It's Public Services Stupid

Public services are the top issue for the vast majority of Scottish voters.

We are publishing a full scale poll, undertaken by Survation for UNISON Scotland, that asked voters to tell us their priorities for the local government elections. Public services were the top priority followed by the economy and job security.

The results were clear over 70% of those who took part place public services as one of the three most important issues facing them and their families ahead of the upcoming election. The economy was second chosen by just over fifty percent (51%) of respondents and job security and availability came in third with 40%. There was very little variation when results were broken down by party affiliation with public services coming highest among all party voters. Jobs came second for SNP voters while the economy was second for Conservative voters equal numbers of Labour voters picked jobs and the economy.

Voters were also clear about whom they believe delivers the best quality services. Half of all voters chose public sector organisations with only 19% supporting the private sector and even fewer (13%) choosing charities. Even amongst Conservative voters only 31% picked the private sector and 10% charities. UNISON hopes that candidates from all parties are now clear that the people of Scotland want high quality publically delivered services.

Trust and accountability are important issues in a democracy. The polling figures indicate that people trust publically delivered services and believe them to be more accountable than private of charitable delivery: 71% of respondents believed public sector organisations are accountable for the services they deliver while for charities and the private sector the scores were 52% and 44%. Our survey reveals low levels of trust towards politicians and the media. Only 27% of respondents stated that they trust Holyrood politicians as sources of information about public services and 42% stated that they distrusted them. Only 20% trust the media with 47% stating that they distrust the media. Trade unions remain a relatively trusted source of information with 32% only topped by “friends and family” and academics. Friends and family are by far the most trusted source of information on public services (72%), academics achieved 56%. Academics were only distrusted by 11% of respondents.

Budget cuts are having a serious impact on local services: only 6% of respondents believed that services have improved in recent years and a further 30% that they had stayed the same while 59% felt they had declined. When asked where they blame lay 26% blamed local councils, 35% the government and 36% blamed both. SNP voters were the least likely to blame council alone but even then it was still 23%, with 36% of Conservative voters blaming the council and 30% of Labour voters. Nearly half of respondents want more of their taxes to be spent in their local areas and councils were the body most trusted to deliver local services with 41% picking the council and only 8% the government and 12% private companies. The poll summary is available here and tables here.

The poll clearly shows that people value public services, that they want them delivered in the public sector and that they want them delivered local by their council. UNISON agrees.

Extending the Scottish Living Wage through procurement - vital in social care

A new UNISON Scotland Briefing has been published explaining how public bodies can use procurement to extend the Scottish Living Wage to all those working in public services.

Nearly all public sector workers in Scotland are now paid the Living Wage, (uprated this month to £8.25 per hour) but thousands who deliver public services in the community and private sectors don't yet receive it, particularly in social care.

New Statutory Guidance from the Scottish Government sets out how the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 enables all public bodies to spread the benefits. Previous legal objections no longer apply.

Infrastructure Secretary Keith Brown said that employers "must now recognise that they cannot adopt exploitative practices in relation to their workers and expect... lucrative public contracts."

The Guidance on Addressing Fair Work Practices sets out how public bodies can legally include payment of the Living Wage in contracts, along with other employment matters, such as trade union recognition and representation and no "inappropriate" use of zero hours contracts.

(The Living Wage is a voluntary level for over 18s, higher than the current statutory National Minimum Wage (NMW) of £6.70 per hour for over 21s. It is an independent calculation of what is required to cover the basic cost of living.

While the increased legal minimum announced by Chancellor George Osborne as a new National Living Wage (NLW) of £7.20 per hour for over 25s in his July 2015 Budget is welcome, it is in effect a higher NMW, not a real living wage. It is nothing like enough to compensate for cuts to tax credits. IPPR Scotland said for low and middle income Scottish families the impact is "vastly outweighed" by the cuts.)

It is vital to progress the Living Wage in social care, which is facing a growing staffing crisis. The Scottish Government, COSLA and care providers are currently involved in discussions about how best to drive up pay in the care at home/housing support sector, recognising the links between pay, quality of care, retention and recruitment etc.

An interim funding deal is likely, with work continuing on a more robust proposal for 2016/17, alongside analysis of the full financial impact of the NLW 2016 to 2020 announcement and the overall cost of residential and non-residential social care.

UNISON wants to see the Living Wage included in all social care contracts and will also press our Ethical Care Charter. However, we accept that this has to be fully funded.  We welcome the Scottish Labour party's proposal to pay the Living Wage to all those working in social care.

