Don't waste a good old reorganisation, by ePass CEO and co-founder James Buchan

“Don’t waste a good old reorganisation”.  I'm not sure that's a saying yet. Given what was announced at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh last week, and in Whitehall last month, it deserves to be.

The Programme for Government commits to rewiring the Scottish state: fourteen health boards becoming two, more than 130 public bodies facing rationalisation, a dialogue on local governance. In Whitehall, Rewiring the State is moving power and funding to strategic authorities.

Two governments, different starting points, very similar activity.

Here is the bit I keep coming back to. Many public bodies are about to choose digital infrastructure they may still use in a decade. We are rightly clear that local control matters. But somewhere along the way we began treating local control and locally owned infrastructure as the same thing. They aren't.

Merge two organisations and plenty changes. But the work underneath is stubbornly similar. The underlying capabilities can be reused.

Across government the same handful of capabilities get solved again and again. Proving who someone is. Taking a payment. Recording a decision so it stands up to scrutiny. Every organisation builds its own version, at its own cost, to its own standard, and none of it is where local difference lives. Build these once, then let services focus on what genuinely needs to differ.

This isn't an efficiency argument. It is about what fragmentation displaces. Every hour retyping details into a second system, every case that stalls because two organisations cannot see each other's records, every person proving who they are for the fourth time in a month. That is paid in the currency public services have least of. Staff time.

The public feels it too. Nobody experiences an organisation chart. They experience the people and services. The form that already knows who they are. The application that doesn't demand the same evidence twice. The decision that arrives in days, not weeks. Share the plumbing and a carer explains their circumstances once, not again to a council, a health board and a charity.

That is what prevention requires. This Programme for Government is built on reaching families before crisis and care at home rather than hospital, both of which depend on seeing the same person across boundaries. Prevention is also the first thing squeezed when staff are buried in admin. Budgets are not getting looser. We can make room for work that changes lives by not spending effort on rebuilding the same plumbing in dozens of different places.

None of this argues for one national platform telling public bodies how to work. Shared infrastructure works only when the shared layer stays thin, open and configurable. Savings without a new monolith.

The disruption is coming regardless. So there are two choices. Migrate today's fragmentation into a new shape. Or, while the bonnet is open, look at what goes back in.

If you have to pull the plumbing apart anyway, it is a strange time to put it back exactly as you found it.