Scottish Budget: draft budget 2018-2019

Annex E: Public Service Reform Delivery And Prevention Update

A strong commitment to public service reform lies at the heart of our vision to build an inclusive, fair, prosperous and innovative Scotland that is ready and willing to embrace the future.

Our reform programme remains rooted in the principles set out by the Christie Commission in 2011. Our work is directed squarely at improving outcomes, especially for those of us whose wellbeing and life chances are poorest. Our National Performance Framework sets out the range of outcomes we wish to improve. We are currently refreshing the framework, having asked people what kind of Scotland they would like to live in.

Our public services need to embed a preventative approach into their work, not only to maintain positive outcomes, but also to disrupt deep-rooted cycles of negative outcomes, help tackle persistent inequalities and drive inclusive economic growth. The Scottish Government expects our public services to work closely and effectively with each other and with communities, to design and reshape sustainable services around people’s needs and help to support the ongoing vitality of our communities. This Government also wants to put more decisions and resources directly in the hands of communities, providing greater control over how local public services meet their needs and aspirations.

Driving Reform for Scotland

The following examples illustrate some of the ways in which our work embodies reform principles, in particular through preventative approaches to support positive wellbeing and life chances for all.

Giving our young people the best start in life

• Scotland’s Baby Box strongly signals our determination that every child, whatever their circumstances, should get the best start in life by ensuring that every family with a newborn baby has access to essential items needed in the first six months of a child’s life.
• We are to increase the number of health visitors and we will ensure all eligible first-time mothers benefit from the support of a Family Nurse Partnership.
• We are expanding entitlement to early learning and childcare to 1,140 hours from 2020 – ensuring a high quality experience for every child, improving outcomes and contributing to closing the poverty-related attainment gap.
• We are building on existing actions to better prevent adverse childhood experiences ( ACEs), and support people where ACEs have occurred, as we know they impact on children’s wellbeing and can have ongoing impacts into adulthood.
• We are continuing to expand a major programme of work to close the attainment gap. This will include £179 million in 2018-19 from our £750 million Attainment Scotland Fund to support schools and local authorities. Our £120 million Pupil Equity Funding is already enabling headteachers to secure the additional resources they believe are required to support pupils affected by poverty and boost attainment.

Inclusive growth

• We are continuing to make progress following our Enterprise and Skills review. Its Phase 2 report, published in June 2017, set out a comprehensive programme of actions and commitments to ensure that our enterprise and skills support reflects the needs of users and contributes effectively to inclusive and sustainable growth. A new Strategic Board to align and co-ordinate the activities of Scotland’s enterprise and skills agencies met for the first time in December 2017.
• We are developing plans for a Digital Growth Fund, with up to £36 million of support available over three years from April 2018 in the form of loans to businesses to invest in the digital capabilities of their workplaces and workforces.
• From April 2018 our devolved employment service, Fair Start Scotland, will provide support to people who are further removed from the labour market (at least 38,000 over three years of referrals into the service), treating them with fairness, dignity and respect.

A healthier Scotland

• We are providing more person-centred care for vulnerable adults in community settings, reducing the need for emergency hospital admission and managing delayed hospital discharge. We are providing recurring baselined funding to support integration, including an Integrated Care Fund of £100 million per year to support delivery of improved outcomes from health and social care integration, and £30 million per year to support Integration Authorities to reduce delayed discharges.
• We will establish public health priorities for Scotland in partnership across national and local government, the NHS, voluntary and independent sectors. These will be published by spring 2018 and focus on improving the quality of services and more effective collaboration on those areas most likely to improve service quality and reduce health inequalities.
• We are shifting the balance of care towards mental health through our new Mental Health Strategy. We are increasing the level of investment in mental health services, including an additional 800 workers over the next five years and re-designing primary and community services to improve support in the crucial period from birth to young adulthood.

