Scottish election 2026: How Scotland can get change right
A conversation on Scotland’s upcoming election and how the new Parliament can build a future where everyone can thrive.
As Scotland approaches the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, public confidence in politics is declining, all while Scotland faces persistent low productivity, health inequalities, pressures on public services, misinformation and lack of transparency about immigration, a housing emergency, and accelerating climate and biodiversity crises.
In response, the RSE has brought together its multidisciplinary expertise to examine the issues voters identify as most pressing – the economy; health and social care; immigration and asylum; housing; education and skills; and the environment – to consider how Scotland can move from policy to practice.
This event marks the launch of the RSE’s Scottish election publication, which sets out an evidence-based framework to strengthen governance, close the implementation gap, and rebuild trust in democratic institutions. The discussion will explore how political leaders can prioritise delivery, make transparent trade-offs, and ensure that policy results in tangible improvements in people’s lives.
Listen to this timely discussion around how Scotland can get politics right by doing policy differently to deliver meaningful change.
Transcript
This transcript has been automatically generated so may feature errors.
0:00
A warm welcome to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, both to you here in the room with us, and to those joining us online on YouTube, of whom I gather there are rather a lot as well. It’s great to see so many of you here today. Quick housekeeping note, in case of fire, we should assemble outside the dome leaving the building the way we came in. Exits from the room are on the slide there, and there are lots of staff around to guide us if an alarm does go off. So my name is Sally Magnuson. I’m delighted to be chairing this launch event for the RSE report. Policy and Practice, how Scotland can get it right normally. At this stage with the holiday the Holyrood elections only six weeks away, I am mired in cheering political discussion, which parties are promising what, while privately musing over the chances of any of it actually transpiring tonight, though, we get to junk the politics and explore some of the deeper issues underneath. And this is not some abstruse intellectual exercise. Democracy itself depends on trust, that promises will be fulfilled, that rhetoric will lead to delivery that the state knows what it’s doing, that trust is being eroded as Scotland approaches the 2026 election, public confidence in politics is declining. As a non political organization, the Royal Society of Edinburgh is well placed to do this kind of thinking. It was established in 1783 for the Advancement of Learning and useful knowledge. And the current mission remains the same, the deployment of knowledge for public good. Drawing on our multi disciplinary 1800 strong fellowship and Young Academy of Scotland, we provide independent evidence based advice for Scotland’s decision makers and an impartial forum for debate. The report we’re launching tonight brings together the work of three expert work groups focused on the economy, the environment and social inclusion and cohesion. What our marvelously well informed panel here, somebody described it like as looking a bit like at home with Sally sitting here on our sofas, but it’s so much more. What they’re going to be sharing reflects those conversations that the groups have had. It looks not only at what Scotland might choose to prioritize, but also at how policy can be done differently. After we’ve heard from each of the panel, I’ll be inviting your questions to them, which you can either do by raising a hand here in the room or by typing questions in the online chat section for someone here to read out. Do feel free to start popping these questions in whenever you like. So I’d like to start by inviting Ailsa Henderson, professor of political science and head of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, to set the context of the political landscape in Scotland ahead of these very significant elections, so please welcome her now.
3:30
Many thanks for the invitation to be here today. I should say I am no longer head of department. I have, I have passed that baton on very happily. So I am tasked with providing a five minute introduction to the wider context of this election. And of course, we were very pleased to be involved in the report, because some of the themes in the report are drawn very much from the data that we have about the issues that matter to Scottish voters. So following on from what Sally was mentioning, one thing we know is that this is an election that takes place in a context in which a high proportion of Scots feel that Scotland is going in the wrong direction that had an initial jump from the moment of the 2021 election reaching its clear high In around 2023 and there it very much has remained. If we look at evaluations of government approval, we can see a clear difference between approval ratings for the Scottish Government and for the UK Government. The Scottish electorate has long held the Scottish Government in higher regard than it does the UK Government, and over the period since the last election, we can see that there is a certain amount of stability in the approval ratings of the UK Government. One thing I would take from this graph is that the Scottish electorate appears no happier with a labor led government in London than it was with a conservative led one. If we look at evaluations of Scottish Government, a. Approval, then it is. It has declined since the moment of the 2021 election, so that predates the changes in First Minister that we saw. If we look at support for constitutional change, then I’ve got two pieces of information for you. The one on the left is very much the trend line in support for independence, and it’s if it was a patient, you would be worried about its heart rate. It’s a very static line there in terms of support for independence. If we look at support by generations, then we see that there too, there is a certain amount of stability, but that period immediately before the graph showed a considerable amount of churn, where we saw a significant rise among all generations in their support for independence, and then a fracturing after the 2014 referendum, and there very much it has remained. So what we’re not picking up on this tiny portion of the graph is a sense of life cycle effects changing people’s attitudes to independence as they age, we can see clear differences across the generations. Of course, that’s not the only way to think of constitutional change. We have a yes, no, do you want independence way of looking at things? But there is also a wider range of constitutional options that has always been before Scots, and this one looks at attitudes to constitutional change, considering different options for independence, both outside Europe and inside Europe, whether the Scottish Parliament should have more powers, whether we should stick with the status quo constitutionally, or whether we should, in fact, abolish the Scottish Parliament. And you see these are broken down by the party that people say that they will support in this election, you can see that there is clear support for independence inside the EU among those who plan on voting SNP and reform. The center of gravity, however, is very much on the no change side for the pro union parties. But I would draw your attention to the proportion supporting abolishing the Scottish Parliament for reform supporters, those intending to vote reform in this election. It is the most popular Constitutional Option. And if we look at conservative supporters, that represents a doubling in the proportion of conservative supporters in the last 10 years who would wish to abolish the Scottish Parliament.
7:20
Now, one thing we ask we conduct polls before and after the election, but we also conduct Scottish opinion monitors or scoop polls during the year, three times a year, and since the 2021 election, we have been asking people about what they think is the most important issue facing Scotland. And so we have the trend graphs for all of the issues that we ask about, and you can see different types of issues there. You can see issues where support is fairly static and low. So that would family and child care, low salience there solid but low pensions would be another one. You can see policy issues where support is a bit more undulating but consistently high. So perceived importance of the economy would be one example and health another. You can see issues where the salience has decreased since 2021 everything on that left column would cover would come under that description. So Brexit, environment independence perceived to be less salient than it was. And if we want to look at the issue where there has been an increase in perceived salience, then housing is one example, but so too is immigration. Of course, the perceived salience of different issues varies across different parties. We ask this question. It’s a very common question. It’s asked in election surveys all over the world, and when we ask that question, it is consistently the economy, education and health that come out top in every single country that you poll in, and that is consistently true across parties. Those three policy areas are often in the most salient policy issues. But if I would draw your attention in particular to education, which is listed in the top five for conservatives and labor and Lib Dems, but does not appear in the top five for the SNP, the Scottish greens and reform, it’s bumped out by different policy issues there. And I think that’s particularly interesting, because two of those parties could well find themselves in a coalition arrangement after the elections in May, and two of them could well be the largest party in the Scottish Parliament very quickly. Two more slides, one party salience, our perceived issue salience varies across parties, but it also varies by age group. If we look at the youngest members of our data set, and we look at the oldest members of our data set, then they are interested in different issues. We had a question experiment the last time around. We haven’t been asking about cost of living. We’ve been asking about the economy and housing. When we include cost of living in the list, it immediately bumps ahead of everything else, 60% of. People mention cost of living as the most important issue facing them, and it is something that is mentioned by younger voters and by older voters. But it’s also the case that the two groups have different perceived important issues. The environment appears on the list for young voters and doesn’t for older voters, where immigration and independence appear on the list, and if you put those two things together, what you end up with is an age gap in terms of the perceived salience of issues. If you’re on the right side of the graph and a red bar, then that’s an issue that older people are more likely to find important than younger people. If you’re on the left side the blue side, than younger people think it’s more important than older people. So you do end up with a sense that there is a slight difference in emphasis on the issues that are important for Scotland, if you’re looking across the age groups, if you put all of that together, then we do this as my last slide. We have trend lines in terms of what might well happen in the election, but as you can see, there are considerable movements up and down on that graph. If we look at reform, for example, we see a significant jump and then a leveling off. Labor has been on a bit of a roller coaster since the 2021 election. And what that suggests is that we can look forward to an exciting, exciting campaign where we might yet see further movement in party support, but I’ll end it there.
