The public sector in Scotland

Gerry Hassan in The Herald chooses to rubbish the Bell-MacKay report:

"The Scottish public sector is too big. This has become the equivalent of the dawn chorus of the early years of Scottish devolution. Two senior researchers, David Bell and Donald MacKay, have added their names to the debate, producing a report for a Sunday newspaper looking at the waste in the Scottish Executive. Their report should be taken seriously on a number of levels, however, their findings seem a little threadbare and open to question.
To arrive at their headline £4.6bn savings – £3.1bn identified by them on top of £1.5bn already ear-marked by the executive – they engage in all kinds of back-of-envelope calculations. For a start, across the public sector – health boards, education, local government – they make savings by simply calculating what would happen if the best performances were spread across the whole country. Secondly, their savings are based on significant cuts. While it might make sense to cut the number of Scottish government ministers, cutting the number of list MSPs makes the Parliament less proportional and more Labour dominated. More seriously, Bell and MacKay's savings programme involves the closure of primary and secondary schools, hospitals, water privatisation, the selling off of the Forestry Commission and extending prison privatisation. This comes across like some schoolboy exercise in producing savings or some Downing Street junior John Birt's blueprint fantasy for Scotland!"

Yes, well, maybe. But if one health board (or education authority) is spending significantly more than another, then it is at least somewhere to start looking. In many cases, there may be good reasons for disparities in spending levels but, at the very least, there should be explanations. Perhaps water privatisation may not be on the cards for the foreseeable future but the industry needs to be monitored and compared with its private sector counterparts south of the border. Furthermore, given the decline in Scotland's birth rate, school closures would appear to be inevitable, a fact of life that too few local authorities seem willing to face. So while Bell-MacKay may have over-egged the pudding a little, perhaps we should not be so swift to dismiss at least some of their findings.