Scotland’s public services ‘hollowed out’ by £3bn outsourcing leak |
A new report from Scotland’s largest trade union body has revealed a £3 billion outsourcing scandal at the heart of Scotland’s public services. STUC General Secretary and Herald columninst Roz Foyer says the Finance Secretary must “stop the rot” of profiteering throughout the services that matter to the public.
Next month, the Scottish Parliament will debate a budget that ministers insist will involve “difficult choices.” It’s language we’ve heard time and time again. While I don’t dispute there are difficult choices ahead, too often that language is an attempt to rob working people of their agency in an effort to present spending cuts as inevitable.
But a major new report commissioned by the STUC and written by the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) tells a different story: Scotland is not short of money; we’re being drained of money via a decades-long model of outsourcing and profiteering within our public services that is now costing us between £2 and £3 billion every single year.
Put simply: the money is there for our public service – it just ends up being extracted by multinational companies and private finance.
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We’ve all seen how under pressure our public services are. We all know the Russian Roulette system of getting a GP appointment or trying to get seen by the dentist. At a time when our NHS, local councils, social care system and schools are all stretched to breaking point, this report lays bare the scale of the leak at the bottom of the bucket.
Scotland spends more than £16 billion a year buying........