11:35
Thanks very much indeed, Ilsa, so that’s the context of the report. Let’s get an overview now of the findings, and we’re going to get that from Shauna MacPherson, who’s co chair of the study. She’s the president of prosper, formerly scdi, of course, and so much else that it’s impossible to list all the things she’s either Chair of or involved in but a very valued expert at the at the head of all this. So shonouk socket to us.
12:17
Thank you very much indeed, Sally, as Sally has explained, the report reflects the work of three thematic, multidisciplinary groups of fellows who members of the Young Academy and external experts who worked over a period of 12 months around the three challenges which the society has identified in its current strategy, economic prosperity, social cohesion and inclusion and environmental sustainability, to consider the current state of affairs in Scotland and how things could improve as we approach the election in May this year as the National Academy, we wanted to make our knowledge useful and relevant to both voters and new parliamentarians. As we must recall, there’s going to be the biggest change in parliamentarians following this election. The work groups were charged with reviewing already published RSC research and sharing their own expertise to consider five of the key issues for voters identified in Ailsa study, and the ones that we chose were the economy, health and social care, immigration and asylum, housing, education and skills. Ailsa has already commented on how in her study, environment plays out. But at the RSE, we took the decision that we would add the environment, which we believe is central to all policy issues and is underpinned by a pressing need to address the rapid change in our climate and loss of biodiversity. And we’ll hear more from that, on that, from Professor Monaghan, we chose to frame our work through the lens of voter concern, rather than as perhaps we would traditionally do through academic disciplines, institutional remits or sexual interests, to reflect the priorities that most strongly shape how People vote, while recognizing a democratic reality political attention is significantly driven by voter priorities and to ensure that our collective knowledge and evidence is presented in a way that speaks to those concerns and help voters make their decisions and politicians to respond to them. And while I know that every person in this room will, of course, read all 36 pages of the report. I hope you also saw the flyer that we have produced for those who are time poor and maybe don’t want to spend all their time reading the report. In parallel with the work of the working groups, we held a series of public events across Scotland to inform our work. Those events indicated that many. Citizens feel a disconnect between their concerns and policy outcomes, adding to declining trusts in politics. From the outset, the working groups identified that Scotland’s principal challenge is not a lack of policy ambition, but instead a persistent implementation gap, a failure to deliver on policies, along with an apparent unwillingness to publicly recognize the trade offs that are inevitable in politics, choices that have to be made between competing priorities, particularly in a constrained fiscal environment, which are often avoided. As JK Galbraith commented, politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. Early work also highlighted the extent to which voters’ concerns are intrinsically linked and neither could nor should be addressed in isolation economic performance and social cohesion outcomes are shaped by interconnected and interdependent structures, in particular the issues of housing skills and immigration with a pressing need to adopt a systems approach, with coordinated, integrated long term approaches and delivery focused governance, not siloed policy making, as is often the case today,
16:25
the working groups were asked how we could do policy differently, using four lenses informed by those initial findings and which the report concludes are now required if we are to address challenges. Firstly, politics is currently experienced as something imposed upon people, rather than undertaken with them. I expect that we have all experienced consultation overload and fatigue with the policy which then emerges, not seeming to have been informed or influenced by that consultation. Doing policy differently requires a transition from paternalism and top down governance to a process of partnership driven by meaningful engagement and CO production with all sections of the community from the very start to the finish. Secondly, too many people, businesses and organizations in Scotland are simply surviving effective democratic politics creates the conditions in which every individual and organization can thrive. It’s about ensuring that people have the ability resources and information to participate meaningfully in decision making and self organize in the pursuit of change. Thirdly, the challenges that Scotland must address cannot be fixed within a single, short electoral cycle, addressing systemic challenges required sustained investment and foresight, generating cross party consensus with long term cross party frameworks for policy alignment, transparency and continuous evaluation. Finally, it’s time to translate rhetoric into reality. Many campaign pledges evaporate when they meet the harsh reality of turning them into tangible deliverables and outcomes for the electorate. Our report concludes that policy making in Scotland must shift towards a delivery led focus grounded in realism about constraints and explicit about prioritization. Every policy commitment should be accompanied by named leadership, defined budgets, clear delivery milestones, robust evaluation frameworks and details of how it fits the larger policy agenda. Accountability must be strengthened through independent scrutiny, transparent reporting of progress and clarity on the allocation of responsibility and resources. This means that sustained investment is required in program management, evaluation and scrutiny capacity across the civil service, the Scottish Parliament, local government and delivery bodies. In each section of the report, you will find a key call to action, and in the appendices further suggestions of changes that are required, and you will hear more shortly from my colleagues, if we do not help our current politics and system to change, we will continue with the proliferation of strategies that fail to take into account delivery capacity, with commitments that do not translate into positive changes for our citizens or Our economy as important, it will further undermine public trust in our politics. It requires political leaders and institutions to make difficult choices, to explain trade offs honestly and to sustain focus on outcomes rather than announcements. It’s time to move from policy to practice. Finally, on behalf of my co chair professor, des Thompson, who cannot be with us this evening, as he’s at the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the conservation of migratory species of wild animals in Brazil. That’s a mouthful, and he does send his best wishes he was in contact this morning. I’d like to publicly thank and acknowledge the contribution of each and every member of our working groups, many of whom are here this evening for sharing so generously their knowledge and the vigorous debate within each working group to our speakers and audiences at our public events throughout Scotland, whose contributions were invaluable to members of our steering group for their input in shaping the report, and lastly, to the excellent policy team at the society, most notably Ishita and Daria for their unsinting report support In preparing the report. Thank you.
21:02
Thank you very much, Sean, and indeed, for all the work that you have done on this, it’s my pleasure now to introduce Dr Poonam Malik, who will talk to us now about the challenges in relation to the economy, skills, investment and growth. Poonam is an entrepreneurial business strategist, academic, leader and investor in innovation, as long as well as much else. So thank you very much.