UNISON branches should study the guidance in detail and ensure that public bodies: revise their procurement strategy to include the Scottish Living Wage; specify compliance with the S52 guidance in procurement documents and the consequences for the LW; revise their tender evaluation procedures to take account of the LW and other employment and 'fair work' standards. These can include no zero or nominal-hours contracts, trade union recognition and the Ethical Care Charter.

Under the Act, public bodies are required to set out their general policy on the Living Wage in their procurement strategy. Bids can be evaluated against that policy and payment of the Living Wage can become an enforceable performance clause. For contracts with a strong workforce element, such as social care, there can be a significant weighting in the evaluation for workforce matters.

With a civil society coalition behind '10 Asks' on the legislation, we had called for the Living Wage to be mandatory for all those working on public contracts. The guidance does not go that far but is an improvement.

UNISON still believes that EU law would allow it to be set as a contract condition. Advocate General Mengozzi's opinion, given on 9 September 2015 in RegioPost GmbH v Stadt Landau (C-115/14), was that EU law did not prevent contracting authorities setting conditions relating to the payment of minimum wages.

Further Statutory Guidance later in 2015 will cover areas including the Sustainable Procurement Duty, fair trade and tax dodging. There is separate guidance on blacklisting.

Support campaign to protect and extend FOI rights

Freedom of Information rights need to be defended at UK and Scottish levels, with action vital in the next couple of weeks.

The Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland is urging supporters to tell the Scottish and UK governments how essential FoI is and to back the campaign’s crowdfunding bid.

A shocking attack on FoI by the UK Government is underway, while in Scotland plans to extend legislation to cover some new bodies are feeble in the extreme.

Despite strong support for ensuring all bodies delivering public services are subject to FoI legislation, Scottish ministers are currently consulting only on including private prisons, providers of secure accommodation for children, grant-aided schools and independent special schools.

UNISON supports CFoIS in condemning the decision not to also add others, including housing associations and private contractors providing public services – extensions we have campaigned for over many years.

Big questions over increasing private financing for Scottish PPP programme

A strong investigation by the Guardian’s Severin Carrell today shows the Scottish Government is bringing in extra private sector funding and control to its multibillion pound infrastructure programme.

The aim is to keep key projects off balance sheet to ensure the Scottish Government meets European statistics agency Eurostat rules on measuring state spending.

Companies set up to deliver hospital, roads and other projects are being restructured, with greater private sector control and funding.

This is bad news for taxpayers and for accountability. Conventional funding with full democratic control and proper financial transparency is the best way to finance schools, hospitals and other infrastructure.

The changes have caused delays to contracts being signed off and are a major setback for the so-called Non Profit Distributing model and hub programme, which the Scottish Government tried to claim heralded the end of disastrously expensive Public Private Partnership/Private Finance Initiative schemes.

UNISON Scotland said such claims misrepresented the continuing widespread use of private finance in public infrastructure.

We have highlighted for years the ways in which the Scottish Futures Trust and the NPD model and hub, which it promotes, merely continued PPP/PFI with some ‘slight financial tweaking’ – PFI lite.

Indeed the SFT this year again won the Government PPP Promoter of the Year Gold Award.

However, the structures it helped set up seem to have fallen foul of the European System of Accounts 10 (ESA 10), applied in September 2014, despite seeking external financial advice five times since 2010 to ensure the correct classification for NPD/hub projects.

Interestingly, the increased dependence on private sector borrowing, as pointed out in the Guardian: “allows Holyrood to load up its balance sheet with more debt”, making it “far easier for Nicola Sturgeon’s government to borrow at least £2billion to fund further capital project and bolster its anti-austerity stance using new powers from the Scotland Act 2012.”

Finance Secretary John Swinney said in Parliament on June 18 that ESA 10 “is designed to provide a comparable estimate of the level of debt that is carried country by country across the European Union so that the levels of debt can be assessed on a comparable basis.

“Frankly, those definitions are constantly changing and are also then the subject of reinterpretation. The issues broadly relate to the governance of projects and whether they are controlled by the public sector or the private sector, and the acceptability of the approach to profit capping that is implicit in the NPD programme.”

He said in a letter to the Finance Committee on 1 June that the SFT has developed proposals for changes to contractual and shareholder arrangements for hub projects “which further strengthen the case for a private sector classification” and he has instructed the changes to be implemented across the hub programme, which should take 6-8 weeks.

The Guardian report says that a leaked SFT document shows that “for Hub projects affected by the changes, a 20% stake previously held in each by public-sector partners will be transferred to a new private-sector charity. That will give the private contractors the right to increase their shares in the new companies set up to deliver each project from 60% to 80%.”

