Rewiring the Scottish state
The Scottish Government’s announcement on public service reform is a chance to rethink not just how our public services work, but where power sits.
Under the initial proposals, NHS territorial boards would fall from 14 to 2, and Scotland’s 32 unitary authorities would be restructured into between 6 and 10 regional councils, alongside 120 to 160 local councils.
Nothing is settled yet. The proposals have been shared with COSLA and Holyrood committees as a starting point for debate, legislation is expected, and councils are in the middle of a three-month round of talks.
For Katie Kelly, chair of New Local, former Depute Chief Executive with East Ayrshire Council and former chair of the Scottish Government’s Democracy Matters Steering Group, the key question is: how do we change the relationship between the state, public services, people and communities?
I have spent much of my working life exploring what makes public services effective and what it takes to create lasting change. Through the Vibrant Communities work in East Ayrshire, and later in my role as Chair of New Local, I have witnessed firsthand the transformative impact that community power can have on the wellbeing, confidence and happiness of local people. Across communities in the UK and Europe, I have seen powerful examples of self-determination, compassion and hope. These stories continue to inspire me and strengthen my belief that we must fundamentally transform how we work together to create better futures for people and places.
One thing has become increasingly clear to me: we cannot transform public services simply by changing structures. We also need to change relationships.
Of course, how services are organised matters. We need to make the best use of public resources, reduce unnecessary duplication and ensure that organisations work together effectively. But these are means to an end, not the end itself.
The more fundamental question is this: how do we create a state that works alongside people, recognises the strengths of communities and gives both the power and opportunity to shape the things that matter in their lives?
That is the opportunity I see in Scotland’s reform agenda.
The real test is not how we reorganise the state, but how we change the relationship between the state, people and communities.
Much of the debate about public service reform will inevitably focus on structures, governance, efficiency and accountability.
We can redraw boundaries, bring organisations together and create new arrangements. But, if people still struggle to influence decisions that affect their lives, if professionals remain constrained by organisational boundaries, and if communities are treated as recipients of services rather than partners in shaping them, how much will really have changed?
For me, there is a simple test for any proposal that emerges:
Will people and communities have more power to shape what happens in their lives and in their places than they do today?
I believe we need to start with people and places, rather than institutions. People’s lives do not fit neatly into organisational boundaries, and the challenges facing families and communities rarely belong to just one service. Yet our systems have too often been designed around individual organisations, their responsibilities and their processes, rather than the lives people lead.
A more relational approach starts somewhere different. It begins with listening to people’s experiences, understanding their hopes and dreams and recognising the strengths that already exist in communities. It encourages professionals to work across boundaries, build trust and develop solutions with people rather than simply delivering services to them.
This is not about asking communities to fill the gaps left by stretched public services or diminishing the vital role of the state. Quite the opposite. It is about creating a state that works alongside people, combines professional expertise with community knowledge and recognises the contribution everyone can make.
At New Local, we see at first hand in places across the UK, what becomes possible when people are trusted, relationships are nurtured and communities have the opportunity to shape their own futures.
Community power must be at the heart of reform
My experience of Democracy Matters reinforced something I feel strongly about: people want more than an opportunity to be consulted. They want to have a meaningful influence on decisions and, where possible, greater control over what happens in their communities.
Consultation can be a starting point, but the real test is whether people’s contributions change anything. Are they helping to set priorities? Do they have a genuine voice in decisions about their place? And do they have access to the resources and powers needed to turn their ideas into action?
Across Scotland, our New Local members in Fife and Renfrewshire, are helping to demonstrate what place-based working and community power can look like in practice.
They are part of a much wider picture of brilliant work taking place in communities across Scotland. People are coming together to lead change, develop local solutions, support one another and run facilities and activities that matter to their neighbourhoods.
We saw the strength of this community power during the Covid pandemic. Communities, voluntary organisations and local public servants worked together in remarkable ways to respond to local needs. People mobilised quickly, drew on local knowledge and relationships, and demonstrated what could be achieved when communities were recognised as equal partners rather than simply recipients of support.