21:37
Good evening. I think I’ll just stand here and can you turn that light off a little bit, please? Thank you. So welcome to RSE. And I suppose all of you are very welcome and looking forward to this topic, very important topic for all of us. And I would say, from voter’s point of view, I’ll try to discuss the economy, housing, skills and immigration, big topics to summarize in seven to 10 minutes, but I’ll try my best, because, as Shanahan highlighted, that what we are trying To think here is long term and probably more implementation and delivery. So as Scotland approaches the May 2026 election, voters face challenge that go beyond party politics, and that’s the key thing here, for many households, the immediate concern, as you saw in Daria, is cost of living, food, rent, mortgages and energy bills have risen sharply, more so in some cases and in the last three, four weeks, and before that, in few months, voters have to focus on making ends meet, and that was evident in the young people whose take homes are Less than some of the elderly people. Scotland’s economy is being held back, is the general feeling, and the reason for that, if you look over the 1015, years of decade, while we are happy that Scotland has a separate government, a sluggish economy, low productivity, skill shortage, lack of investment and regional inequalities, they seem to limit growth, in most voters’ opinion, in addition, one of the bigger changes that we all need to be aware of it, and this room is no exception to that, and it’s evident our population is aging. Over the next 20 years, the number of people over 75 is expected to grow by a third of a million, while the number of children and young adult is projected to fall. So naturally, former will considerably increase the demand for health and social care. But where will the tax in the treasury come from? Already, the demand for public services is rising rapidly, yet the necessary spending for the public services is not keeping pace. The squeeze on public spending is getting tighter and tighter. The question is, if we are not getting enough tax, the population is getting age is aging, where will the money come from for Scotland, a new incoming Scottish government post May election 2025, six. Sorry, depending on whoever that is, whether it’s a single party, whether it’s a coalition of parties, if they form a government, they have three options in front of them to fund the public services and elevate living standards in the decades for which they have been chosen. One, cut public services. Two, raise taxes, or third, grow the economy so that the tax revenues can increase naturally, all of us, from coming from different aspects, will have different choices. Yes, but we all uniformly agree that we want to be better public services. The third option to grow the economy so that the tax revenues can increase is the most attractive one, naturally, but also the most difficult. And I’ll try to highlight how economic growth does not happen by accident. It depends on viable businesses, a skilled workforce and ample investment available to sustain a thriving growth that my colleagues were saying. And a way towards hope is via long term planning, innovation and fair taxation, which can strength the economy. But I would like to say that I wouldn’t like economy by hope, it should be by implementation and delivery and by practice. As we were discussing, Scotland seems to be very good at formulating strategies after strategies. So we identified, I will highlight just two here through strategies such as national strategy for economic transformation. N set in 2022, National Innovation Strategy, NIS in 2023,
26:06
policy makers highlighted industries which have global potential. These cover health and life sciences, financial services, energy transition and renewable power, digital and data services and advanced manufacturing. And the good news is Scotland tends to be good at these. We have good innovation, good working people within these sectors, some of these technologies likely to shape the global economy over coming decades, such as precision medicine, robotics, hydrogen energy and satellite deployment, and hearing those names, you will understand that that’s where Scotland’s academic and innovation strengths lie. But another good news is that these do pay and create well paid jobs with high value exports. Many of these companies, because they by nature of their work, operate in global markets, bringing income into Scotland from around the world to pay for those who are public services. They also tend to generate high productivity by way of utilizing the technology such as artificial intelligence, which you’ll be hearing every day, the key driver of rising wages and bringing tax revenue. But the reality is the By contrast, larger parts of Scotland’s economy remain concentrated in sectors such as hospitality, retail and social care, and these are vital to economy, but we are also very aware that they do operate in very tight margins and low, relatively low productivity because of the nature of the work and the salaries paid and the business rates, the issues that we all keep discussing with politicians. So looking ahead, if we are to fund strong public services, we need the growth of the new economy areas with high value sectors, beyond attracting these new companies, we need a workforce with it the necessary skills. And again, lot of you coming from the business background or academia will understand the value of the skills that we need. And here, Scotland faces a serious challenge, not that we cannot train the skills, while these jobs require university degrees, 1000s of highly skilled technical roles are also essential, and I will highlight simple examples, like 10,000 additional worker for electrical engineering skills at the same time retrofitting housing requiring 140,000 skilled workers and offshore wind and energy sectors, they could become one of the income generating high economy contributing areas. But challenge is that failure to generate and supply chains and skills that are required in these industries, it poses a massive challenge for all of us. On one hand, the good news is that these jobs, which are technical, are highly paid and a good job potential, roughly 40 to 80,000 per person is the average wage for these areas. So the question is, are we doing enough to create these technical jobs? The other issue that is there, as I said, related to the demographic challenge. Scotland’s workforce and communities rely on migration, and this I’m talking here about legal, skilled economic migrant people, but they do face challenge, because Scotland hosts a very small population, 0.026% of world’s asylum population. Many sectors here in the work by hospitality and care requires inward immigration to fill those labor shortages. Policy understanding is fragile with misinformation shaping public opinion and perception. About what do they contribute? Because a legal immigrant with contributing to the economy is very different from an illegal immigrant. So integration is hampered by inadequate housing, limited language support, and barriers to work and qualification recognition, if I say positive hope towards that scenario is long term coordinated knowledge migration with contributing to economic growth for Scotland and integration policies. The other challenge that Scotland is facing, which was again listed in Ailsa highlights, is housing crisis. It affects people, communities and economy
30:42
over 30,000 households are homeless or at risk, insufficient, affordable, energy efficient, climate resistant homes. That’s not a unreasonable list to think of, but they undermine health growth and environmental goals. Rural and island communities are particularly affected with this challenge. And the rationale, if you think about is decades of under investment, siloed policy making, weak delivery, which we’ve been saying that it’s the rhetoric from policy formation, but not leading to delivery. Mean housing supply and quality fall short, and local communities have limited influence on that. Again, positively, a way towards hope is investing in affordable energy efficient homes and empowering community at community level to help solve the crisis. Clearly, education, business and economic policy areas must work together if we have to challenge and come positively forward. Organizations such as skills development Scotland, along with colleges and university, can help play a critical role in skills development, training, those technical roles and aligning and preparing for these new economy jobs. But skills alone are not sufficient. We also need capital. We need investment, and which is where the challenge comes from. Innovation funds linked to UK universities collectively manage around 3.4 billion in capital, but there is so much less investment in Scotland compared to in the universities as well as the companies that are raising funds in Oxford capital and in Cambridge. So without stronger investment commitment and risk mindset for pipeline opportunities, Scotland will continue to face the challenge of how to grow those companies that start but not manage to scale. So normally, when we talk about the economy and the economic growth, it is always discussed in abstract terms. But for voters, the question is real and simple, will growth improve living standards across the country, and yes, positively, if we say about it, it will but not at the current status quo. Inclusive growth ensures new industries, creates opportunities, not only for the researchers that are in the university labs, but for technicians, engineers, tradespeople, skilled frontline workers, as well as supporting their families. So Scotland do need well funded public services, good health and NHS, which is I will talk about good wages, strong regional economies and well paid work, high quality jobs, so that we can support the families, improve the living standards and sustain the next generation of workers. The opportunity is now, prior to May 2026 to challenge the politician, to ask those questions and to turn these trends into inclusive, thriving economic growth, and do so at pace by asking those questions for asking for details, the question voters may wish to ask, Will Scotland move fast enough to create these well paid jobs for the future, or will these opportunities, as always, be exported and built somewhere else in the world? Thank you.
34:18
Thank you, Poonam. I hope you’re getting a sense of the scope and the depth of thinking in this report. We go on now to Theresa Shearer, Chief Executive of the charity enable Teresa, is going to apply the paper’s four principles to health and social care. The
34:44
Thank you, Sally, and good evening to my fellow fellows who are here this evening, and to everyone who’s joined us. I’m actually not going to talk about health and social care. You’ll be surprised. I’m going to talk about social care, and hopefully it’ll become apparent when I focus on social care. What. We have to shift the balance from health to care. So a context in terms of the RSE to think about. So the RSE is the place where we have knowledge for public good. It absolutely commits itself to research and innovation, and when we think about research and innovation, I’d like us to think about health and social care, a statistic which has floored me, and I work in this sector, day in and day out, is if we look at the whole research pot for health and social care, how much do you think goes to health and how much do you think goes to social care? So we’re going to be a bit interactive here. Who thinks it’s about 5050, 6040, no, 8020, Okay, how about 98.2% and point 8% the other way. So I think that statistic is shocking, but it’s also very revealing, and it’s why my remarks tonight are going to focus on social care. Because until we switch the balance, not just in policy, not just in practice, but in research and innovation, we are never going to get away from this conundrum of our aging population and of the demographic time bomb that we’re about to have that will hit us, not just in terms of the economy that Poonam talked about, but also in terms of what kind of society we want to be. Some of the figures I’ll talk about tonight refer to the Scottish fiscal commission, who’ve done some predictions out to 2072 I will be 100 that year, and I hope I’m still alive to see it. But what I really hope is some of the interventions that I talk about tonight will move from rhetoric to reality, that they’ll stop being about policy and actually be about practice. So what are the four things I think we as the RSC can get behind to help us move some of that dial? So four key interventions, we have to switch investment from health to community based support in research, in innovation, but also in the delivery and the execution of health and social care. The second thing we must do is reform the social care sector itself. Now that’s quite controversial, and I’m going to come on to that. I think that’s very interesting point. The third thing we have to do is we have to recognize the critical importance of Fair Work and Social Care, particularly in terms of Social Security spending, the cost of poverty. And what happens in Scotland when we have huge swathes of individuals who experience in work poverty so they are still experiencing poverty despite the fact they’re working on one of our most needed and treasured areas of health and care. And finally, I’m going to argue that we have to resource health and social care reform in a once for Scotland approach. We are a population of 5.5 million, and I will have some stats that will maybe give us some highlights into who we should be looking at and how other countries do things differently. So I think that international dilemma is quite important for the RSE. And finally, I’ll leave us with the biggest question that we will have for our politicians. There are two key roads in which we can transform health and social care, both of which are equally popular and unpopular with the general electorate. So we go to ailsa’s point, health and social care is not going to win any party, any votes. We hear some of this data. So what do we do to influence our politicians in terms of that policy? So let’s first think about moving that investment from health to care, and why we have to do it. Currently, health and care is around about 40% of the Scottish budget. That is going to move to at least 55% and in some predictions, to 65%
38:45
so simply asking the question, what do we stop doing if we continue to fund health and care in the same way that we do today? Now I’m looking at Joe Shaw there, and I’m sure you don’t want cuts to university spending, Joe. And in fact, I’m quite sure most people in this room don’t want to see cuts to university spending. I know that Poonam wants money for the economy, and I also know that we think about the environment every time we think about some of these policy choices. So there are two things here. We have to radically change how we fund health and social care and switch the balance to care, but we also have to think about operational optimization. And so what I mean about that, particularly in terms of digital and the digital workforce, is, how do we take the budget we currently have and get much more from it, leverage the productivity whilst we’re looking at the second and third horizon for radical change and reform? So that’s which is required. It isn’t impossible to do, but bluntly, no one has done it before, and I keep going back to that research and innovation stat. If there’s less than 1% of your research and innovation money being spent in social care, how can you possibly switch over to a much more preventative, community based social care society, which is what we all want to be do. Now why do we want to do that? If we look at the America’s National Institute for Health, one of the things that they did on their meta analysis was look at the cost of health versus the cost of community care. It is very obvious from their data that you can prevent more hospital admissions, and you can prevent those high cost admissions if you have good, solid and consistent social care. So the consistent part is very important. When we start to talk about workforce and we start to talk about fair work. So that’s the first thing. Switch from health to care sounds quite easy. It’s not like switching your mobile phone. It’s much more difficult. But we have to unpick why it’s so complex, and what are the things that we can do that will make it easier, quicker, faster, without sounding like huge armor.
40:43
However, the next thing that we have to think about is reform of the social care sector itself. I’m very weary about talking about that as someone whose day job is Chief Executive of Scotland’s largest social care organization. We employ three and a half 1000 people who work in the front line, day in and day out on health and social care work. So why do we have to change as a sector? Here is the reason. There are 1300 health and social care providers in Scotland, 1300 we had a population of 5 million. So when we talk about public service reform. We typically talk about local authorities. We typically talk about non departmental government bodies, and we typically talk about NHS, boards and trusts. I am not sure how any government, even the most effective government, can reform a social care sector that has 1300 players in the market for a population of just over 5 million. Now, to give you a competitor, Sweden has largely the same system of health and care as Scotland. When it comes to social care, it has double the population and significantly less providers of social care for the whole 10 point 5 million of their population. Yet the customer satisfaction for social care is amongst the highest in the world. So I have been misquoted as saying there are too many charities in Scotland. That is not my point, but my point is there are too many social care organizations where we’re spending our money on chief executives. I see that as one of them, Finance Directors, human resource directors, policy directors. I’m looking at our own policy person, the front line, but actually what we have to do is not just collaborate, but we have to get some practical interventions around the mergers. I don’t use the word acquisition, but the mergers of social care organizations to allow them to become much more effective and optimize the current expenditure. So that’s the second thing we ourselves as a sector, have to reform. We won’t do that without government intervention. There are too many charities who believe that their reason to exist still exists today in 2026 in the same way it did, and I speak about my own charity 75 years ago. Charities must change. NGOs must change, and we must become more progressive and contemporary around thinking about how we will manage the social care market. The reason for that is quite, I think, obvious, if you know some of the statistics. So if we look at Scotland, in the past 10 years, we’ve had a 20% increase in the number of social care providers. So that number has not only not plateaued, it has grown when the obvious policy intervention is to pull some more charities together so that they can work more efficiently and effectively. I say that as a chief executive who has just over the past 12 months, move three small charities who do vital great work into our own charity, where they will continue to do their own vital great work, continue to do their own policy work, continue to have their own values, but not do it with four chief executives or four Finance Directors. So if you think about the meta analysis, if you do that across 1300 organizations, the productivity optimizations could be huge, but government do not want to tackle that. And I will quote which very prominent politician, but if I say the most prominent politician in our country today, it may give you a clue. And his very clear view is that’s for charity boards in particular to think about. I disagree with that if we wait for individual charity boards to think about reforming the sector. We will not get the sector reform that we all need. So third thing that we have to do, which I think is really important, is a once for Scotland approach to reform. We have tried this. And for those of you who have been involved in the working groups around care and health and the community of interest, you’ll understand some of the frustrations around what has been spent on devising a national care service. So a national care service, in many ways, gives us some of the answers to the productivity that we’ve talked about. We have spent 10s of millions of pounds in a country to think about how we might implement it, only to be foiled by and. My view, vested interests, which means that the policy has been scrapped. I’m hopeful that post 2026, it will come back round again, but the chances of having it come back round again with the strength that would be required to fundamentally change how we deliver social care, I think, is slim at this stage, although we will keep advocating for that every day in terms of enable and hopefully that su will join us in that.
45:26
The final thing I want to say is around fair work. And again, I just want to be really clear that I think most people fail to understand that the social care workforce in Scotland is almost the same size as the NHS workforce, but it doesn’t have a common voice. It doesn’t have a common collective bargaining position. It doesn’t have an ability to even organize basic T’s and C’s for some of our most vulnerable workforce. So there are people out there today delivering health and social care who do not get paid for sick pay. There are people out there delivering health and social care, 20% of whom experience in work poverty. If you are a child of a frontline worker in social care, you are four times more likely to experience material deprivation than if you’re a child of an NHS worker. So I’ll let that sit with you, two sectors both doing very similar work, but one sector not only morally failing the children of our country, but causing huge future costs in terms of entitlements and Social Security. And if we look at the figures from Scottish fiscal commission and that 5 billion pound gap, we see a huge part of that is exactly linked to Social Security. So I am absolutely pro social security. I’m absolutely pro supporting our vulnerable residents and our vulnerable citizens to make sure they have the best life possible. But is there something we can do around preventative spending and social care that would stop that huge drain on government resources? Because I don’t think we’ve got 5 billion pounds worth of options to cut in the country. So we have to really think about that. So I’m going to leave you with one final point. And I thought this was really important for another piece of research. And I know the RSE loves its research, so if we think about demos, you’ve done some really good work around what does new social care look like consistent investment in prevention has been shown to deliver results. However, we lack the architecture to do this systematically. We lack the architecture to do this systematically today, I think post 2026 with an effective national care service, we could answer some of the issues around migration, around productivity, around poverty, but we need a national care service that looks entirely different to how we deliver today’s health and social care For that rhetoric to turn to reality. Thank you.
