Public services may join forces in radical plan

Emergency services, health boards and councils are discussing radical proposals to see how Scotland’s cash-strapped public sector could be reorganised by themes such as child protection, rather than on traditional service models.

Under the plans, staff would work for the violence prevention body or domestic abuse body rather than working strictly within health, social work or policing.

David Strang, chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, told The Herald he is in talks with the heads of other emergency services and council chief executives in his area to look at radical alternatives to the status quo.

Police forces and the rest of the public sector have been told to expect budget cuts of up to 25% over the next four years.

“We have to look at cutting the pie a different way,” said Strang. “We are in talks with other forces about shared services and we are also working with the public sector and talking with the health boards and fire service as well.

“Rather than saying it is a health problem or a crime problem, it is the notion that we all have a responsibility for people’s wellbeing.

“We are exploring with partners how we might put this into action. It might be focused on dealing with a particular problem in a neighbourhood or with a particular child. The solution might be more street lighting.

“One part is whether we save money by sharing facilities. The other bit, which is more radical, is for completely joint service provision.

“The sorts of areas we could look at would be child protection, anti-social behaviour and domestic abuse. Where there is overlap with health and other services such as education, it is worth looking at this.

“Violence prevention, drugs and alcohol and reducing casualties on the roads would all be areas worth considering.”

Local authorities, police and health boards have all improved their joint working in recent years – particularly in relation to child protection, where the lack of a joined-up approach has been cited in the past for contributing to the deaths of particular children such as Danielle Reid in Inverness.

“It is worth looking at whether there might be a new model of public-sector leadership with a child-centred approach that looks at more creative ways of addressing the problem,” said Strang.

“It is radical because it might include shared budgets and shared governance and accountability.

“Barriers still exist between different services. At the moment we have a problem still with information sharing.

“Currently we all work together but then go back to our different organisations. We come together for case conferences but still manage cases separately.

“We could say in an area such as child protection that you could have one public sector and one person in charge. Rather than the police, health and education all having their own separate databases, you could have one single database so there could never be any accusation that police or health are not sharing data on a particular person.

“We all have a duty to explore some of the more radical options and look at how we could remove barriers because the focus should be on the best outcomes for the child and the community.

“If by doing this we can get better outcomes and save some money, then let’s do it. We should have shared IT and databases, shared performance measures, shared budgets and co-location.”

He added: “I am meeting next month with the chief executives of the local authorities. In the public’s mind the police are there to investigate crime and patrol, and that is still our bread and butter and would continue, but we are changing our focus to do more long-term prevention work to drive down crime.

“Policing would still have to be independent from politicians and the details of who would be in charge of each area have not been agreed.”

When sharing information is vital

When five-year-old Danielle Reid was murdered by her mother’s boyfriend and dumped in the Caledonian Canal in Inverness in early 2002, it took months for services even to realise that she had gone missing.

Her school teachers had been told the family were moving to Manchester and no-one checked whether she arrived at her next school.

The subsequent independent inquiry did not blame social workers, or others. But it did make 68 different recommendations, and many of them – as with the inquiries following so many other tragic child deaths – focused on joint working and greater sharing of information.

Recommendations included tracking offenders, multi-agency management of transitions and the tracking of missing children.

Highland Council has since been praised for its integrated approach. However, the agencies, databases and budgets are still separate.

Under the proposals being discussed in Lothian and Borders, a group of social workers, police, doctors, education experts and others would work on a single aim, with one boss and one budget and a completely shared database.

Rather than coming together for a multi-agency management meeting and then going their separate ways – as with current models – these staff would work together permanently.