The same day, at the launch of the Scottish Executive's refreshed economic development strategy (FEDS), McConnell made improving productivity in both the public and private sectors "the centrepiece" of his whole approach.
"Nationally, the government has produced targets of 1.25% each year cash savings in government spending across departments," he said. "We in Scotland will go further than that and, in three years' time, we will have targeted a minimum of 2% cash savings in government spending."
In both the FT interview and at the FEDS launch, McConnell remained coy about the implications for public sector jobs. In July, in the wake of the UK government's biennial spending review, the Scottish Executive had insisted it had no plans for a jobs cull. By last weekend, the first minister seemed to be changing his tune. "It's not possible to achieve (the scale of savings envisaged) without job reorganisations and, in some cases, job cuts," he told BBC Radio Scotland.
However McConnell's finance minister Andy Kerr, who unveils his latest spending review at the end of this month, has apparently been reassuring trade unions privately that no jobs need be lost in this drive to out-Gershorn Gershorn in Scotland. Quite how that can be achieved in administration budgets where, typically, three pounds in every four goes on staff costs remains a mystery.
It is not the only one. The executive's questionable claim that its planned cash savings of £500m a year by 2007/08 will outstrip those Gordon Brown is targeting in Whitehall is another big puzzle. It is already coming under intense critical scrutiny.
I understand Holyrood's finance committee discussed its concerns at a recent away day. Former cabinet member Wendy Alexander pressed McConnell on the issue at first minister's questions yesterday. And now the finance committee's special adviser, Professor Arthur Midwinter, is poised to crystallise his own personal doubts about the executive's cost savings claims in a paper going to the committee's next meeting on Tuesday.
Midwinter said last night: "I have already advised the committee I am sceptical about the executive's claims. The current confusion about the scale of the savings and whether there will be job losses really needs to be clarified. We appear to be getting different versions from the first minister and the finance minister. We need a more robust and rigorous reporting framework than this."
Midwinter's concerns are similar to those I aired in a piece written in the immediate aftermath of Brown's July spending review. Prior to the chancellor's statement, on June 24, Kerr had revealed his own three-year plan for efficient government to MSPs.
Kerr's "attack on waste, bureaucracy and duplication in Scotland's public sector" would, he told parliament, save £500m in 2007/08, rising to £1bn by 2009/10. But no savings at all were planned, apparently, for the first two years of the coming spending round – 2005/06 and 2006/07. And the savings promised beyond 2008 mean nothing until we have assigned budgets to match them against.
I questioned whether Kerr's waste attack went nearly far enough to meet the chancellor's promise that promised efficiency drives in the UK's devolved administrations over the next three years would be "as ambitious as those in England".
We already know, from the latest Brown spending review, that the executive will have an assigned budget of £25.5bn by 2007/08. Saving £500m cash from that total produces a saving of 1.96% – presumably the 2% that the first minister was boasting about last week.
But on the basis of Kerr's June statement, those savings only start happening then, two years after the chancellor's own Gershorn drive is due to start biting. Were the Scottish Executive to bring its efficiency drive forward to next April, in line with Gershorn, saving 2% cash a year would, Midwinter calculates, release £1.45bn in total for frontline services by 2007/08 – not the £500m Scotland's finance minister is promising.
Then there is the mystery of McConnell's claim that, while his administration will be saving 2% a year in cash terms by 2007/08, Gordon Brown will only be managing a paltry 1.25%. That claim does not seem to stand up to numerical scrutiny. July's UK spending review set efficiency targets across Whitehall departments totalling £21.48bn. As a percentage of total UK government spending (excluding the devolved administrations) that works out at 7.3% by 2007/08, or around 2.5% savings a year between next April and 2007/08, not 1.25%.
Note that, when McConnell told the FEDS launch that London's savings target was only 1.25% a year, he was talking exclusively about "cash" savings. The Gershorn review came up with a mix of cash savings (roughly 60% of that £21.48bn target by 2007/08) and what it called "productive time savings", accounting for the rest.
Productive time savings is all about getting more policemen back on the beat and more teachers back in the classroom, freed of the burden of paper shuffling and other admin.
Although the first minister has laid great stress on this kind of productivity enhancement in our public realm, he appears to have excluded that aspect of Gershorn in its entirety in making clear his ambition to be ahead of the rest of the UK when it comes to efficient government.
However, as Midwinter points out, even if you only allocate 60% of Brown's overall summer savings target to cash, that's still some £13bn out of the total of £21.48bn. That still works out at a saving of 4.4% by 2007/08, comfortably ahead of the 2% the Scottish Executive is targeting.
It looks as if Scotland's first minister has some serious explaining to do about his claim to be out-Gershorning Gershorn. What we've had so far looks more like spin than substance.
Autor: Alf Young
Quelle: The Herald,, 09.09.2004