48:02
Applause. Wow. Theresa, a lot to think about there. Thank you very much indeed. Exhilarating stuff. The final member of our panel is Pat Monahan, Regius, Chair of Zoology at University of Glasgow. I hope I’ve got your title right at least. Theresa is an ecologist whose research focuses on ecology, animal life histories and conservation, and you’re going to focus on the central role of the environment in shaping future security.
48:36
Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me. Okay, I’ve got hay fever today, so literally, nature is getting up my nose. My background is a scientific one, so I’m a scientist. I’m interested in the quality of the evidence on which we make our decisions. Now, the environment is absolutely central to our lives. It’s how we survive. It’s where we get the resources. If our environment is in a poor state, we will also be in a poor state. We get from our environment. We get food, we get energy, we get clean air, water, we get the raw materials with which we’re going to make things we get help with combating disease from the environment. Of course, sometimes we get diseases caused by other species, and we also often get solace from nature and from being in the environment we’ve long disregarded our impact of our extractive approach to the environment. Our approach has been all take and very little give. The uses of the environment that we have increased it dramatic. Luckily, in recent years, as our human population has expanded and as we as individuals, it’s not just population expansion, it’s the fact that we want more for each individual. We want to do more stuff, and to do that, we need to take more and more from the environment, more energy, more land, more raw materials, and we’ve taken what we need without a thought for the consequences of so doing for a long time, but now that’s beginning to catch up with us. Our intelligence and our inventiveness has now made us the most destructive species on the earth, or that the earth has ever known.
50:49
We out compete other species. We are super competitors. We take over their habitats. We over exploit them when we think they might be useful to us, and if we think they’re a pest, then we make a cocktail of chemicals with which to destroy them that pervades through our ecosystems and continue to do damage. We’re burning carbon for energy, and we have been for some time. These stores of carbon are finite. They’ve been laid down over millions of years, and in the past 200 years, we’ve been just blowing through them. We it’s reckoned that we might have the estimates vary, but perhaps 50 to 100 years left when we can use these carbon sources before they run out entirely. They powered our industrial revolutions with coal, with gas, with oil, releasing in the process, greenhouse gasses that have cloaked our planet and stopped the planet losing heat so the planet is warming. These are high energy sources, of course, but they’re not renewable. They’re finite, as I’ve said already. And the other thing we’re quite keen on doing is just dumping our waste products, either on the land or in the sea, and thinking that’s it, they’re dealt with. Well, as you know, they’re not. So we’re now faced with two major environmental crises. On the one hand, we have rapid climate change that the planet has never seen at the space before, and we have rapid, very rapid very rapid, and accelerating loss of biodiversity. The World Meteorological Organization released data just a few days ago saying that the past 11 years have been the hottest on record, and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have been for 2 million years, and that’s as a consequence of what we have been doing now climate change, it isn’t just about global heating. It has many other consequences. We are changing the planetary system such that our weather is much more unpredictable, with many more extreme weather events, not everybody will see global actual warming the rain, as I’m sure you’ve noticed here in Scotland, it’s heavier, the winds are stronger, but that’s nothing like what it is has been in Other parts of the world, but it’s heading in our direction. There’ll be more storms, more floods, more crop failures, more places becoming becoming uninhabitable, uninhabitable, which will need people to move both within our country and across countries. There’ll be more diseases that will head in our direction. The ice caps are melting, glaciers are melting and the sea is rising. I didn’t say I was going to be cheerful, and I’m not done yet. So we’re driving out other species at the same time at an accelerating rate, at a rate 10 to 100 times higher than has taken place in the past 10 million years, such that many scientists think we’re in a sixth mass extinction crisis, except this time, we’re the ones that caused it. Now, for a long time, we didn’t know what we were doing now we do know we didn’t know or not as we weren’t there, but when the industrial revolution started, people didn’t realize where that was going to lead us. When people were over exploiting other species, they didn’t really know about how important biodata. Diversity is it’s not just something that’s nice to have. We need to have ecosystems that continue to function. The UK government just released a port a report earlier this year about the consequences for us of ecosystem collapse, which is happening all over the globe that will really change our food security. It will change our national security in ways that we haven’t really thought about. And in Scotland, we can also see these effects of biodiversity loss. The state of nature report in 2023 shows that over a 30 year period, wildlife in Scotland has decreased by 15%
55:48
and just over 10% of our native species are in danger of being entirely lost to us in this country, Increasingly, we have a problem with invasive, non native species. How do they get here? Mostly, they get here because we bring them one way or another. They go out of control, not all of them, but many of them go out of control, and they damage our ecosystems even further. So nature isn’t just nice to have, it’s crucial to our survival, and biodiversity loss is destabilizing the planetary, physical and biological systems on which we depend. So what now do we just all put our heads under the covers and say this is so awful that we can’t think about it anymore. No, what do we do? We start a war in the Middle East, which is spewing out 1000s, millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. In 14 days of the Middle East war, more carbon has been spewed into our atmosphere than the 84 low carbon countries in the world have been producing. So we’re making things worse rather than better. So what do we want our government to do, the government that we’re going to hopefully elect. Now there have been good things happening in Scotland. There’s legislation, pioneering legislation being going through the Scottish Parliament. There are plenty of really good aspirations, the most recent being the natural environment Bill Scotland, which has just received royal assent. It’s full of great aspirations for how we might protect nature and regenerate nature. But we need our governments to think long term, not to think just about the short term. And that’s a problem. The cycle of governments that we have is such that you think, in a very short cycle, how can we please the public now? But when it comes to the environment, we need long term plans. We need to get the right environmental targets in place. The new bill allows legal targets to be set for nature, but they’ve got to be the right ones, and they’ve got to be achievable. Also we need to monitor compliance with regulations. There’s no point in having regulations if nobody looks to see whether anybody is breaking them. And we’re partly in that state with our environment at the moment, because nobody is doing very much of that kind of monitoring, we mustn’t set up policies where, on the one hand, we’re investing in processes that are damaging nature, and in the other hand, we’re trying to restore them. So this is currently the case with the burning of fossil fuels. We’re not going to solve it by drilling in the North Sea more. We have to solve it by getting away from these very destructive fuels. We have a problem with forestry in Scotland, which I’m particularly interested in. On the one hand, we’re investing in commercial, productive forests because we need timber, but we’re doing so in a way that is seriously damaging biodiversity and is allowing non native conifers to spread invasively into our environment.
59:39
We need to try and make our societies resilient, resilient, as has already been said, We need homes that are climate friendly. We need energy that is renewable. We need our fisheries, our forestry, as I’ve mentioned, our agriculture in particular, to be more environmental and. Environmentally friendly, one of the globally biggest threats to biodiversity is producing food for humans. We need to find better ways of doing that, more more nature restoration, more climate mitigation. We need to look after our biggest store of carbon, which in Scotland is not woodlands. It’s the peatlands that are have carbon in the soil. We don’t look after our soils in Scotland at all. We need to do that. We need to protect our peatlands, instead of digging them up or planting trees on them, as is quite often done. We are smart. We’re intelligent. We can do a lot better than we are doing. We have much of the science done. What we need is actual delivery, and that’s what we need to push our governments into doing. So thank you. I’ll stop there. You thanks
1:01:05
very much. Thank you very much indeed. Pat we’re we’re going to go straight on to your questions now. I’m going to spare the panel the deep and testing interrogation I was going to launch at you, because I very much want to hear what you’ve got to say. So do raise a hand. Give us your name so we so we can identify you. And that goes for online as well. Pop your questions in, and Ishita will deliver them here. So yes, there. Thank you.
