Why fewer means better for Scotland’s regulators

It’s a very good start, says Lorne Crerar, of his assault on the Byzantine organic complexity of the bodies which regulate Scotland’s public services. “It’s almost more than I could have hoped for.”

He’s talking about the reduction in the number of scrutiny bodies – inspectorates, commissions, tsars and the like – from 29 to 23, which will now take place thanks to proposals from the group he chaired.

The public services reform bill is currently under consideration at the Scottish Parliament. It will enshrine some of his proposals for the future regulation and scrutiny of health and social work services.

As part of the rationalisation, the Care Commission and the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA) will be dissolved, but Crerar hopes the government will go further in years to come. “We’ve reduced the number of agencies to 23. Maybe we don’t actually need 23 and only need 16, say. If this rationalisation makes sense, then by the same logic it will probably make sense again.”

The Scottish Government clearly thinks Crerar’s arguments make sense. It was the former Scottish Executive that commissioned him to look at revising the current set-up, which was seen as costly and burdensome.

But today’s ministers have been happy to back his proposals, including the most challenging – the call for a new regulatory body for health, combining the roles of what was NHS Quality Improvement Scotland, and part of the role of the Care Commission. Crerar points out that 49 of the 54 recommendations his group made were accepted in full.

Notably, the government is also following his suggestion by creating a social care inspectorate that will take on the existing job of the Social Work Inspection Agency and much of the rest of the Care Commission’s work.

The Care Commission will no longer exist, and nor will SWIA, which was only set up in 2005. Crerar is unapologetic about those agencies he is consigning to oblivion.

Indeed, he is fairly scathing about the roles some had come to serve, and the way that a watchdog, once established, becomes self-perpetuating.

SWIA, set up to inspect local authority social work has inspected all the councils now, he says. “Sometimes we need to recognise that once a scrutiny body has done what is has got to do, the job is completed,” he adds.

Instead what happens, Crerar argues, is that we end up with a cyclical inspection model which he sees as a waste of time and resources for all concerned.

“Cyclical inspections are an old hammer cracking a nut,” he says.

Regulation should be targeted and proportionate, he says.

The review came about because local authorities and other agencies that are subject to official scrutiny demanded a rethink.

Both they and Crerar agree regulation is necessary, to establish whether services are high quality and public money is being spent efficiently. But the squeals of objection were due to a system in which too many bodies had a call on precious time and resources.

Crerar plainly came to agree with those concerns. His report, originally published in 2007, includes flow charts that show one council answerable to at least 14 outside agencies. Meanwhile, Highland Council told the panel that it was subject to more than 200 inspections of different types during the course of a year.

Remits overlapped and much of it had grown up without a coherent plan, Crerar explains.

In fact, many agencies were the result of knee-jerk government reaction to a scandal or a crisis. That’s understandable, Crerar says. “When there is public outrage about these things happening it is easy to say, It’s OK, we are going to set up a formal scrutiny body’. I recognise the pressure on politicians.

“But we were saying you should not create any more bodies. There are plenty already – ask an existing one to do the job.”

There were two problems with setting up bodies in this way, Crerar explains. Firstly, a new agency would have to find its position in a crowded public sector landscape. Secondly, it would quickly be pretty redundant, having finished the task it was set up to perform.

Hence some strange anomalies – Crerar draws attention to the Care Commission which is responsible for monitoring standards in privately-run hospitals, a role he describes as “bizarre”. He also sees it as strange that the social work inspectorate doesn’t oversee child protection. That is done by education inspectors.

Agencies have ended up “bumping into each other all over the place,” Crerar explains.

In many cases, where remits overlap, they have ended up doing joint inspections. “It was seen as the answer but it is part of the problem. The much more difficult answer is to say to one body, you are accountable for this, you are in charge.”

What Crerar’s report proposed is a slimmed down roster of scrutiny bodies that are answerable to parliament, and depend much more on self assessment by public services they cover. Assessment processes should be similar in methodology, clear in their goals.

That isn’t without pitfalls, as Crerar acknowledges. “Self assessment most certainly can be self-delusionary, so what the scrutiny bodies have to do is make sure there are very robust systems embedded to check that. At present, in many cases, there are not,” he says.

If services self-regulate to a degree, the agencies charged with overseeing them can concentrate on the few that generate complaints or other cause for concern.

Meanwhile, he says, the agencies will be more clearly independent and more accountable to parliament. “I hope they will come before committees and be interrogated,” he adds.

“I want to see scrutiny much more meaningful for the public,” Crerar explains. “Simple things like, why do bodies say, We have the citizen completely at heart’, then report their views in an indigestible way? Too often scrutiny is designed for another purpose, not for people who use the services.”

The outcome of Crerar’s review, according to the Scottish Government, will be a 25% reduction in time spent by local authorities answering to inspection bodies. “It means more resources will be going to service delivery, rather than scrutiny.”

It’s also, if he has his way, only the start.