That experience showed us something important: community power is not an abstract concept. It is a real asset, built on relationships, local knowledge, people’s strengths and a shared commitment and passion to making things better.
The challenge is that these examples of community action and leadership are still too rarely fully integrated into the way our public services plan, make decisions, allocate resources and measure success. Too often, communities demonstrate what is possible at the margins of the system, rather than having their contribution recognised and supported as a central part of how the system works.
There is an opportunity now to build on this experience: to move beyond celebrating individual examples and create the conditions in which community power becomes an everyday feature of public service reform.
This is particularly important as Scotland considers changes to local governance. Proposals for a different balance between regional and community-level decision-making create an opportunity to consider how local democracy and community influence can be strengthened.
The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) has emphasised the importance of local democracy, meaningful engagement and working in partnership with communities and the public service workforce. These are vital considerations. The debate should not simply be about which functions sit at which level of government. It should be about how decisions are made, whose voices shape them and whether power and resources are placed at a level best able to improve people’s lives.
Changing the geography of government will not, by itself, create community power. That requires a deliberate commitment to sharing influence, supporting community-led action and building stronger relationships between residents, public servants and elected representatives.
Leadership and relationships will determine whether reform succeeds
We cannot expect people to work differently if we do not create the conditions that enable them to do so. A more relational public service requires leaders who are willing to work across organisational boundaries, build trust, share power and learn alongside the people and communities they serve.
The Scottish Government’s Public Service Leadership Statement, published on 23 September 2026, provides an important foundation. It sets out a shared ambition for collaborative leadership, working across organisational, professional and sectoral boundaries, and recognising that Scotland’s most complex challenges cannot be solved by any organisation acting alone.
The real test will be whether these commitments translate into the everyday experience of public servants and communities.
This means moving away from the assumption that leaders must always have the answers, towards an approach that values the knowledge and experience of people closest to an issue. It means giving professionals the confidence and freedom to exercise their judgement, supporting collaboration and creating space for communities to influence decisions and take action.
It also means recognising that relationships take time. Trust cannot simply be mandated, and collaboration cannot be created through organisational charts alone. Leaders have a crucial role in creating the culture, permission and shared purpose that allow people to work differently.
We need leaders who are prepared to challenge established ways of working, to learn from what is happening in communities and to recognise that leadership does not reside solely in formal positions of authority. People living and working in a place often understand its strengths and challenges in ways that no organisation can fully appreciate.
Relationships are not a soft extra to public service reform. They are central to whether it succeeds.
From efficiency to a different vision of public services
The Scottish Government’s reform agenda creates an important opportunity to think afresh about the kind of state Scotland needs.
We should be ambitious about making better use of public resources and improving accountability. But we should be equally ambitious about prevention, community power and the relationships that enable public services to make a lasting difference.
That means asking not only whether services are joined up, but whether people experience them as joined up. Not only whether communities have been consulted, but whether they have influenced the decisions that matter. And not only whether public servants have been given new structures to work within, but whether they have the support and freedom to build the relationships that make change possible.
For me, this is also an opportunity to move beyond a market-led view of public services, where relationships can become transactional and success is too easily reduced to what individual organisations deliver. We need a stronger focus on the collective value created when people, communities and public services work together.
Ultimately, we need to see people not simply as users of services, but as individuals with strengths, experience and ideas; and communities with the capacity to contribute to their own futures and have power over their own lives as citizens, neighbours and coproducers.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the responsibilities of the state. It means rethinking how those responsibilities are fulfilled: combining professional expertise with community knowledge, investing in prevention and creating the conditions for people to exercise greater agency in their lives.
Scotland has an opportunity to put these principles at the heart of reform and create a public service system that is more human, more connected and better able to respond to the challenges people face.
Perhaps this really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
I believe that we have the ambition, vision and an abundance of skills, talents and experiences within our communities and our local and national institutions to build a state that shares power, invests in relationships and creates the conditions for people and communities to thrive.
Like the post-war reforms inspired by Beveridge, Scotland now has an opportunity not merely to reorganise institutions but to redefine the relationship between citizens, communities and the state for a new generation.
Photo by Andrew Dawes on Unsplash.
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