A fairer and safer Scotland

• Our new social security agency will create a fairer system that treats people with dignity and respect. We will offer a local presence across Scotland, supported by centralised functions located in Dundee and Glasgow.
• Using powers available to us to mitigate some of the worst consequences of those changes introduced by the UK Government as part of Universal Credit, we are giving Scottish applicants more choice over how payments are made, such as to allow for twice-monthly payments and managed payments to landlords. We have also extended the Scottish Welfare Fund on an interim basis to help 18-21 year olds adversely affected by the UK Government’s decision to end entitlement for housing costs within Universal Credit for young people.
• We are establishing a Tackling Child Poverty Fund worth £50 million over the next five years to trial new approaches, strengthen the evidence base and support innovation. We will take advice from the Poverty and Inequality Commission on where this funding can have the biggest impact.
• We are establishing new community justice arrangements that will support the delivery of services which aim to prevent and reduce further offending, offer alternatives to imprisonment and support those who have offended to reintegrate into local communities.
• We are building on work to reduce the incidence of domestic abuse and improve the outcomes for victims. This includes establishing a specific offence of domestic abuse covering both physical and psychological abuse and expanding the innovative Caledonian Programme, so that more male perpetrators of domestic abuse can receive rehabilitation services designed to address those issues giving rise to their offending behaviour.

Encouraging and Supporting Reform at Local and Regional Levels

If our public services are to be shaped around the needs of people, then national and local government have to work together with the third sector, the private sector and communities. Much of this partnership working will happen at local or regional level. That is why we are working closely with public services and other partners to ensure that reform is embedded into what they do with and for local communities.

For instance, on education reform, the Scottish Government and local government have established, in partnership, six new Regional Improvement Collaborative areas across Scotland which bring together a range of expertise from across local authorities and Education Scotland. The Collaboratives will ensure and enhance high quality support to our schools in ways that respond to local needs, support a culture of collaboration, and embed a continuous, systematic and collective focus on improvement, including on actions to close the attainment gap.

Our Realigning Children’s Services programme is supporting public services to redesign children’s services in ways that allow prevention and early intervention and reduce the need for high-intensity, high-cost services. The programme includes work with five Community Planning Partnerships to review practice and identify opportunities for earlier intervention.

Local government and other public services have a critical role to play in driving inclusive growth in ways that reflect distinctive local and regional conditions. We have already committed over £1 billion over the next 10-20 years to support City Region Deals for Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness, and Edinburgh and South East Scotland. Next, we will seek to secure new deals for Stirling and Clackmannanshire and the Tay Cities, and deliver a regional deal for Ayrshire.

Building on the progress made by City Region Deals, we have committed to new Regional Economic Partnerships representing every community in Scotland. These Regional Partnerships focus on the achievement of accelerated inclusive growth and will learn from, and build on, the foundations laid by City Region Deals.

Our £2.5 million Employability, Innovation and Integration Fund is supporting 13 projects across 18 local authority areas to test innovative approaches for joining up employability support with health and social care, justice, and housing services.

Community-led regeneration delivers inclusive growth by supporting community-led projects and services which respond to local circumstances and increase opportunities to attract investment and jobs in disadvantaged and fragile communities, while building community and regional cohesion.

The Scottish Government is committed to supporting and investing in community-led regeneration in areas which are more deprived, disadvantaged, remote or fragile. We have capital funds, including the Regeneration Capital Grant Fund, that support the purchase of land and buildings and that create new or improved infrastructure and community facilities. We also have revenue funds which support both community-based activity to develop or enhance local services and projects, as well as broader community participation, decision making and capacity-building. These include the Empowering Communities Fund, Community Choices Fund, Aspiring Communities Fund and Social Innovation Programme.

We will continue to bring democracy closer to people. We recently launched the Local Governance Review in partnership with COSLA. At the heart of this comprehensive review is an invitation to communities, large and small, to identify the powers and resources they need to thrive. An extensive and highly participative engagement process will begin early next year. What people tell us will help to inform the Local Democracy Bill, which we will introduce later in this Parliament.

We have also announced that we will listen to proposals from those island authorities that want to establish a single authority model of delivering local services – including health and social care. We will support proposals that have been developed with stakeholders, that have clear potential to improve people’s lives, create efficiencies, drive inclusive growth and protect local democracy and our NHS.

Since December 2016, legislative changes introduced by our Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 have required local authorities and other local public services to work together and with communities through community planning in order to improve outcomes and tackle inequalities on locally-identified priorities. Most Community Planning Partnerships have now produced Local Outcome Improvement Plans and locality plans, which set out their ambitions on local priorities. These reflect themes that are fundamental to people’s wellbeing and life chances (e.g. inclusive growth and improving employment prospects; positive physical and mental health; children’s wellbeing; sustaining fragile communities). Yet each plan does so in a way that is shaped around distinctive local needs, circumstances and aspirations.

Public services in Community Planning Partnerships are now focusing attention on resourcing action to deliver on these ambitions. We are working with other agencies and sponsoring What Works Scotland to support local improvement activity and collect and share examples of learning.