Special advisers being ‘dreadfully misused’ in delivering on policy
McAlpine warns of erroneous understanding of role
THE work of the Scottish Government’s special advisers (Spads) needs an urgent rethink, it has been warned. Questions have been asked about the advice being given to ministers, particularly former first minister Humza Yousaf who was forced to resign after what looked like a spectacular own goal.
Common Weal’s head of strategy Robin McAlpine told the Sunday National that the reason the SNP made “such a total mess” was because their special advisers – known as Spads – were “terrible at their jobs”.
He said this was because there was a profound misunderstanding of what Spads were for. Rather than being a waste of money, McAlpine said they were a “crucial” part of the delivery of government policy.
“This is the thing that the left gets wrong, a lot of the independence movement gets wrong and finally the Scottish Government has been getting dreadfully wrong,” he said. “Announcements, plans, ideas, proposals, objectives, targets are all brilliant. All of these tell the story of your intention but your intentions don’t really count in the long term because what counts in the long term is your delivery.
“A terrible mistake made by people, particularly those on the progressive side of things, is that you have won when you get the nominal acceptance of a proposal on the books.”
He said that the much-criticised Hate Crime Bill was an example of poor Spad work as the actual hate crime legislation was not as bad as its critics implied – but the Scottish Government had managed to make it bad through poor implementation.
“Which is what they have done with almost everything,” said McAlpine.
“The only thing they did well was the child benefit payment which is incredibly difficult to screw up when you are giving 25 quid to a lot of people. But a national energy company, for example, is a different task and if you want to change society you need it all.
“You need the big vision, you need the big idea but you also need the delivery. You need to pay serious attention to the mechanism of how policy goes from idea to implementation.”
Originally this was thought to be the job of the civil service but Spads became a common phenomenon after Margaret Thatcher brought in the infamous Bernard Ingham to make sure the civil service did her bidding.
Since then, they have been enthusiastically adopted by every government in the UK, including the Scottish Government.
McAlpine said Spads were necessary to make sure government policy is implemented properly.
“I agree the civil service should get it right in the first place but somebody has got to sergeant major the whole process,” he said.
“If you just assume the civil service has done its job and nobody asks, you get the Deposit Return Scheme debacle and you get the smoke detector madness.
“It took me ten seconds to work out their proposals were daft.
“They announced during the second lockdown in autumn 2020 that everybody must have wired smoke detectors by March 31, 2021.
“It takes about half a day to a day’s work for a retrofit so I just took the total number of registered electricians in Scotland and divided it by the number of houses and even if electricians had worked only on that for two years it still would not have been completed. That took me under two minutes with a calculator so what were the Spads doing?”
McAlpine said that many people misunderstood the role of the Spad and saw it mainly as public relations “because the one Spad everyone knows is Alastair Campbell”.
“There’s a view that you can spin your way out of everything but that is not true as eventually it catches up with you,” said McAlpine.
“The best defence is to do your job well.
“You can say what you want about New Labour but they got things done and it wasn’t just because of parliamentary majorities. A lot of it wasn’t good but they got things through because they worked government. They had people in there that were not outward-looking PR monkeys – they were serious trained experts in government and they knocked obstructions down.
“Civil servants are there to advise, implement and deliver but when there is a change of administration, everything that the civil servant was working on last week is anathema and now they have got to do a completely different thing, so they are not always motivated and don’t always agree.”
McAlpine said that the SNP had made the mistake that the force of a big idea with a dominant leader would be enough to propel policy through.
“You can’t just will it, you have to manage it,” he said. “Government is a giant machine with lots of moving parts and it only takes one part to not operate and the whole thing can go wrong.
“If you doubt this, here is a simple point – it is not the minister’s job to ensure the DRS is legally cleared, it is the Spad’s. If you are a minister, you can’t keep your eye on this all the time which is why you have a Spad.
“The other mistake is the view that Spads work better if they don’t challenge you – but you need someone to tell you when you are wrong.
“The single, biggest piece of advice I would give anyone in power is to have someone you respect who can tell you when you are wrong. Constant reaffirmation all the time is not good,” McAlpine said.