1:01:49
Thanks very much. Sandy Begbie, I’m Chief Executive of Scottish financial enterprise. I was very fortunate to take part in the economy group on this so I’ve thoroughly enjoyed contributing to it. Fascinating conversation. Really enjoyed all the loads of questions on all of them, but I’ll stick to one. I’ve been quite fortunate to spend a lot of time internationally, and from what I can see, high performing countries tend to get four or five things really right, which is economic growth, infrastructure, including housing, education, health, law and order and security and cost of energy. Very few countries excel in all of those. But I would suggest that Scotland has gone back on backwards on all of them. So small changes post May is not really going to cut it. But likewise, as we know, governments tend to promise far too much and quite often lack focus. So where would the panel start if they agreed on that list? Thank you.
1:02:48
Sean, the question really behind that is, there’s so much, so much, and it’s it feels even just to me, an outsider sitting here listening to it so intractable. You know, problems, what are the feasible first steps? What needs to change in a small way first in order to make any of this possible? Which is not exactly Sandy’s question. So do take that on
1:03:14
as well? No, I think there are two things. I think there’s one about policy, and there’s one about how we do politics. Some of us were involved at the very beginning, and have been involved in things like calm and commission and other things. And we were all promised a different way of doing politics, where there would be cross party consensus, there would be scrutiny in committees. The machine is there. It’s in the legislation. It’s maybe not working in practice. So what I would like to see is an acceptance by all of the parties that they need to work across the aisle as Pat so eloquently explained, environment, it’s not going to get fixed in four or five years, and we can’t keep having people tinkering at the margins. So I think a different way of doing politics is really important. I think the second one for me, and this is a reflection of my background and of the society Scotland, was a knowledge economy long before the term was invented, and that all came from our education, phenomenal education system, our universities, our inventiveness, my number one priority would be focusing on how we generate growth, whether one wants to call it inclusive growth or not, not, but we need growth, Because without growth, with a 4.7 billion funding gap. At the moment, it’s going to be very difficult to continue to maintain our current level of public service before we address issues like the demographic bomb that we’ve known about for 30 years and haven’t done anything about. So I would be for economic growth. Is focusing on those key opportunities and again, getting long term plans. If one of the things that has always frustrated me is the way in which the economic development infrastructure in Scotland has become a merry go round. And you know, it is so fractured, so fragmented it. I feel it doesn’t work. I think, alongside that, though, one of the really important things we need to do is have an independent fiscal review of how Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government is funded. I think, you know, over the period of, you know, the last 27 years there’s been an increase in tax raising powers. There are more to come. Not all the powers have actually been implemented yet. And I think, you know, some there’s not quite the level of sophistication in fiscal policy that we should see somebody mentioned. You know, if you look at the great success that the child poverty payment has had in eradicating childhood poverty, what with some of the changes that have been made in income tax, you have families who are now on a cliff edge, whereas their income progresses, they lose benefits, and it is, has Been, it’s theoretically a disincentive to work. So I think 27 years in, we really do need to understand what we can do, how we can do it better, and engage with UK Government to see what is the best thing, not just for Scotland, but for the UK economy as a whole, in terms of our fiscal arrangements.
1:06:41
Thanks very much. Yes. There, thank you. And then then gentleman, there, thanks, Hello.
1:06:49
Sorry about my English. I three years studying, but no good for this time. But I hope you understand me. I’m Native Ukrainian. Live in Scotland for last year. And I have a question for all people, if Ukrainian soldiers going to South East now help for American army who asked about English level. Who ask it about verified diploma? Nothing. But when in Scotland, coming a lot of qualified professionals. Of course, we not speak English very good, because we have probably physicist but in Germany, in England, more easy, more easy now in Scotland, stay maybe 100 medicine professional before, for year before 200 a lot of go to England. A lot of go to another country. Why we’re ready? We want get it all our heart, all our soil, for this country, for Scotland. But who know what need to do for work? English is first but no courses. Nothing help college, no help for English. But second question, all courses for verify, deep longs in England, need stay family. Need separate. This family go for one, two year in England after return for what you understand? What? Okay, let’s, let’s see. Wait. Please, wait.
1:08:42
Well, be as brief as you can, because, because I want to try and get as many questions in this process, you’ve got a very good question
1:08:49
in there. Please. I want all we want for Scotland, get the best rules from England, from Germany, from another country for easy way to professional from another country for professionals. No clean floor a study doing benefit for this country with all our heart. Please help for us. Be useful for our lovely Scotland.
1:09:17
Okay, thank you very much. I think we’re going to get an answer from our education supremo here, yeah,
1:09:25
thank you. And actually, that is a really good question, because it’s from anybody who comes into Scotland. It’s really important that we recognize that the skills that they have are valuable to Scotland, and it’s important that we can recognize their professional skill set, we can compare that to what’s available in Scotland and what our qualification structure is, and recognize that and allow them to get into the workforce. In terms of English education, that is absolutely critical, because as you, as you’ve so rightly pointed out, it is important people can communicate with each other, so. So one of the things we really need to make sure we do is have an English for foreign speakers program that is really effective, is accessible by people outside of work time, at a point in time that they choose for themselves, so that it’s flexible, so more people can take advantage of it, we are very, very lucky that we the one positive thing about covid was we learned very, very well how to operate online. We need to take advantage of that to enable people to develop the skill set that they need, such as an English speaking competency, to allow them to be able to enter the workforce. And equally important, we need to take advantage of the Scottish Qualifications and Credit Framework and its mapping to the European framework to understand what level of qualification somebody has when they come into Scotland so they don’t have to start again. And just
1:10:57
briefly, why is it so much worse here than in England? If that’s correct,
1:11:01
I think there’s, there’s a lot of focus on English courses down. Down in England, they have a larger immigration poll, immigration numbers, so it’s been more of a priority for them. We need to recognize it isn’t a priority for everyone.
1:11:17
Okay, thank you. Thank you. That was, that was an excellent question. Gentleman, there. Thank you.
1:11:25
Good evening. My name is James. I wanted to just touch on the subject of immigration and asylum, because, as you made in your first presentation, is that it seems to be more pertinent to an older generation than a younger generation. But I also noticed that in your RSE paper is that you were very critical of the potential reforms that was going to discriminate between the method of arrival of the people who seek asylum in this country, and I wondered whether that was purely for the treaty obligations under the ECHR and the Refugee Act of 1951 or other other reasons why the RSE was so critical of that and if, for example, a party that wanted to leave the ECHR would that actually remove your criticisms in that paper? And also bearing in mind, how do you differentiate when you say means of arrival? Are you effectively talking about illegal and legal, or are we talking about method of arrival? And secondly, on the Refugee Treaty, how does how does that compare to the ECHR in terms of other countries being applicable to that?
1:12:52
It’s certainly this is not a criticism of channel boat arrivals. It’s the distinction between illegal and legal routes of migration and what’s available for people when they are there. We have not looked in the context of this report at the ECHR and that impact on immigration, but it is something that we will take back we, we do believe that there is a need for a sort of more coordinated cross government framework, which is not just in within Scotland, but within the UK as well. Because obviously, you know, asylum seekers in particular are here because of a choice of UK government, which the Scottish people welcome. But I think it’s one of these areas that’s quite fraught. And of course, Scotland has historically shown leadership in this. In if you recall the the second administration, when McConnell was the First Minister, it was Scotland that pioneered the fresh talent. Pointed to the Ukrainian point as well, which was very much aimed at people who arrived here as students and who wished to continue to work and contribute to the Scottish economy that they were allowed to do that. So it was not, it is not a sort of, it’s strictly legal, illegal. It is not a political point about crossing the Channel boats. Okay, thank you. Question down here,
1:14:40
Marty question, having recently done book events with para Canna about his book, move about the future demography and population migration because of climate and Simon sharp on his book, five times faster. How is each of you differently going? To persuade our new large intake of new politicians of a what they need to do, the timescale, the urgency, but above all, the fiscal constraints. Because it seems to me that the issue of silos constraint, are very real. So one thing from each of you on, what timescale would you really urge them to do on,
1:15:32
on the particular issue
1:15:34
of climate? No, I think on anything. I mean, the one figure that startled me in El slides was where education came. Because without education, how do you progress? How do you grow? How do you excite the economy and the entrepreneurs without social care and health. How do you have a population fit to work? I mean, it seems to me there are very, very real issues. Do you have confidence, given past silos and potentially future silos that actually, are you optimistic or pessimistic?
