Same country? The Scotland/England public policy divide

In the last week, we have seen the Scottish Government pumping an extra £550m into an £842m Glasgow health campus with the First Minister confirming the SNP’s policy “…determination to avoid private finance for new projects in Scotland” and the announcement of £25m to go into new council housing building. Both of these follow the rejection of the SNP’s “Scottish Futures Trust” idea by the Treasury.

In England, the NHS Confederation has called for social insurance to cover the escalating costs of dementia and other debilitating conditions, estimated to triple to £30bn pa by 2026. We’ve also heard that there’s to be a new joint project by the Treasury and the Cabinet Office that will create the evidence base to demonstrate the value added by the third sector as a prelude to their greater involvement in delivering public services.

Not only does the policy gap appear to be widening – public expenditure in Scotland, private expenditure in England – but there also seems to be a basic difference in perception.  In England the state apparently cannot afford either the cost of an aging English population nor the historic ‘post-box’ model of the delivery of public services – services delivered to the individual by employees - whereas north of the border different rules seem to apply. Surely, both models can’t be right, so what’s going on?

There are a number of potential explanations: the Scottish government ignoring demographics in a mad dash for independence when all will be resolved through north sea oil revenues, a too-generous Block Grant settlement for Scotland in the Comprehensive Spending Review, a too-great a readiness to embrace the private and third sectors in England or a combination of all of these.

One thing is certain, though: the driving facts of an aging population and not enough working people to pay for them apply more-or-less equally on both sides of the border and whatever governments are in power, they will not be able to ignore them.

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