The document says that “any perception of public sector control over the (project) delivery company must be avoided.”

Labour’s finance spokeswoman Jackie Baillie has tabled a series of questions in the Scottish Parliament, scheduled to be answered on Friday.

These include asking whether the Scottish Futures Trust’s revised structure for design-build-finance-maintain projects halves the public sector share of the project from 40% to 20% and, if so, for what reason.

And for what reason the construction of (a) Our Lady and St Patrick’s High School, (b) the North West Edinburgh Partnership Centre, (c) the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, (d) the Dumfries and Galloway Infirmary and (e) the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route has been delayed and what the (i) length and (ii) cost of the delay is.

There must be full transparency on the costs and effects of these changes, which clearly reinforce our reasoned opposition to PPP/PFI. And the Scottish Government should be using its coming, far too limited, extension of Freedom of Information law to cover all companies and other bodies providing public services.

Scottish Government 'must do better' on preventative spending

The Scottish Parliament Finance Committee today warned that nothing like enough is being done in Scotland on preventative spending.

It is widely agreed that in key areas of public services the focus needs to shift from tackling symptoms of disadvantage and inequality to addressing root causes, with what the Committee described as a “decisive shift to prevention.”

However, today’s report from the Committee on the Scottish Government’s Draft Budget 2015-16 makes clear that “there is little evidence of the essential shift in resources taking place to support a preventative approach.”

This is damning, but UNISON welcomes the Committee recognising the reality of the situation.

As the report shows, radical changes in shifting resources to prevention are hampered by the scale of the financial challenges facing public services.

We are urging politicians from all parties to act now to put fairness and tackling inequality at the heart of economic policy and to look at the vast amount of evidence in favour of this.

The cuts don't work - we need Food for Good in hospitals

14 July 2014

Today’s Herald has an exclusive report on criticism of the quality of food in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde hospitals.

The health board are to be praised for allowing a restaurateur David Maguire access to all areas when he volunteered to examine the meals and the preparation process in detail.

However, despite the claimed “increasingly positive feedback” from patients, the board must be wincing from his comments that: “What passes for food in the NHS bears no resemblance to anything that I have encountered...On occasions it looked like food. It rarely had the texture of food. It reminded me of the worst components that I have encountered at school meals.”

He summed up: “I am astonished that anyone eats any of it.”

No-one expects the NHS to serve the kind of food you would get in a top quality restaurant but people in hospital deserve to have, indeed need to have edible meals as part of their recovery. Mr Maguire offered his services after a column in the Herald last year by the paper’s writer Anne Johnstone who was being treated for leukaemia and was appalled at the food dished up to patients at the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre.

UNISON Scotland has long campaigned for fresh, nutritious, locally sourced food in schools and hospitals, highlighted in our Food for Good Charter. We noted that the Scottish Government’s recent discussion document “Becoming a Good Food Nation” called for, among other things, the public sector to lead by example with the NHS, local authorities and Scottish Government signing up to offer fresh, seasonal, local and sustainable produce.

We pointed out on this blog that if we’re serious about creating a real Good Food Nation, such an initiative, broadly reflecting our Charter, should come under public health. And of course, the cuts facing the health service, along with all public services, place enormous pressure on hard-pressed catering staff.

The Herald leader, acknowledging mass catering is very different from restaurant food preparation, points out: “..part of the problem is that the catering budget was cut by almost £1million in 2012 and the board now spends barely £4 per day per patient in some of its hospitals.” We agree with them that cutting back on the quality of food is a false economy. Glasgow is certainly not the only area undergoing cuts and our recent ‘The Cuts Don’t Work’ report shows ‘austerity’ measures leading to even deeper cuts in the next few years.

What kind of Scotland, what kind of health service, what kind of food for hospital patients do we want? Only so much can be done to drive up quality in the face of cuts if resources, equipment, and the times hospital kitchens are open all place big restrictions on what catering staff - who want to feed the patients well - can achieve.

Job losses and an ageing workforce spell trouble for services

50,000 jobs have been lost from the Scottish public sector workforce and a further 60,000 could go by 2019. Those who are left are getting older and young people are the losers.

I have been crunching the latest workforce data published before Christmas, together with other reports and forecasts on public sector staffing levels. There are three key points to make.

