programme as having "potential (negative) consequences" for devolved services as one example.

Prevention and addressing inequality

The Commission states that "no progress can be made towards positive outcomes... without addressing the issue of inequality" and recommends that the public sector adhere to the duties in the Equality Act. Further, it also recommends that "a human rights based approach of participation, accountability and legality are embedded..." in the public sector ethos”.

It proposes that demand reduction is the best policy response to public sector reform to support this and that“....a cycle of deprivation and low aspiration has been allowed to persist because preventative measures have not been prioritised”. The Commission highlights 3 threats to this preventative agenda:

a focus on immediate problems
short term results
narrow focus on outputs

They estimated that as much as 40% of all spending on public services is accounted for by interventions that could have been avoided by prioritising a preventative approach.And that a specific presumption towards prioritising prevention and tackling inequalities must be adopted across the public sector.

They highlight that support for active participation, independent living, Personalisation, Self Directed Support, community development and employability as key to the preventative agenda and state that these should be a focus of public sector reform.

Coproduction, empowerment, accountability and participation

The Commission sees partnership and coproduction as “vital to the achievement of outcomes for people and communities”.They state that evidence supports the principle of involving people in design and delivery of services and that this is crucial for accountability. They highlightcommunity development as crucial to this. They therefore propose an approach to reform, based on 2 basic principles - partnership and participation.

Currently, Community Planning Partnerships are set up to support this. However, the Commission states that “the potential benefits of a localpartnership approach are far from beingfully realised...there are variations in theeffectiveness ofcommunity planning partnerships...for the most part...communityplanning has focussed on the relationshipsbetween organisations, rather than withcommunities”.

To address this gap the Commission proposes:

A full and proper public process to determine and develop outcomes through local partnerships that involve people and communities (including working at a more local level that LA level)
Collaboration to design and deliver integrated services
Development of ways for all partners to be accountable to each other and to the public for the delivery of the agreed outcomes
A role for public sector staff as ‘champions of participation’
Public services understand their collaborative role and so develop a shared identity e.g. ‘Public Services South Lanarkshire’
A new set of common and shared powers and duties for the public sector:
budget and resource pooling
mandatory integrated provision of services
long term plans for asset management between agencies
the development of national standards and targets which encourage partnership and flexibility

In addition, they highlight the "Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill" as having the potential to promote improvements in participation in service design and delivery and in building community capacity.

Joined up provision

The success of partnership working “is dependent on the ability of organisations to pool budgets”(Association for Public Service Excellence). To compliment this the Commission focuses the reform agenda on long term, joined up planning,provision and budgeting for public services and states that this is essential to achieve the outcomes needed to address inequalities.

However, they recognise that “resources within public services...have...a strong organisational ‘identity’” and argue that “creating a focus on the needs of a particular place or a group of people, rather than the funding streams of individual organisations, can be an effective way to target attention and provide a basis for partnership”.

To do this, they recommend an agreement, between Scottish Government and localgovernment to develop joined-up services, that is backed by funding arrangements that require integratedprovision. They also suggest new inter-agencytraining to help people to work together and build acommon public service ethos.

In terms of localism, the Commission wish to see local flexibility in determining outcomes. However, they state that national policy drivers are useful where they support the achievement of outcomes for communities and individuals and build their capacity, prioritise prevention and address inequality. Thus the Commission states that where it is necessary for the Scottish Government to set targets and agree entitlements, these should be jointly agreed between LA’s and communities and should be explicit in how they relate to agreed outcomes.

Improving performance and reducing costs

The Commission recommends a public sector that is transparent and can demonstrate a link between value and shared outcomes and recommends that Audit Scotland extend it’s remit across the wider public sector to consider shared powers and duties.

They also suggest that a ‘single public service model’, used in the Northern Isles, is monitored closely as a model for service delivery elsewhere.

To support a focus on longer term, shared outcomes, the Commission suggest that the Government should set budgets over similar multi-year cycles across the whole public sector.

What this means for the Independent Living Movement

It is important that the ILM set their approaches for policy change in the context of the Christie report and there is a lot there to build on. Many of the issues ILiS highlighted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights(click here to watch the evidence session) as important for the progression of independent living; empowerment, prevention, coproduction, joined up provision, shared resources and consistency; need public sector reform and the Christie report highlights many similar issues and potential solutions. As a key piece of mainstream policy, Christie’s report has the potential to support progression of independent living, not just in it’s action but in it’spromotion and reasoning.

The report presents many opportunities to progress the principles and outcomes of IL, including:

As highlighted in the ILiSresponse to the Christie Commission (click here to download it), the ILM share a desire for prevention.To help overcome the threats to this (highlighted above)the ILM must:
demonstrate how today’s immediate problems could have been avoided by taking a preventative approach e.g. hospitalisation vs. appropriate community care
gain the support and will of the general public, so that perceptions of failure e.g. when crisis management fails vs. a longer term vision, are recognised
support and promote the future integration of services
The ILM has long campaigned for joined-up working and budgeting, and so the recommendationsto reduce short-termism, work collaborativelyand to pool budgets,underpinned by new duties on public bodies and roles for workers as ‘champions of participation’, is useful
Participation of this sort needs coproduction and that needs empowerment and capacity. If we are to move to localised decision making and shared working and budgeting, it is essential to empower disabled people and the professional first. Without this, disabled people will be left behind, decisions will be taken without them and expertise is lost from the system. This itself isneeds a preventative approach, where capacity building; rather than just front line provision; is resourced
The ILM should engage with the “Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill” to ensure that ways to support participation and community capacity for disabled people are central to it’s development and implementation
As one of the basic rights of independent living and as less than half of disabled people of working age are in employment, employability is a useful common focus for public sector reform. The ILM should work to ensure that support and provision in this area optimises choice, control, freedom and dignity
Portability of support (across LA boundaries and across life stages e.g. from children’s to adult services) and consistency of provision has been important to the ILM for many years. Localism has threatened this agenda. With a focus in Christie on flexibility locally, it is important that the ILM highlight portability as an issue as one that needs national direction; that supports the achievement of outcomes for communities and individuals, prioritises prevention and addresses inequality
Reinforcing the role of key tools such as laws on Equality and the Human Rights, in delivering our public services,is useful in carrying the message wider

July 2011

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