The Scottish Government are show themselves to be all plans no action after a my Freedom of Information request revealed the SNP Government has produced over 450 “strategy” documents in the last ten years alone.
I queried the Scottish Government as to how many strategy documents had been produced, and found that 160 strategies, 202 plans, 55 frameworks, 6 route maps, 11 visions, and 21 programmes had been produced in the last ten years.
Commenting on this information, I wanted to draw attention to evidence given to a committee session of the Scottish Parliament from Professor Mairi Spowage, Director of the Fraser of Allander Institute who said:
“On the question whether there are too many strategies, the Fraser of Allander Institute is on record as saying that there are. Quite often they can be fairly high level and less practical on the policy actions that should be put in place to achieve the grand, broad and difficult-to-disagree with outcomes that we are trying to achieve. It is notable that the national performance framework is supposed to drive Government activity, but often it is not referenced in strategy documents or, if it is, it is in a perfunctory way.”
The SNP Government are excellent at producing strategy documents but not quite as good at following through with actions. From last year until now we’ve already had over 100 of these strategy documents published and often the words and intentions are all well and good.
However, little action often comes from these documents, and we end up with a library of good intentions. What is the measure of success of all these documents as there appears to be little evaluation from the Scottish Government?
We are facing one of the worst cost-of-living crises in living memory, and what we need is discernible action. The Scottish Government really needs to focus more on implementable measures that will have direct benefits to making Scotland flourish and less time on masses of strategy documents that do little to benefit people’s day-to-day lives.
