Better lives should be the goal of public service reform

First published in The Scotsman on 21st July 2026

Remaking Scotland’s public services will be the “defining task” of this term of Parliament, according to Cabinet Secretary Ivan McKee.

His assessment that the state is under severe fiscal pressure and must become more sustainable has understandably attracted widespread attention.

But if public service reform is framed only as a response to tight budgets, Scotland will miss the bigger prize.

The big question isn’t how government becomes smaller, cheaper or more efficient. It is how the state helps people live better lives. A bonfire of the quangos may generate plenty of heat, but without a new vision for the state it will shed little light.

Encouragingly, Mr McKee has argued that “we must reimagine the state as an enabler”, which means rewiring public services around a different relationship between government, citizens and communities.

At Carnegie UK, we agree. Financial pressure may be the trigger for change, but it cannot be the guiding principle.

Between 2014 and 2019, Carnegie UK ran a programme of work on the Enabling State, led by former Scottish Government Permanent Secretary Sir John Elvidge. It concluded that traditional models of public service delivery were struggling not only because resources were constrained, but because they were poorly suited to complex social problems. Challenges such as poverty, poor health, loneliness, insecure housing and weak community connections do not respond well to one size fits all solutions. They require relationships, trust, local knowledge and shared responsibility.

The Enabling State programme argued that public bodies must move beyond seeing citizens as passive recipients of services. Public services remain essential, but their role should increasingly be to support, connect and enable people and communities to improve their own lives. Shifting from doing things to people, towards doing things with them.

In Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham’s Live Well programme is attempting to redesign public services around prevention, community power and neighbourhood support. Greater Manchester Combined Authority describes Live Well as a commitment to ensuring “great everyday support is available in every neighbourhood”, rooted in communities and focused on reducing inequalities. It is explicitly about shifting spending and effort from crisis to prevention, and creating the conditions for people to “thrive, not just survive”.

Andy Burnham now has an opportunity to take this argument to a much bigger stage as Prime Minister. If Live Well shows that prevention, neighbourhood working and community power can improve outcomes in Greater Manchester, the next question will be how those principles are applied nationally.

Scotland should watch and learn, but it should not wait for Westminster. The pressures driving reform here are already urgent. Rising demand for health and social care, persistent inequalities, stretched local government and constrained public finances all point towards the same conclusion: the current system is not sustainable.

A serious reform programme must therefore shift attention upstream. It should support families earlier, strengthen community infrastructure, invest in voluntary and community organisations, and give local places more power to shape services. It should make prevention easier to fund, easier to measure and easier to sustain.

That will require more than changes to organisation charts. Too often public service reform becomes a discussion about structures, agencies and accountability lines.

The danger then is that the focus of Scotland’s Public Service Reform programme becomes too narrow. If it is seen mainly as a way of reducing the number of public bodies or cutting administrative costs, it will fail to address the deeper challenges facing the country.

Real change comes from shifting the relationships between public bodies and citizens, from the extent to which people feel heard and trusted, and from whether services can work together around people’s actual lives rather than around institutional boundaries.

The opportunity here is to build a state that supports long-term wellbeing. That means aligning services around people and places, backing prevention, supporting community capacity and giving citizens more influence over decisions. It also means recognising that government cannot create better lives on its own. Families, communities, employers, local businesses, charities and informal networks all shape people’s wellbeing. Good government should strengthen those assets, not crowd them out.

This is where Scotland has an important role to play in the wider UK debate. If Andy Burnham’s opportunity is to take the Live Well philosophy into Downing Street, Scotland’s opportunity is to show how similar principles can be embedded through devolved government. The two agendas should be seen as part of the same broader shift: away from a reactive state that manages failure, and towards an enabling state that helps people and places flourish.

The test for the Swinney and Burnham governments will not be whether they can announce reform. It will be whether they can create public service systems that improve lives over the long term. Success should not be measured simply by the number of agencies merged, budgets reduced or processes redesigned. It should be judged by whether people experience better health, stronger communities, greater opportunity and improved wellbeing.

If ministers and officials can make that shift, public service reform could become about far more than balancing budgets. It could help build a state that gets ahead of the problems, works alongside communities and improves lives over the long term.