Better value for your money

We would take the following measures to reduce waste and deliver better value for your money:

Introduce a new Taxpayer Savings Act: New legislation to save taxpayers money, including provisions to:

• Cut the number of quangos by a quarter – through closing down and merging unnecessary quangos.
• Establish a Scottish Agency of Value and Efficiency – tasked with saving £500 million of public money and led by Scottish businesspeople, it would be given powers to make recommendations on savings to ministers. Once it has achieved its savings target, SAVE would then be shut down, but the business figures who worked with the agency would remain in an advisory capacity to ministers.
• Tighten public spending rules – to clamp down on the frivolous use of taxpayer money in the public sector and introduce sanctions for individuals who breach these rules. This would include the introduction of zero-based accounting into the annual budgetary process of the Scottish Government.
• Reduce red tape for public services like the NHS – by cutting the number of statutory reporting requirements imposed on public bodies so that their time at work is spent delivering on the frontline, rather than filling in forms.

Slash the cost of government – via making efficiencies in public bodies’ communications and HR departments.

Ensure government is focused on delivering for taxpayers – by banning roles in the public-sector that are exclusively focused on ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusion’, so that public money is instead used to fund roles that are improving public services like our schools, NHS and the police.

End the Scottish Government’s obsession with gender issues – through banning the production of all non-statutory guidance documents related to ‘gender identity’ or ‘trans’ issues across the public-sector, saving workers time and money which can be used to focus on the frontline.

Improve the transparency of public-sector decision making – by extending lobbying laws to public-sector organisations, so that taxpayer funded campaign groups who are seeking to influence policies within the public-sector are required to disclose any lobbying efforts as they would if they were lobbying a minister or an MSP.

Ensure public resources are being used effectively – with a new Accountability and Transparency Index that would provide the public with clear information about how their money is being spent by public-sector organisations and the outcomes that are achieved as a result.

There are a total of £642 million worth of estimated savings for taxpayers made as a result of the measures in our policy paper.