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With attention focused on the public finances and the defining moment of the comprehensive spending review next Wednesday, there's a gathering pace to the pressure for serious solutions.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland's Great Cuts Debate told us on Wednesday night that the consensus remains strong around protecting certain services. But neither public participants nor party representatives seemed willing to engage in the difficult bit about priorities and awkward choices.
Scotland's political timetable, with an election little more than six months away, makes that difficult.

That's where think tanks come in handy. Scotland doesn't have enough of them to do its independent thinking. Based in London, the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, a Lottery-funded innovation tank, is soon to deliver a significant contribution to the thinking on Scottish public service reform.

This week, it's been the turn of the David Hume Institute to weigh in, in the heavyweight category, with a series of essays. Among the authors are academics, three former civil servants in St Andrew's House and the Auditor General.

The former mandarins are interesting for having been creatures of the government machine, and now able to bring that experience to bear. Jim Gallagher is co-editor with the Hume Institute's director Jeremy Peat, and among their conclusions is the need for transparency, with the civil service opening up thinking to outsiders. They suggest, for instance, Crawford Beveridge's Independent Budget Review panel could continue its work.

While emphasising that the public service challenge must not be treated as short-term, they also point to no single solution, but the need for a range of them: "silver buckshot rather than a silver bullet".

New politics of necessity

Eddie Frizzell also sat at the top table in St Andrew's House and is now a professor at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh. He sounds unimpressed by the failure of the public sector to change culture - in the NHS, for instance, "despite 30 years of strategies, initiatives, restructurings and efficiency reviews".

He concludes that it would be a welcome outcome of straitened times if Scotland could move from the bottom to the top of the entrepreneurial league table.

"The 'new politics' which devolution has not delivered may still come," he writes. "Necessity may drive the culture change we require:
In our public bodies as employees realise that their jobs depend on it, and in Scotland at large as the importance of private enterprise is recognised and a smaller public sector frees up the space it needs to flourish."

The new politics extends to a contribution from a serving council chief executive. And even though David Hume (no, the institute was not named after him) sits atop Scottish Borders Council, the frustrations, constraints and desire for serious change within the public service are very evident.

He sees adversity as a good time to drive change, or as Barack Obama's outgoing chief of staff observed: "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste".

Big Society

Hume's been influenced by the US authors David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, who nearly 20 years ago wrote the influential book 'Reinventing Government'. What's clear from recalling it is that it wasn't all that influential in Scotland.

Using the same template, Hume tears into the lack of any serious discussion about, or measurement of, productivity in the public sector. Without knowing how you're performing, there's limited leverage to keep costs under control, and wage negotiations are a one-dimensional process that only leads to increasing labour costs.

He hints strongly that, even if the Scottish government doesn't like the sound of David Cameron's Big Society of volunteering, local government should get on board for it. It will require a radical change in the way public officials work with community representatives, says Hume.

There's sharp criticism of councils for failing to figure out better ways of sharing services and pooling resources. Hume wants them to standardise, simplify and share.

And there's what he calls 'the challenge of place': pooling budgets for a local community and using them to get outcomes rather than defining services and allocating money to them.

"Great power and initiative can be released from communities and partners, and government will benefit from being more enterprising and committed to early intervention and prevention," he concludes.

This talk of local brings back to mind one of the findings that struck me most from talking to historians for the documentary 'The State Scots Are In' (still on iPlayer until Tuesday).

While the state's role was to set expectations and guidelines from the 17th century on, public services were overwhelmingly local until after World War I. The centralisation of the state grew out of the radical and expensive measures to combat inter-war Depression.

And according to Professor Lindsay Paterson, one of the roots of the Scottish National Party in that era was embedded in favour of that localism while in the reaction against that centralisation in St Andrew's House. Are those roots still evident as it meets in Perth this weekend?