On the ground: how Scotland’s public servants experience public service reform

Given widely recognised fiscal pressures, we can expect to hear plenty of discussion during this May’s Holyrood election about the need to make public services more effective, productive, and affordable at a time when demand on services is set to grow. The chorus of voices calling for spending cuts as a part of the solution is getting louder.

Before we leave the politicians to make their pronouncements, it is worth reflecting on what those involved in the provision of public services have to say about the sector, and the unresolved challenges it faces in the future.

We spoke with a variety of stakeholders engaged in or with insight into the future of Scotland’s devolved public services. They ranged from public servants like senior government officials and local authority staff, to union representatives and those with experience leading change in local public services within and outside Scotland. These conversations helped us understand what the public service reform agenda looks like from the inside.  

Some key themes emerged from these interviews:

• Well-founded, necessary reforms, aimed at preventing issues manifesting in the first instance, have not yet been enacted.
• Public service workers recognise that things need to change in the way services are delivered and function.
• There is a strong consensus against the idea that there is a clear and justifiable delineation between ‘frontline’ and ‘back-office’ staff, inferring one is of greater value than the other.

On the first point, the frustration with government inaction in moving Scotland towards a preventative model of public service delivery was apparent.  

“Scotland knows what it needs to do. The Christie Commission set [it] out, and you know there was broad consensus about that” a trade union official said.

On the Christie Commission recommendation, a voluntary sector leader said: “It's outrageous that that's still a thing we have not addressed and if we had it would have been so much cheaper [in the long term].”  

The 2011 Christie Commission set out a series of recommendations for how Scottish public services could be reformed, with an emphasis on prevention. Most of our interviewees agreed that the failure to embed those recommendations has proved to be a huge mistake. Scotland is paying a high price for it both in the quality of public service provision on offer, and in the long-term financial sustainability of public services. Service provision has focused increasingly on keeping up with growing (and increasingly complex) public demand. This is particularly true in healthcare.

“A model of health and social care, which is dominated by high cost acute interventions as opposed to more preventative community-based interventions is not sustainable… we need to shift that model to integrated working, collaborative teams, supporting people to be as well as they can in a community setting for as long as possible and in ways that don't over treat people” an agency head said.

However, prioritising a preventative agenda is not cheap or easy. Spending on prevention today to save tomorrow does not absolve us of the responsibility to meet the very real needs of today. We still must spend whatever deemed necessary to meet the failure demand arising from yesterday’s lack of investment. No matter what the Scottish government says in its 2025 fiscal sustainability drive, the road to preventative public services will be a long one that should have started years ago.  

One interviewee, a government official, provided a historical example of what they termed ‘double running’: “Why have we singularly failed to achieve what seems like logically necessary shifts… the closing down of acute mental hospitals, for instance, and the movement of people into the community required a systematic double running for a number of years of both paying for the acute mental hospitals and building the capacity and capability of community services.”

Given the high expected costs, policymakers naturally feel compelled to make savings in areas that might appear less visible to the public, and least detrimental to the functioning of day-to-day services. This is a fallacy, however. Oftens it is only when a public service is undermined or vanishes does its impact and effectiveness become apparent.  

In recent years, local government services have borne the brunt of this particular impulse to ‘drive efficiency’ in Scotland with a 0.7 per cent reduction in local government workforce in the year to June 2025 with “further efficiencies” mandated from the Scottish government in the years ahead. Continuing to reduce headcount risks piling continued pressure to sustain local provision on a shrinking workforce.

“The go-to has always been, reduce the headcount but keep the service or the expectation [through streamlining digital, AI, etc]…because the service has to remain at the same level, so you've got a lot of people scrambling in the background trying to perform as they were before and you see complaints going up because you're not able to deliver what you were before,” a local authority senior official said.

Interviewees were nonetheless pragmatic about the need for public services to evolve and respond to financial pressures. Some welcomed a consolidation of local services across local authority boundaries where it made sense.  

The same local authority senior official said: “We're looking at collaboration…other partners [councils] and how we deliver our services and whether that's in shared services, whether that's doing it ourselves, reducing the service, stopping the service or commissioning.”

That said, the extent to which the Scottish government believes there is still much more scope for further efficiency within councils is highly questionable. The 2026 Scottish Spending Review did not do much to dispel the notion that the government merely passes on difficult financial decisions to councils in a tone-deaf fashion:

Interviewees unanimously pushed back on the notion that prioritising ‘frontline services’ means ‘back-office’ staff are not as important within public services. They agreed that the ‘front’ and ‘back’ office dichotomy was not only unhelpful and counterproductive, but patently wrong.

Scottish government policy papers detail how a programme of workforce reduction and euphemistic “re-deployment guidance” will reduce the number of staff and save costs while simultaneously committing to protect “frontline services”. Social Security Scotland is named directly in the 2026 spending review as undergoing investigation into potential efficiencies in “back-office functions”. One interview spelled out the futility in dividing the wide spectrum of public service workers accordingly. “The definition of front office. Well, it's a policeman. It's a nurse. It's this. It's that,” said an agency head, “...so my researcher who actually is essential for what I need to do in terms of delivery of protection of public health is back office. Why? Why from the centre are we trying to define what is frontline or back office for my organisation?”  

The subsequent removal of so-called ‘back office’ staff has very real and tangible outcomes for the public they are meant to serve.  

The common thread throughout the interviews is that public service workers are pragmatic about the need for public service reform but that government and party-political pronouncements on efficiencies, and exaggerated possibilities of further ‘efficiency drives’, are likely to yield limited benefits. If we continue to indulge simple solutions we risk a second round of austerity. The Scottish government must urgently confront the fact that high quality public services require both necessary increases in investments and clever preventative reforms – neither of which is possible with further cuts.