'Fake' charities, quangos and DEI advisors: Where SNP’s Ivan the Terrible should swing his axe – Murdo Fraser

Having shadowed McKee in various roles at Holyrood, I both like and admire him. He is one of few in the SNP with real business experience and, on that basis alone, is a good fit for this vital new role. But he is not going to find it easy.

Bringing a splash of humour to an otherwise fairly dull session last week when responding to the new Cabinet appointments, my Conservative MSP colleague Meghan Gallacher branded McKee “Ivan the Terrible”, with a riff on him appearing at the door of government departments wielding an axe and striking terror into the hearts of public servants.

Certainly the scale of spending reductions that will need to be made cannot be achieved by retaining existing staff head counts, and the question of who and where to cut will be fundamental to the success of McKee’s project.

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Scotland’s massive benefits bill

It is surprising that Swinney didn’t decide to combine the roles of public sector reform and finance, the latter responsibility being given to the new Deputy First Minister, Jenny Gilruth. McKee will only be successful in his project if he has the wholehearted backing both of her and of Swinney, otherwise he is likely to find vigorous resistance from other Cabinet Secretaries anxious to protect their budgets.

Astonishingly, Gilruth, in an interview at the weekend, repeated her claim that Scotland’s £7.4bn benefits’ bill for the SNP’s more generous welfare system in Scotland is not too high. It came the same day as it was being reported that Social Security Scotland is now spending an incredible £1,000 every single minute on payments to Scots suffering from stress and anxiety.

If the benefits’ budget cannot be touched and we assume that the same will apply to health and social care, that doesn’t leave much else. It suggests that other areas of spending such as education, transport, justice and local government are likely to see even more massive cuts than they have had to cope with in recent years, meaning that we, the, public are going to see much poorer public services as a consequence, whilst those on welfare will continue to be protected. This doesn’t sound like a credible, sustainable or popular approach for the SNP to take.

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Four swings of McKee’s axe

Any independent observer looking at the numbers will know that the benefits bill has to start coming down, otherwise there is no hope of the budget deficit being eliminated. But short of that happening, and in a spirit of constructive opposition, let me make a few suggestions as to where Ivan McKee and his colleagues could find some savings without a massively negative impact on public services.

Firstly, we need to have some rationalisation of a number of public bodies and quangos that exist across Scotland. Even Scotland’s Information Commissioner said last year that he could not believe the number of public bodies that existed, and kept coming across new ones.

These organisations might do valuable work, but each of them has to carry their own senior management, their own in-house HR and finance functions, maintain separate premises, and comply with annual audit and regulatory requirements. Surely there must be substantial savings to be made in management and administration from a programme of rationalisation.

Secondly, the long-standing policy of no compulsory redundancies in the public sector, introduced by the SNP as far back as 2007, needs to be rethought. As any employer knows, relying purely on voluntary severance, and not filling vacancies, means that it is not always the brightest and best who are left in a shrinking organisation. The trade unions wouldn’t like it, but it would ensure best value for money in the public services. When numbers have to fall, it cannot just be those who volunteer to leave who are let go.

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Thirdly, the whole lanyard class of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) advisors, those individuals who appear to spend their time ensuring public sector workers properly state their pronouns on emails, simply can no longer be afforded. If we have to reduce the public sector headcount, it can’t be those doing vital frontline roles such as teachers, nurses and social workers who are axed, but instead these luxury appointments that add nothing to a positive public experience. As we saw during the Sandie Peggie case, too many of these individuals are subject to policy capture by vocal and extreme lobby groups.

Fourthly, it is time to end government funding of ‘fake’ charities, by which I mean campaign groups that exist to lobby government but are themselves almost entirely reliant on government grants. The Equality Network comes to mind as an organisation pressing for gender self-ID and claiming charity status, despite being mostly funded by the public purse. If these campaign groups want to lobby government, then they should raise the money themselves and not rely upon the taxpayer to provide it.

These four simple measures would make a very useful start for Ivan the Terrible when considering how to tackle the deficit. I am always ready to offer more constructive advice. But whether he and his colleagues really have the courage to take the hard decisions that will be necessary to address the SNP’s black hole remains to be seen.

Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife