The great reformer?

The state is being redrawn. Apparently.

Strip away the language about child poverty and opportunity, and last week's Programme for Government was about one thing. The Scottish Government intends to rebuild public service delivery, and hopes it will look different at the end of this parliament from how it looks today. Hope being the key word.

I sat through enough of these statements to spot the difference between a programme built around a giveaway and a programme built around the plumbing. This was plumbing. John Swinney used his time not necessarily to unveil a new spend-heavy flagship policy but to announce that the machinery behind policy is about to be taken apart and put back together. For anyone who earns a living off the back of government, and that means all civil servants, many in the third sector, most sizeable contractors, and a good deal of private business, that should matter more than any single spending line in the speech.

Three changes sit at the centre of it:

First, the 14 territorial health boards will be replaced by two “strategic” boards, drawn roughly east and west, in what the First Minister called the most significant reform of the NHS since devolution.

Second, local government is next, with a three-month period of “engagement” on a new structure and a fairly broad hint that smaller councils might be merged into something more regional in nature. Strathclyde, I hear readers of a certain age cry?!

Third, the public bodies themselves face a cull, with Transport Scotland pulled back into core government, the environmental agencies folded into one, and even a single ferries body under consideration, which, to be fair, I first recommended in a committee report nearly a decade ago. Put together, this could be, if it happens, the largest structural reshaping of Scotland's public sector since the single police and fire services were created in 2013. And there are mixed views as to how well that went.

None of this is happening because ministers woke up enthused by organisational charts. It is happening because the sums no longer add up. Audit Scotland has been warning for years about a gap of around five billion pounds between what the government wants to spend on services by the end of the decade and the money it will actually have. Indeed the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, has become something close to the most persistent honest voice that Scotland's public finances have, and he is not a man given to hyperbole. An ageing population, rising demand and weak growth are the real authors of this Programme for Government. Reform (small r) is the answer ministers have reached for because the alternative is admitting the state cannot afford to keep doing what it does, and does not want to make gaping slashes in service delivery.

That context actually matters, because it shapes what the serious people are now saying. Ignore the party exchanges in the theatre of the Holyrood chamber. They are exactly that, theatre, and you will learn little from them other than where early opposition lies. Listen instead to the institutions that have no election to win. The Fraser of Allander Institute has made the same point for years, and made it again: there is a persistent gap between what this government wants to do and what it delivers, and a reform driven by savings runs straight into a public sector pay policy the Fiscal Commission has already warned is unaffordable. Structure is the easy bit. Money and people are where reforms come apart and hit walls of opposition. Just as NHS and council reform will I suspect. Hands up if you support cutting your department and your well paid 6-figure salary?

The Health and Social Care Alliance put it more plainly than any politician managed. Redrawing boxes on an organisation chart is not the same as redesigning services around the people who use them, and governments have talked about reform for years without ever involving those people.

The Royal College of Nursing, which has no reason to oppose reform in principle, went straight at the process, warning about a lack of transparency in how these health board plans were prepared and insisting that staff have a real voice in what follows.

From local government, the message was measured and pointed. COSLA says councils are up for reform but will, in its words, fiercely defend local accountability. Read that as a warning shot. And the third sector, through SCVO, welcomed the promise of a formal partnership and multi-year funding while making clear that reform cannot be a polite word for cuts. Their own research keeps finding the same thing: charities already struggle to be heard by the public bodies they work alongside, and a reorganisation could easily make that worse before it makes it better.

The common thread here? Almost no one thinks structure is the problem, and almost everyone fears that reorganising the structure will absorb years of energy that should go into delivery. That is the lesson of the National Care Service, quietly abandoned after consuming enormous effort, and money. And that of Police Scotland, where a merger sold on efficiency produced a decade of turbulence. Reorganisation is the thing that looks decisive on the day and takes years to actually do!

What does this mean to you, dear reader? As a taxpayer, probably a lot. As a service user, even more. As an organisation? Well, your stakeholder mapping is about to be worth less than the recycled paper it is printed on. The health board relationship you have built over years, the council you are mid-conversation with, the arm's length body that holds your funding, several of those may change shape or cease to exist in their current form. The people you know may not be the people who decide.

Then there is timing. The moment to influence this whole conversation is now, while it is still being designed. Three months of engagement on councils. A design phase on the health boards. A review of every public body. These windows are where the new lines get drawn, and then close again. Officials consumed by their own restructuring have less time for yours, and decisions that used to take weeks will take months. If you need something from government in the next two years, do it now.

I spent a decade inside this, on the committees that scrutinise exactly this kind of reform, and I have watched more than one grand reorganisation promise the earth and deliver a reshuffle.

Last week was the announcement. The hard bit us yet to come. The organisations that treat this as somebody else's restructuring will find out too late that it was theirs as well.