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chapter six: Fundamentals of reform - joining up
59. Many of the biggest challenges we face - like health improvement, eradicating poverty, environmental threats, creating a dynamic and entrepreneurial culture, and regenerating our most deprived communities - need effective and strong public services; but they cannot be solved by any single agency.
60. There are also areas where the current structures create duplication of effort - possible examples include regeneration and economic development.
61. So we need to be prepared to go further in looking at services from the user's point of view, and do away with organisational, professional and governance barriers which get in the way of effective delivery without compromising safety and standards. In some cases this may involve structural change, (discussed at paras 96 - 101), but this has significant costs, and no structure can abolish all geographic and functional boundaries. To tackle complex, multi-dimensional problems, public services need to be flexible, involve local communities and users, and work together across common boundaries to meet agreed priority goals. That needs cultural change within agencies, and it needs government to remove barriers to joint working.
62. We aim to:
- strengthen the current mechanisms for joint working;
- work with public bodies to test out new ways of delivering integrated services; and
- use technology to support service transformation.
Joining up the Arts
"Scotland's Culture" 7- Set out a vision of culture as a shared responsibility across government and public life, with local cultural entitlement backed up by national support from cultural talent and excellence, and with culture a fundamental part of wider policy - from regeneration to education.
Community Planning
63. Community Planning has been developed as a locally driven process and is the formal mechanism which underpins joint working.
It has four key objectives, which are central to our ambitions for reform:
- People and communities should genuinely be engaged in decisions about the public services which affect them;
- Public sector organisations should work together to improve services;
- There should be better co-ordination of initiatives and partnership working;
- The links between national priorities and those at regional, local and neighbourhood levels should be improved.
64. The emerging conclusions of the review of Community Planning Partnerships by Audit Scotland, and our discussions with other organisations, raise serious issues which need to be tackled if Community Planning is to become everywhere a real driver for better, more joined up service planning and delivery.
65. The issues we want to consider include:
- How best to ensure that local communities are aware of and involved in the Community Planning process;
- What more needs to be done to ensure that appropriate organisations engage fully in Community Planning. This may include extending the statutory duties to other organisations - but we also wish to consider how to strengthen the engagement of bodies already subject to a statutory duty;
- Whether Community Planning partnerships could play a more direct role in planning and co-ordinating integrated services - perhaps through outcome agreements to achieve agreed priorities, which are shared amongst different Community Planning partners;
- How we strengthen the democratic accountability of Community Planning building on local authorities' democratic mandate and community leadership role - including through ways in which local councillors can participate in and scrutinise the work of partnerships;
- Whether Community Planning can help to rationalise the many partnerships and structures which operate at a regional level.
Testing out new ways of joining up delivery
66. We have launched, in collaboration with local government and community planning partners, a project aimed at testing out different ways of joining up service delivery across public services.
67. The project will help us consider what ways of joint working might offer most promise in particular contexts, and will also identify practical obstacles - including restrictions on legal powers, and different and incompatible audit and accountability arrangements. We will take forward the lessons from the project to ensure that we identify and remove any unnecessary barriers to joint working.
Joining up service delivery
The Highland Youth Action Service is a partnership between the Highland Council's social work, education, culture and sport services - NHS Highland, Northern Constabulary, NCH Scotland, SACRO, BLAST (a local drugs service for young people), Apex Scotland, and the Scottish Prison Service. This multi-agency service operates in four localities across the Highlands and it provides a range of prevention, support and treatment facilities for young people to address substance misuse and offending; positive alternative choices; support to children affected by parental substance misuse; educational alternatives for young people at risk of exclusion and access to specific and intensive services for individuals.
The new Community Justice Authorities bring together local authorities, the Scottish Prison Service and key partners to make sure the right services are in the right place at the right time - an integrated approach with a shared task, to reduce reoffending. Local authorities and the Scottish Prison Service have specific duties and responsibilities to manage and challenge offenders as well as engaging others, e.g. police, health, housing, employment and the voluntary sector and victim support. This is designed to make a difference to the way in which we manage offenders and is helping to build a stronger, safer Scotland.
ICT and integration
68. The Scottish Executive is working alongside councils and other public bodies to develop innovative, Scotland-wide but locally responsive ways of improving service quality and efficiency, but more needs to be done to realise the full potential of ICT to transform services.
Joining up through technology
We and our local partners are using the eCare Framework to put in place a system of electronic data sharing to provide better and more joined up care, advice and assistance to the people of Scotland. Within a framework of consent, secure information sharing between professionals, such as doctors, nurses, social workers and teachers, is now taking place. The Framework is supporting a number of key integration policies; Joint Future, Child Protection, Additional Support for Learning and Getting it Right for Every Child.
The technology has been independently evaluated and we are currently examining ways in which the approach can be extended to other public sector agencies to support joint working and more efficient service delivery.
The Scottish Schools Digital Network ( SSDN) programme is one of the most ambitious education ICT projects taking place anywhere in the world. It is made up of three key initiatives, each of which will bring long-term benefits to all Scottish schools, but which, together, will form a coherent programme that has significant implications for the way authorities and schools will work in the future.
The three initiatives are:
- the national intranet, an integrated package of services and applications for teaching, learning and education management, all within a secure online environment;
- the national interconnect, providing every education authority with a high-capacity link to every other authority and out to agencies (such as LTS and SQA) and to the wider internet; and
- the content delivery infrastructure ( CDI), easing the flow of multimedia across the country by setting up storage systems which will speed up delivery and allow prior downloading of resources for use in the classroom.
68. We do not yet have a comprehensive overview of e-government activity in Scotland, which makes it hard to ensure it is joined up effectively. Information Communication Technology development has often been based in service silos, with limited opportunity for common issues to be addressed in a shared way. This can lead to duplication and wasted effort. The Openscotland Information Age Framework has provided a framework for developing and approving interoperability standards, but we do not have a common approach to the full range of technical issues needed to support joined up ICT.
69. We need to consider whether there should be overall strategic leadership of e-government activity in Scotland to oversee major projects, direct the use of relevant standards and ensure compliance with them, develop policy on common technical issues; and realise synergies through partnership working.
Discussion points:
- Are there legislative changes which would help public sector organisations to work more closely together?
- How can we make more effective and accountable regional partnerships and structures?
- What do we need to do to provide more strategic leadership in relation to e-government?
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