This is the final blog in a series of three considering Scotland’s new phase of Public Service Reform. Irene Beautyman, former Place and Wellbeing Partnership Lead, discusses the growing recognition that our public services need to become more preventative, more collaborative and more focused on the outcomes that matter to people and communities.
If we are serious about turning that ambition into reality, there is a challenging question we need to ask: What is stopping us from putting what we already know into practice?
In my first blog in this series, I explored why place matters to public service reform. The places where people live, work and spend time shape their health, wellbeing and opportunities, and place provides a common focus around which different sectors and communities can work together to prevent poor outcomes.
In my second, I argued that land use planning should be recognised as one of Scotland’s most important preventative public services. Planning decisions shape the conditions in which people live for years, influencing everything from access to housing and green space to active travel, services and social connection.
However, knowing what matters is not the same as changing what happens. Scotland is not short of evidence, policy or frameworks to support change.
For years now my passion has been to improve our understanding about the relationship between place and health. To raise awareness of and support the implementation of place-based approaches and collaboration across organisational boundaries. National Planning Framework 4 provides a strong policy foundation. The Place and Wellbeing Outcomes give us a shared, evidenced understanding of what every place should offer if people are to thrive.
So perhaps the implementation gap lies between knowing what needs to be done and deciding to do it.
We can understand what contributes to healthier and fairer places, but that knowledge does not automatically influence every decision about investment, development, transport, housing or public services. This is where public service reform needs to go beyond creating new strategies, structures and processes. It needs to consider how decisions are affecting people and places.
There has been significant progress in recognising that no organisation can improve outcomes alone. Collaboration has become a central part of place-based working and public service reform. However, there is a risk that collaboration becomes an end in itself. The real test of collaboration is not how many organisations are represented around a table but whether the decisions made around that table are different as a result.
For place-based working to deliver its potential, partners need to develop a genuinely shared understanding of the outcomes they are trying to achieve and use that understanding to shape shared priorities, resources and decisions. That requires trust, leadership and sometimes a willingness to give up a degree of organisational control in pursuit of a shared outcome.
From frameworks to decisions
Frameworks can help us understand what we are trying to achieve. But their value ultimately depends on whether they influence decisions.
The Place and Wellbeing Outcomes are a good example. They provide a common language for considering how places can support health, wellbeing and equality across five interconnected themes: Movement, Spaces, Resources, Civic and Stewardship. Their value lies in helping us ask better questions before decisions are made.
What will this decision mean for people’s ability to move around their neighbourhood?
What spaces and opportunities will people have to connect with nature and with one another?
Will people have access to the resources they need?
Will they have opportunities to participate and influence decisions?
Are we creating places that can adapt and thrive over the long term?
The challenge is ensuring that these questions become a driving part of more collaborative decisions, rather than something considered one organisation at a time. That distinction matters. We need to consider our collective impact.
We also need to learn from what we do
Aline Kirkland’s recent blog on planning, data and monitoring highlights another important part of public service reform: the need to understand whether our policies and interventions are actually producing the outcomes we want.
In other words, implementation isn’t the final stage of policy. It is part of the learning process. And we need to learn from what happens so that the next decision is better informed.
Reforming the way we work
Craig McLaren’s recent reflections on what public service reform could mean for planning also highlight an important point: reform is not simply about asking existing services to deliver more. It creates an opportunity to rethink how services work to deliver on outcomes.
For planning, that might mean simplifying processes, managing demand differently, sharing expertise and data, making better use of digital technology and AI, and thinking differently about how planning authorities engage with communities and stakeholders.
Closing the gap
Perhaps the implementation challenge can therefore be thought of as a cycle:
Know → Decide → Do → Learn
It requires leadership, capacity, collaboration and a willingness to work differently across organisational boundaries. Scotland already has many of the building blocks and the opportunity presented by public service reform is to connect them.
For those of us working with place, this means making sure that place-based approaches are not simply programmes, projects or ways of bringing people together. They need to become part of the way decisions are routinely made to maximise their contribution to prevention.
Place based approaches and land use planning can help implement the kind of public service reform we need: creating the conditions for people to thrive rather than playing a resource intensive game of catch up when people are already struggling.
The success of public service reform will not be measured by the number of strategies produced, partnerships established or processes redesigned. It will be measured by whether people experience better lives as a result. And we do that more efficiently when we can prevent rather than react to Scotland’s inequities.