Firstly, the workforce continues to shrink in total and as a proportion of the Scottish workforce. The public sector as a percentage of the total Scottish workforce has fallen to 21.5% (547,300 headcount), barely one in five of the workforce. 49,500 jobs have been lost in the public sector across Scotland since the financial crash; 4,400 in the last year. That has an inevitable impact on the quantity and quality of public services, as well as the local economy. Public sector workers spend in their community and this, together with the wage freeze, is a major cause of the slow economic recovery. The big numbers have come from local government, although proportionately colleges have been hardest hit.

Secondly, the workforce is getting older. In 2013, the average age was 44 years and four months compared with 43 years and nine months in 2009. The biggest losers are young people, with those aged under 20 falling by 25%. Those aged between 50-59 actually increased by 5%. This is creating a retirement and skills blip that is likely to get worse if job losses continue under austerity economics, as recruitment freezes keep young people out of public service. Older workers on small average pensions are less likely to retire early because they will need to work on due to living costs and the later pension retirement age. They are also more expensive to release under early departure schemes that are anyway declining. The big job losses have actually come from natural wastage.

Thirdly, a further 60,000 jobs could be lost over the next five years. This year and next the numbers will be less severe, but after that they are forecast to increase dramatically. This number is extrapolated from the OBR and IFS forecasts for the UK, taking into account job losses already inflicted on Scotland. It is always difficult to be precise with this sort of calculation, but previous forecasts have not been far off the mark. It could actually be worse, because future cuts are likely to be concentrated in revenue spending as the CPPR paper highlights, and that is before any deliberate shift of spending from capital to revenue as the Scottish Government favours.

All of this creates very special problems for the workers who are left behind, as they try to keep the plates spinning on deteriorating Scottish public services.

Latest Census Results

The latest report from the 2011 is now available. This report focuses on education and the labour market in Scotland. While some argue that there are more up to date statistics,the point about the census is that everyone is surveyed at the same time. The return rate is very high. In fact it's an offence not to take part. The breadth of data and the ability to cross reference each question to the other questions means there is no better source for information on Scotland's people and their lives. Key findings:

A massive 27% of people living in Scotland have no qualifications, 1% more than the proportion that has degrees or equivalent. Another reason not to cut further education budgets.

Gender segregation in the workplace continues with women making up the vast majority of workers in caring, leisure and administrative and secretarial jobs.

While more people are working, partly because there are more people, there is also a growth in part-time workers: 530,000 people now work part-time. Almost five times more women than men work part-time.

Key categories in this report are:

Qualifications
Economic activity
Hours worked
Unemployment
Industry and occupation
Socio-economic classification (class)

These are all broken down by gender, age and local authority area. All really useful information for local campaigning.

Census reports are a vital source of information and the latest report will be poured over by a range of researchers, policy makers and planners. It is the key tool for planning future public services. How many schools, nurses, roads, and houses will we need? The data also forms the basis for ensuring that all other surveys are of groups that are representative of the wider population. So when you see a spat about whether surveys are worth believing, this is how you would check.

Significantly the UK government is planning to get rid of the census, another victim of their slash and burn of public services. Danny Dorling lays out here why cancelling the census is stupid. A report will go the Scottish government in 2015 let’s hope they decide to reject the UK government’s decision and carry on with a full Scottish Census.

Ten civil society priorities for the Procurement Reform Bill

The Scottish Government’s long-awaited Procurement Reform Bill was published last week – to major disappointment on a number of issues, particularly the Living Wage and sustainability.

UNISON, of course welcomes the fact that blacklisting is highlighted, along with the inappropriate use of zero hours contracts, as examples of practices that could see companies excluded from public sector contracts.

We had campaigned along with the STUC and other unions for action against blacklisting to be included in the Bill. We also wanted to see much stronger measures than are proposed for excluding companies involved in tax dodging.

However, there is widespread disappointment that the Scottish Government has made no mention of the Scottish Living Wage in the Bill or its accompanying documents. The Scottish Government is correctly a Living Wage employer itself, but ensuring contractors pay the Living Wage could make a major difference to tackling low pay, as well as helping local economies.

UNISON, as part of a coalition of coalitions involving the STUC, Enough Food for Everyone If, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Scottish Fair Trade Forum and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, has ten key asks for the Bill.

Scottish public services tackling climate change

UNISON Scotland has long argued that public services must lead by example in action on climate change.

In today’s Herald newspaper Paul Wedgwood of the Carbon Trust praises the world-leading legally binding climate targets in Scotland’s Climate Change Act.

And he says: “Action and leadership by the public sector will be the key to unlocking the scale of transformation required to create a sustainable Scotland by 2050.”

Yet he highlights that, of the recommended measures in carbon management plans developed by the Carbon Trust with 150 public sector bodies, two thirds have still to be implemented.