Chamber and committees

Across the political parties in Scotland, most of us agree that we should allocate more to prevention and that spend should be less reactive. However, because we already put money into hospitals and prisons, for example, we find it difficult to change that approach.

Thank you. That is helpful.

I will move on to Covid specifically. The Scottish Government’s intention is to bring its Covid strategy to an end this summer. Is that too soon? Should the period of recovery from Covid be longer, or should we put that aside and deal with general problems from now on?

Do you think that there is active resistance? Misinformation continues to come to me on social media. Is that having an impact?

Can you give us examples of any countries that have undertaken such a review that has led to major changes in how they do things? I am particularly interested in preventative spending: spending more to prevent things from happening, whether that be ill health or crime, for example. We struggle—I think that this is the same for other countries—to disinvest in secondary expenditure.

That makes a lot of sense, because my feeling is that we need both processes. If we take the example of health, which is our largest area of expenditure, we know that we spend too much on reactive health spending, such as hospitals, and not enough on community healthcare, such as general practitioners. The challenge that we find is how to switch spending from one area to the other. Would the type of spending reviews that other countries use help us to do that better?

It would be fair to say that we have struggled with that.

On a slightly different issue, we have just had an evidence session with the OECD. You came in straight after the session, so I do not know whether you were able to see any of it. There was quite an interesting discussion around spending reviews, in which we established that the OECD’s definition of a spending review is slightly different from ours. Its definition is based more on the fact that other countries look at specific areas. For example, Germany had a spending review of transport that really looked in depth at what the Government was already spending, to see whether it could make savings and move forward.

I asked the witnesses whether we could learn from that. For example, we could look at the health service and say, “We are spending all this money on reactive care, but we would like to move more into preventative primary care.” The feeling overall was that maybe we could learn from other countries. Is there anything in that space? I realise that that is a new topic, but can we do anything about examining present expenditure to see whether we can free up more of it? Are we already doing that?

On that point, it was previously suggested that the public sector staff numbers, as a whole, would go back to pre-Covid levels. Has that commitment been affected by the pay increases?

Thanks very much.

My example would be better with higher figures at which the tax would come into play but, because I live in a property that is valued at less than £100,000, I tend to think of figures in that direction.