1:16:19
Well, can we start with you, Theresa, and you, you made the point there. You know, what would it take to get a politician to pay attention to this? And I don’t, you know, I don’t think social care was up, was up on Elsa’s graph at all. And yet, there can hardly be a family in the country who is not, you know, at one time or another, you know, going to be touched by this, and yet, it’s almost as if, and this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, it’s almost as if people have just come to accept that there’s nothing that can be done and that it’s always just going to be the sort of issue that we can’t deal with and don’t get out in the streets banging a drum about it.
1:17:08
So I would start with some optimism, much more Pollyanna than Cassandra and I am Vice President of the European Association of service providers. So that’s 20,000 social care providers across 30 countries in Europe. The one thing I would say categorically, our social care policy is one of the most progressive and one of the most effective and one of the most absolutely based on the UN CRPD. So in terms of human rights, I think we’re getting our social care policy right. In terms of the execution, I agree there’s more to be done. And so if I had one thing to ask the politicians, I’ll go back to that. Demos report on architecture. We need a national care service. Almost every political party talks about it yet, one of them, not one of them, has yet identified. What does that architecture look like? So my plea to politicians would be twofold, establish a national care service. Do not let perfection get in the way of improvement. And I think that’s what we did when we lost the bill in 2025 and my second thing, if I might, and it comes to this program where we let’s be creative thinkers and let’s be participants in the policy. So I studied democracy and politics for four years at one of our foremost universities. I’m all for democracy, but we elect our politicians to make difficult choices. So 40% of the population think we should go for a change in social care policy today, tomorrow, and do it quickly. 43% think we should take a longer period of time and have cross party consensus. So there’s not going to be a politician in 2026 that’s going to get social care right in terms of the majority of the voting electorate. So they have to apply judgment and be courageous. And so I think it’s about the culture of courage and the culture of applying judgment rather than having endless consultations and conversations.
1:19:05
Poonam, the economic or the fiscal black hole awaiting whatever government comes into power now, is being carefully not talked about by any candidate, as far as I can see. I mean, you know, we’ll see if honesty, you know, happens to come to the fore by accident, but you know what? What? What needs to be done.
1:19:30
So interesting question in terms of, as we say, we don’t like to talk about hard things, whether we are politicians or whether we are public, because here we are sitting and discussing these questions. But the challenge will be and there is a responsibility on media, journalists, reporters and public, because when a politician stands and says the truth and say, This is the 4.6 billion gap by 2030 and we need to make hard choices. The question is, are we going to vote them in or we vote them out? So. Because we do make a choice which is easy listening and simple for us, and those priorities differ. So as public we are equally responsible for choosing the right politician, but also hearing and listening the bitter pill of truth. So that’s the messaging that we need to openly discuss the challenge of, how do we solve? I mean, there isn’t a magic pill to solve with this, but the positive side and the negative side is that we’ll have 1/3 new politicians. They will have one on the negative side, they’ll have no experience of governing anything. So we are in it. But the positive side will be we can train them into something positive. And do expect to do
1:20:40
something positive about it. Just on that, how do you train them into doing something?
1:20:45
So that is the conversation. So the successful examples of democracy, where people have changed long term, is there is a two layer system. There are politicians who make these things and there are civil services which implement it. And they are me here, we will say they are neutral, but they do serve the line, whatever the civil the politician is sitting as a minister, whereas, where it has worked, effectively, it’s the same civil services person. Last 15 years they would be running at that long term policy. So every four years, if I mean, I’ve been having the chance of working very closely with the minister. So I realize it’s a situation of firefighting every day. One consultation goes out, even before the result is out, we have decided what the line will be in the next newspaper. And that’s reality, because it’s changing. All the European friends that I talked to in the entrepreneurship space or company, they say, Oh, you came out with a very good policy. We copied it, and we are doing very well, and we are still thinking, we are sitting on that policy. We haven’t implemented it. So it’s the question of choosing three or four areas, health, education, the economy, naturally, the priority areas, and deciding coming together across the Pol basically, that’s the job of the parliament, not party that is in the power and deciding the actions and the plan for 15 years and not changing it each election. Saying those stay there. You can have your policy lines and argue about it, but the main priorities, and that’s the response for the civil servants to do and keep it in line. I think those so the how we get it change. Decide our economy is in doldrums. We decide, I talked about it, and I know the only way we can do is we can grow the economy. Grow high priority areas, bring in more tax, put it in public services, get good schools and improve the health. It’s not rocket science, but
1:22:42
thank you. Haven’t got time to go around, everybody. I’m very sorry. Next question, let’s try and get one more in. One there. Oh, I should have you got one from from online.
1:22:54
Okay, go ahead. This is a question from Christie McFadden, who is an economist at the Fraser of allander Institute. And the question is that a range of long term systemic changes required. How do we prioritize in the short term?
1:23:11
We have to have a healthier society. We have to have a society that doesn’t rely on the NHS. We have to stop acute admissions where they’re not there. And if you think about some of the stuff we talked about from America and the meta analysis, we have to understand that social care is part of the answer. So I think until we switch some of that priority, it’s not going to get better. I’m not going to disagree with Poonam. I respect her very much. We cannot grow the economy if such a large number of our economically or who should be economically active citizens are not yet in work, so we’re going to have to find a way that actually we switch that balance. If there was one priority that would be it, and you will grow the economy from a healthier Scotland. Poonam, yeah, I will
1:23:55
add another point to it, because demographically, our population is going to be 65% over 65 so we don’t have young people to grow the economy. So we do need a better system so healthier people, they can work 1015, years, if we are increasing the age. But we do need between 10, 2017, or 18 onwards, whenever people start working, till they’re 65 and they can work, contribute. And for that, we need to prioritize the right people into the right trained areas, and they are the young and early. So basically, Experience matters, but we also need other people to actually contribute to the taxes. Without that, growth won’t happen. Okay, thank you.
1:24:35
Let’s get yes yours. Oh, do you mind us going over maybe 510 minutes. Can we do that? Yeah, yeah, we’ll do that. Then some quick some quick questions, there, there, and then behind, yeah. Quick questions, quick answers.
1:24:54
Jim Gallagher, fellow here and the former public servant, God help me. And. Dan, I suppose my question is this, one of the key messages in this report is moving from policy to practice, from rhetoric to delivery. Reflect for a moment, if you would, for us, on why it is this has proved so difficult and why it’s gotten worse, which I assert to be true.
1:25:20
Do you have a theory in that, since you’ve been in the in the fray?
1:25:24
Yeah, yes, I’d quite like to see where these people’s theories I’m sure. No, I’m not revealing my theory. Okay, and what if you’ve understood why they behave like this? What can we do to help them behave in a different way?
1:25:40
Okay? Yes, Pat, well,
1:25:45
when you say that, you know we need to move from rhetoric to delivery. Why does that not happen? Often, at least in the environment area, there’s such a complexity of organizations involved that are not working together with joined up policies. So one thing that could be done was to really look at that. Do we need all these different organizations? There are also grants being given to subsidize in the environment area already profitable industries, and we really need to scrutinize how we’re spending money in that sector. So there’s a lot that could be done there that would make delivery easier, instead of different organizations competing with each other and not cooperating and not getting anywhere because they can’t agree on what the policy should be.
