5th September 2026
John Swinney has made it clear that Scotland's public sector cannot continue operating in quite the same way it has for decades.
There are too many organisations, too many overlapping responsibilities and, in some cases, too many layers of management.
The Scottish Government now intends to do something about it.
The Programme for Government sets out an ambitious programme of public-service reform which could see organisations merged, transferred, consolidated or abolished over the next five years. It is potentially one of the biggest reorganisations of Scotland's public sector in a generation.
The important question, however, is not simply who is getting merged?
It is what will actually happen when they are merged, how much will it cost, and how much will taxpayers ultimately save?
Because a merger is not the same thing as a saving.
The environmental super-body
Perhaps the clearest example is the proposal to bring Scotland's major environmental organisations together.
The Government is proposing a single overarching environmental body bringing together SEPA, NatureScot and Zero Waste Scotland, with Scottish Forestry also being considered as part of the wider restructuring.
At first sight there is an obvious argument for this.
SEPA regulates pollution, water, waste and environmental protection.
NatureScot deals with biodiversity, protected areas and Scotland's natural heritage.
Zero Waste Scotland concentrates on waste reduction, recycling and the circular economy.
Scottish Forestry has responsibilities covering forestry, woodland creation, regulation and support.
There is undoubtedly overlap between some of the work.
A farmer, landowner, developer or business can potentially encounter more than one of these organisations when dealing with a project.
Putting more functions under one roof could therefore reduce duplicated administration, procurement, IT and management.
But it also creates an enormous organisation.
These are not four identical businesses doing the same thing.
They have different statutory responsibilities, different professional skills and different organisational cultures.
A merger will therefore require new management structures, employment arrangements, IT integration, property decisions and probably substantial organisational change before the first long-term saving is achieved.
The Government needs to show the public what it believes the net saving will be after those costs.
Transport Scotland could come back inside Government
Another significant proposal concerns Transport Scotland.
The Government is proposing to bring Transport Scotland back into the Scottish Government rather than continuing with the existing executive-agency structure. Other transport bodies are also being reviewed for possible merger or rationalisation.
Again, the theory is straightforward.
Why maintain separate administrative structures if the same work can be performed within Government?
But Transport Scotland is a substantial organisation involved in roads, transport infrastructure, public transport and major capital programmes.
Bringing it back into the civil service does not make those responsibilities disappear.
The Government will still need people to manage the A9, A96, trunk roads, ferries, transport policy and infrastructure programmes.
The question therefore becomes how many layers of management and administration can genuinely be removed.
That is where the savings need to be measured.
Architecture and Design Scotland could disappear as a separate body
Another proposal is to transfer the functions of Architecture & Design Scotland into More Homes Scotland.
This is perhaps less dramatic than merging four environmental bodies, but it illustrates the Government's approach.
Rather than maintaining a separate organisation, its functions would become part of another body.
There can be good reasons for doing this.
A smaller organisation can potentially operate with less corporate overhead.
But again, there is a question about what happens to the staff, offices, IT, governance and senior management.
If the existing functions remain almost exactly as they are, but the organisation has a different name, the saving may be relatively small.
If substantial duplication is removed, the saving could be considerably greater.
That distinction matters.
Food organisations are also being reorganised
The Government is proposing changes involving the Scottish Food Commission and the Scottish Pubs Code Adjudicator, with functions being brought into Food Standards Scotland while maintaining independent scrutiny arrangements.
This is another example where the Government is trying to reduce the number of separate public bodies.
There is a logical argument for bringing related responsibilities together.
But independence is important when an organisation has a regulatory or adjudication role.
The Government therefore has to achieve administrative consolidation without weakening the independence of functions that are supposed to scrutinise or regulate parts of the economy.
That is not impossible.
It simply means the new structure has to be carefully designed.
The NHS could be the biggest change of all
Then we reach the enormous question of health.
The Scottish Government's wider programme envisages a substantial simplification of the health and social-care structure. Earlier consultation work has already examined the creation of Public Services Delivery Scotland, combining NHS National Services Scotland and NHS Education for Scotland to strengthen national delivery and digital transformation.
