We should not be too hard on ministers who take bold decisions. Nothing gets done without innovation, and unless we have some radical thinking on how to run our schools, hospitals and social services, we face nothing other than steady decline. The trouble is we have learnt too many lessons from the past, about “brave” decisions that turn out to be bloopers. Liz Truss is living testimony to the way a direct challenge to the status quo on galvanising a sagging economy can blow up in your face.
There is, too, a salutary lesson to be learned from cabinet papers just released, which show how Scottish ministers awarded the Ferguson ferry-building contract in 2015 to Jim McColl, in the teeth of warnings that his company was not qualified to deliver it.
That must have seemed a courageous thing to do at the time, since the chairman of the ferry-owner advised against it. Courageous, possibly – it just happened to be wrong.
Radical is good only when it comes on the back of solid groundwork and a reliable civil service to deliver it. The bravest decision of the modern era was the national health service, launched in the face of medical establishment resistance. It was, however, based on a detailed report proposing a “cradle-to-grave” social service, which had preoccupied its author, the social economist William Beveridge, for most of his working life.
Another tranche of papers, newly published, suggest the SNP government — one of the least adventurous of our time — may once have had radical stirrings. As The Times reported this week, John Swinney, finance minister in October 2007, suggested standing up to councils and forcing through the government’s plans to improve education by centralising control. He talked of “playing hardball” if local authorities did not reduce class sizes and improve pre-school provision.
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In the event he backed off, and a deal was done, which left the job to councils. The so-called “historic concordat” that resulted has, however, achieved none of the aims Swinney set out, and there is a strong argument to say he should have pressed on. James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, has dismissed Swinney’s plan as “a throwback to the days of the Scottish Office under the Tories”, but is that such a bad thing? Michael Forsyth, then Scottish secretary, had many radical ideas about education, including encouraging private alternatives to state education when it came to pupils with special needs. We need more of that today.
At Westminster, Rishi Sunak has announced plans to make mathematics compulsory for pupils up to the age of 18 which, against a background of falling standards in numeracy and rising demand in a data-dominated era, sounds like a plausible idea — always provided it has been properly thought through. That could be radical, as was Nicola Sturgeon’s suggestion that the London Challenge — an innovative education scheme that has transformed the performance of some state schools in the capital — might be introduced in Scotland. Nothing came of that. Why not?
And why has nothing radical been done to tackle our failing NHS? There are strong arguments for a French-style health service, which has a compulsory insurance element to it. The entire population has to contribute to a government-run insurance scheme, and everyone pays for certain services, such as visiting a doctor or dentist: much of the cost is then reimbursed through the scheme, which is means-tested. The French system regularly tops the list as the best in the world, so why have we not tried to emulate it? The answer, of course, is that any minister suggesting for a minute that they are proposing to abandon an NHS “free at the point of access” is heading for political suicide.
How, then, are good decisions made and bad decisions rejected? The answer lies not just with politicians but with the civil servants and think tanks who are, as it were, the front line when it comes to new ideas: think tanks to come up with them, civil servants to stress-test them. Scotland is not, at present, well served with either.
Holyrood is aware of it. An inquiry has been set up by the finance and public administration committee to look at the inner workings of the civil service, and how it supports decision-making within the government. It will ask questions such as whether ministers get proper free and frank advice from civil servants, and whether that advice is dispassionate — free, for instance, of the requirement that every policy is in tune with the need to support independence. Evidence suggests there has been a decline in the quality of that advice ever since the election of an SNP government requiring its civil servants to bolster the cause of independence at every opportunity.
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We need to know more about the quality of the work done on behalf of ministers, but also its accountability. What the ferries scandal revealed was the lack of written evidence showing who signed off on the contract award. It was difficult to establish what advice had been given and who actually took the decision.
It is in the interests of ministers to give the committee every support, rather than to see it as challenging their authority. If radical decisions are to be made, then we need a system that ensures they can be made to work — otherwise we shall be back with that infamous comment from the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Controversial means ‘this will lose you votes.’”
This article was amended on Jan 12, 2023, to take account of the following correction: we wrongly reported that Jim McColl, head of the conglomerate that owned the shipbuilder Ferguson, was an SNP supporter, and that the ferry operator CalMac was unanimously opposed to the awarding of a contract to Ferguson. Our apologies.