1:26:40
Yeah, Shauna, I think you and I have talked about this a lot, and this is going to sound like completely reverse of what we have been saying, but certainly in the first two administrations, enough time wasn’t actually allowed to create policy and then actually implement it, and I’m thinking particularly in and around the enterprise arena, where there were some very bold initiatives, the intermediate technology institutes, which have been copied around the world, which was a 10 Year program with 450 million quid. You and I know that that was pulled at three and a half years because it felt it wasn’t delivering the results, because there wasn’t an acceptance that to deliver the systemic change you need, it takes time. You cannot do it within a four to five year political cycle, and hopefully now, with 27 years experience under our belt, we’re no longer a rebellious teenager. We’re approaching being a mature adult, will accept that things take time. Quick word
1:27:46
Theresa, yeah, I’m going to quote another public servant, sir Gus O’ Donnell, or Lord Gus, I don’t think it might be nice diffusion of innovation. We don’t get that right in Scotland. So we have the innovation both in the public sector, the academic sector, in the private sector and in the NGO sector, but we do not have a strategy to diffuse that innovation. The what works unit in Glasgow University started off doing something similar, but we are unable to scale in this country what works. We have to do that quicker and better.
1:28:16
Okay, you question there, and then the next one there.
1:28:20
Thank you. Daniel University of Edinburgh, we’ve heard a lot about growth, but every growth will take more out of the environment, and I think we already take quite a lot of the environment. But what I think we don’t do is we don’t distribute this well enough between the society. We have lots of people have too much. Lots of people have not enough. Shouldn’t we focus instead of growth? Should we focus more on reducing inequality in our society.
1:28:43
I mean, I think the administration that has just admitted office, you know? I mean, one of the things a great report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, published earlier on this week, looking at devolution in both Scotland and Wales, in that you know, Scotland, in the United Kingdom, has the most progressive tax system, if you look at the way in which it is dealing with benefits in and around, not just child poverty payment, but disability benefit, in particular, where there is a Higher it’s wrong to say, pass rate, but more people are receiving payments as a percentage in the rest of the UK because of the systems that have been put in place in Scotland. So I think that their progress has been made. I hope it will continue. And you know, in the report, you’ll see we talk about inclusive growth. One of the things that concerns us is the inequity that there is in Scotland at the moment.
1:29:47
Thank you very much. Those questions over here, yes, one and then the other. Yeah. Thank you.
1:29:54
You’re all here talking about the health of the people, and then they’ll go on and they build their. Economy, we have the highest rate of illegal drug deaths in Britain, Europe. Why have none of you mentioned the drug barons who are making a fortune out of all your social policy and all your state benefits that these people are living off. And why are they not at work? If you want a good, thriving economy, you’ve got to deal with the drug barons, Theresa.
1:30:26
Again, a bit more of a positive spin on that question, if I may. We do a lot of work in my day job enable with getting young people into work and employability, and we’re particularly focused on working with young people who have come from families who have been affected by drugs, and also young people who themselves have been affected by drugs. So I think the answer for Police Scotland might be the drug barons. The answer for us as society is to make sure there are good, credible, well paid pathways into employment, both for families and for young people who are affected by drugs. We’re actually quite good at that in Scotland. That doesn’t change the drug death rate, I appreciate but we should also focus on what we’re getting right with employability. And I think Sandy Begbie, I thought was in the audience earlier, would probably agree with that.
1:31:12
Yeah. Thank you. And there.
1:31:15
Thank you for a very interesting talk. I also for my since I’m a civil servant and I’ve worked in local authorities, Scottish Government and currently UK Government. So I’m interested, again, just in to follow up about the implementation, intention and delivery gap. I think Boris Johnson called the civil service the blob, but there is tremendous moves now, modernization and transformation with use of AI, and I was just interested because the word AI hasn’t been mentioned tonight, so I just wonder what the opportunities I was five minutes late. But I’d just be interested in to know what you actually see working in practice now to enable civil servants to deliver. Because anyone that works in the civil service is very passionate, committed, like everybody in the public sector, so it’s not due to motivation. Why is it not getting better for people working in the public sector, as well as the outcomes that we’re trying to achieve
1:32:15
here together today? I mean, are there structural changes in civil service that need to need to be made? I mean, yeah,
1:32:24
it is one area that has, you know, in terms of employment has grown massively over the last 20 years. And I think
1:32:37
I sort of, as the powers of the Scottish Government has grown,
1:32:44
I think in a size of the public sector in Scotland, and the deployment of technology, in terms of productivity, is actually an important part and parcel of economic growth. It’s It’s, well, I’m sort of slightly biased, having worked alongside civil servants, I think the description of the blob was a very, very good example of a poor politician blaming somebody else for their absolute inability to, let alone frame policy but implement it. And could
1:33:17
AI be harnessed? Yeah, I
1:33:18
think AI and data are critical to that. So at the moment, as said, even in Scotland, since covid times, 30% increase has happened in public services and civil services growth. The question is, if that’s what the challenge from the private sector always comes through that the Amazon or another organization can lead the world with a smaller workforce, whereas for running the country, we need that. And I take your point that the public services, the impact is not immediately visible. It takes time somebody starts at selling a private sector product. You can see how much sales are happening public services issue. They take long, 510, years of process from the policy formation too, when the impact takes place, whether it’s in the communities, or whether So, data and AI certainly can be helpful, even running the programs that are there to see what the impact has been and putting them information. But going back to the original point that it has to be longer term policy, not impacted by four year party political cycle. Otherwise we will never have the implementation. Because each time whoever comes into the power want to make their impact and rule out the previous policy, and that’s been the reason we have not been successful. Because everybody, and despite this particular government having been in the sort of Office for last several years, it’s also the policy choices. So whether who stands up to the civil services versus politician, I think that clarity needs to be reinvestigated.
1:34:49
But when it comes to joined up thinking AI doesn’t come for free, it’s a very energy intensive thing to do, and it’s been calculated that these. These big data centers we already have are going to by 2030, required double the amount of energy that they’re using at present, and a lot of water is going to have to be found to keep these centers cooling. And that’s a huge resource use that we’re investing in, without thinking of the cost and just using it to make your emails read a bit better is a bit of a waste of valuable environmental resources. I’m not saying AI isn’t good
1:35:35
Theresa fundamentally, I think we’d think about the question not being about civil servants or government, not being about academia, not being about the private sector. When we think about AI, it’s solving some of the world’s biggest problems, and I appreciate there’s an environmental impact, but we have to start thinking about that term that was coined here in Scotland, the triple helix. What is the power that we have together? So AI coming through just the private sector, as we’re seeing in social care at the moment, is a disaster for all of us when you look at the profitability that leaks through the system. So AI is very important. I spent this afternoon with two of the best civil servants in Scotland. It was top of our agenda. But it can’t be siloed into sector. It has to be Cross Society,
1:36:16
just one point. Because the thing is, if we don’t do it and we won’t use it, somebody else will be doing it, and we’ll be buying it from them. So the question is that, if we have the capability in Scotland, should we not export it to elsewhere and earn some money for it, rather than buying it from somewhere else? Because they will do it. If we sit on our
1:36:33
Listen, there’s so much we could continue to talk about here. We’ve given it a start. I hope you’ll agree that we’ve had terrific thought and thoughtfulness in our contributions from our panel. So please join me in thanking them all very much indeed. Applause, please. Thank you also for your questions, for your engagement. This is the start of a conversation, and let’s just hope that the people who need to join this conversation, by some miracle, join it. Thank you very much indeed. Safe Home. Thank you.
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