The territorial NHS structure is also being reconsidered, with the Government proposing a much smaller number of strategic health boards.
This is where the potential savings become enormous, but so do the risks.
There are administrative savings that could be made by combining procurement, finance, HR, IT and other corporate functions.
But healthcare is not simply an administrative exercise.
Scotland has enormous geographical differences.
What works in Glasgow cannot necessarily be transplanted directly to Caithness, the Western Isles or the Highlands.
The danger is that a reduction in the number of boards is interpreted as proof that the NHS itself has become more efficient.
It might.
But it might also simply create much larger organisations.
The test must therefore be what happens to the cost per patient and the quality and accessibility of services.
Ferries are also heading towards consolidation
The Government is looking at a single ferries body for the Clyde and Western Isles routes.
This is particularly interesting given Scotland's continuing ferry problems.
The argument for consolidation is easy to understand.
A single organisation could potentially provide consistent procurement, fleet planning, engineering, staffing and management.
But here again there is a difference between organisational efficiency and operational efficiency.
If the new organisation has a smaller headquarters but the ferries are still late, unavailable or expensive, the public will rightly ask what has actually been achieved.
The ultimate test is not how many boxes appear on an organisational chart.
It is whether the ferry actually arrives.
Revenue Scotland could become much bigger
There is also a proposal to broaden the role of Revenue Scotland, potentially giving it responsibility for additional revenue-collection functions.
This is a different kind of reform.
Instead of merging several organisations into one, the Government could concentrate revenue collection in an existing specialist organisation.
There could be obvious economies of scale.
A single organisation could potentially share technology, compliance expertise and administrative infrastructure across several taxes or charges.
But expanding an organisation also means expanding its responsibilities.
The Government will need to demonstrate that additional responsibilities genuinely reduce the overall cost of tax administration rather than simply creating a larger organisation.
Public watchdogs and commissioners
Another proposal concerns Scotland's network of commissioners and public watchdogs.
The Government wants to look at whether the number of separate organisations carrying out these functions can be consolidated while maintaining their independence.
Again, there is a reasonable question to ask.
Does Scotland really need separate administrative machinery behind every individual oversight function?
Could corporate services be shared while keeping the commissioners themselves independent?
That could potentially produce savings without reducing scrutiny.
But independence has to remain more than a word on paper.
A watchdog cannot be genuinely independent if its ability to operate is effectively controlled by the organisation it is supposed to scrutinise.
Public land is another area for consolidation
The Government also wants to investigate bringing together bodies involved in managing Scotland's public land assets.
This could eventually become quite significant.
Scotland has enormous publicly owned landholdings spread across different organisations.
If management can be coordinated more effectively, there could be savings in property management, procurement, maintenance and administration.
But it could also create opportunities to look at how public land itself is used.
That is potentially much more interesting than simply reducing administration.
Could land currently sitting unused be brought into productive use?
Could some be used for housing?
Could agricultural land be made available to new entrants?
Could public land support economic development in rural areas?
A restructuring exercise should not concentrate solely on reducing the number of employees.
It should also ask whether Scotland's assets are being used efficiently.
And then there is local government
Perhaps the most politically sensitive reform has not yet reached the final stage.
The Scottish Government is examining the future shape of local governance and is consulting on ways of sharing resources and achieving greater economies of scale.
There are 32 Scottish councils.
The argument for greater cooperation is strong.
Councils could potentially share procurement, IT, finance, HR, specialist services and other back-office functions.
But there is a danger in assuming that bigger automatically means better.
For rural Scotland, local knowledge matters.
A large administrative structure based hundreds of miles away can look extremely efficient on a spreadsheet.
It can look rather less efficient to the person trying to get a pothole repaired.
That is why the Government needs to distinguish between sharing a service and centralising a service.
They are not necessarily the same thing.
The bill comes before the saving
This is the part of the reform programme that deserves much more attention.
The Scottish Government's 2026 Spending Review already identifies significant efficiency and productivity savings across portfolios.
For example, health and social care has identified hundreds of millions of pounds of annual efficiencies, including NHS board recurring savings. Other portfolios identify workforce reductions, digital improvements, estates savings and service reforms.
