“A State without the means of some change is without the means of conservation” – Edmund Burke

On 1 December 1942 the wartime coalition government published a report entitled 'Social Insurance and Allied Services' written by Sir William Beveridge, a highly regarded economist and expert on unemployment problems. The Beveridge Report quickly became the blueprint for the modern British welfare state and enshrined a philosophy that the State would provide care from the cradle to the grave.

But as we now sit on the edge of a public sector financial precipice with a rising demand for services and decreasing funds to pay for them, the Welfare State and the notion of public sector delivery faces a crucial tipping point; how much can the State continue to provide, how should it be delivered and what defines value for money?

Acknowledging this crisis and in the face of the most serious budget reductions for a generation, the Scottish Government last November launched a high-level Commission to examine how Scotland's public services could be made sustainable and still deliver improved outcomes for communities across the country.

The Commission, chaired by Dr Campbell Christie CBE, former General Secretary of the STUC and President of Scottish Council for Development and Industry since December 2009, has produced a roadmap for the future delivery of public service leading to a radical reshaping of Scotland’s public sector landscape.

Preventative measures have not in the past been prioritised, it finds, and with a staggering 40 per cent of all spending on public services estimated to be on interventions that could be avoided by prioritising a preventative approach it focuses on this.  

“Tackling these fundamental inequalities and focusing resources on preventative measures must be a key objective of public service reform,” the report says.

Another headliner in the report is personalisation.  Scotland’s public services need to be designed with the person receiving them at the centre.  The approach must be bottom-up, identifying what individuals and communities actually need and, from there, working out the services that will best fit those needs.  

And services need to be much more integrated, agencies across the public, private and Third Sector working together to deliver.

Underlying all of the Christie proposals is the need to improve outcomes.  And to do that, Christie is clear that public services must be better integrated.  

There is little disagreement about the need for integration. But the logistics of achieving it are not so straightforward.  And a key barrier to agencies working together is professional silos. The recent damning Audit Scotland report on Community Health Partnerships laid that challenge bare.

The report calls for Audit Scotland to be given a stronger remit and for the functions of the Auditor-General and the Accounts Commission to be merged.

The future shape of the nation’s public sector and the efficacy of its service delivery is a vitally important debate that affects us all. There is no doubt that the structural basis of the system designed by Beveridge is no longer adequate for the current world and without exaggeration, Christie heralds a new dawn.

This Holyrood magazine conference is timed to take full advantage of the opportunity to examine the importance of the Christie recommendations made in June within the context of the impending Scottish Government’s Spending Review in October and to explore how new working relationships and partnerships within the public sector can help deliver better outcomes for less.