A majority of Scots oppose plans announced today to create a single Scottish police force, an Ipsos-Mori poll has revealed.
54 percent of adults oppose plans for amalgamation of police services, with 34 percent in support. Supporters of all major political parties, including the governing SNP, are more likely to oppose than support the plans, according to the poll’s findings.
The news comes as local government stakeholders warned MSPs of the challenges facing public service integration.
Giving evidence in a roundtable session of the Local Government and Regeneration committee ahead of the First Minister’s speech laying out the Scottish Government’s legislative agenda, representatives from public sector unions, public finance bodies and local government groups questioned the basis for the government’s integration plans.
Don Peebles, Policy and Technical Manager at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy (CIPFA) in Scotland, warned committee members that there would be “financial consequences” of integration.
“There is going to be a great finance and governance challenge in dismantling and disconnecting police boards from the local government family,” Peebles told MSPs.
Profession Richard Kerley, Professor of Management at Queen Margaret University, warned against policymakers responding to demands for public service reform with large-scale reorganisations.
“One of the overhasty policy reactions that I often see is the assumption that working together in that way, integrating services in that way requires some form of structural reorganisation or structural brigading.”
While reserving judgement on proposals for a single police for, Kerley said that “the obsession with the number of uniformed police officers does not suggest that there has been a wide acceptance of output, leave alone outcome” as the motivating force behind public service reform.
Labelling calls from Lord Sutherland for greater integration of health and social care in committee testimony yesterday as “near delusional”, Kerley said: “the belief that [integration] will improve things is, as yet unproven.
“Neurosurgeons and cardios don’t pay a lot of attention to getting elderly people their breakfast at seven in the morning.”
Ronnie Hinds, chair of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives & Senior Managers (SOLACE) Scotland and the National Community Planning Group, highlighted a lack of clarity in what outcomes are being pursued in public service reform at the local level.
“The ideal thing to do would be to have a better definition, a better handle on the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve and to priorities on that basis. I think we’re still finding out way towards that even though we’ve had 45 years now of working on single outcome agreements.”
“What we’d like to have, and still don’t have at our disposal is a very distinct set of outcomes that we can relate to the financial resources that we can apply to deliver them,” Hinds said.
Dave Watson, Scotland Organiser for UNISON, the public sector union, claimed there was a tension between the findings of the Christie Commission on the reform of public services and government policy on police.
“One of the problems that Christie identified was that at local level, you’ve got local authorities working on local priorities but the other partners are very often centralised quangos,” Watson said.
“There are national priorities that those quangos go to, and there are local priorities set by local councils, so I think there’s a conflict there.”