That is significant.
But these figures should not be confused with the eventual cash benefit of every merger.
A reorganisation can require substantial expenditure before it produces savings.
There may be redundancy and early-retirement costs.
There may be legal costs.
There will be IT costs.
There may be new buildings or refurbishment.
Old contracts may have to be terminated.
New contracts negotiated.
Staff retrained.
Databases integrated.
Organisations rebranded.
Management structures redesigned.
All of this consumes money.
And it consumes something else that is rarely included in the headline figures.
Staff time.
Senior managers who should be running services can spend months or years managing reorganisations.
Employees become uncertain about their futures.
Projects can be delayed.
Productivity can fall temporarily.
That does not mean reform should not happen.
It means reform needs a proper business case.
Scotland has to avoid the great reorganisation trap
There is a familiar danger in public administration.
An organisation becomes inefficient.
Government announces reform.
A new organisation is created.
The old organisation disappears.
Everyone celebrates the reduction in the number of public bodies.
And five years later the new organisation employs almost as many people as the old organisations did collectively.
The headquarters may have moved.
The logos may have changed.
The management structure may be different.
But the underlying work remains.
That is not transformation.
It is reorganisation.
The difference is crucial.
True reform asks:
What work can be stopped?
What work can be automated?
What functions genuinely need separate management?
What can be shared?
What can be delivered locally?
What can be delivered more cheaply?
Only after those questions have been answered should the organisational structure be designed.
The Highland question
For people in the Highlands, there is an additional concern.
Whenever public organisations are rationalised, there is a temptation to centralise.
The argument is compelling.
Why maintain several small offices when one larger centre can provide the same service?
But Scotland's geography means that what looks inefficient from Edinburgh can sometimes be essential locally.
If a public body is merged and its administrative functions become concentrated in Glasgow, Edinburgh or even Inverness, the saving on the Government's balance sheet could represent a loss to another Scottish community.
That is why every proposed merger should publish its regional impact.
How many jobs are affected?
Where are they currently located?
Where will the replacement jobs be?
How much office space will disappear?
How much money is being spent locally?
And how will service delivery change?
Those questions are particularly important in rural Scotland.
What should taxpayers demand?
There is nothing wrong with John Swinney trying to make Scotland's public sector smaller and more efficient.
Indeed, given the pressure on public finances, it is arguably unavoidable.
But taxpayers should not be asked to accept a promise of savings without seeing the arithmetic.
For every major merger there should be four figures.
The cost of the reorganisation.
The annual gross saving.
The annual cost of running the new structure.
And most importantly:
The net saving and the date on which taxpayers actually start to benefit.
That last figure is the one that matters.
If it costs £50 million to achieve a reform that eventually saves £20 million a year, that could still be an excellent investment.
But the public needs to know that £50 million has to be found first.
And if the eventual saving is only £5 million a year, the payback period looks very different.
This could be one of Scotland's biggest reforms for decades
Swinney is effectively challenging a public sector that has evolved over many years.
Some organisations were created for very good reasons.
Some may now have overlapping responsibilities.
Some may be able to share services.
Some may no longer need to exist as separate organisations.
That is a debate worth having.
But Scotland should resist the temptation to measure success simply by counting how many organisations have disappeared.
The real measure should be whether taxpayers receive better public services for less money.
If four organisations become one and £30 million of unnecessary administration disappears, that is a success.
If four organisations become one and the same £30 million of administration simply appears inside the new organisation, it isn't.
If the NHS has fewer boards but patients wait longer, that is not necessarily reform.
If local government has fewer management structures but services become more remote, that is not necessarily reform either.
And if Transport Scotland is brought inside Government but the cost of delivering transport infrastructure remains broadly unchanged, the organisational change may have achieved very little.
The coming years will therefore tell us whether Scotland is witnessing genuine public-sector transformation or simply another round of administrative restructuring.
The opportunity is enormous.
So is the risk.
Because one thing is certain.
The savings will be measured in millions.
The cost of making the changes will also be measured in millions.
And before Scotland starts celebrating the money it might save, taxpayers deserve to know how much they will first have to spend to get there.