The Scottish Government has begun a five-year programme to reduce a public sector landscape containing more than 130 national bodies. Transport Scotland is to return to government, four environmental organisations may be brought under one body, food regulators are to be combined, transport organisations reviewed for merger and Scotland’s health-board structure radically reduced. The last comparable programme of public-body mergers exceeded some of its original cost estimates. This time the restructuring sits inside a wider plan to remove £1 billion a year from government and public-body corporate costs.
Scotland’s public sector contains organisations for regulating food, registering land, protecting nature, operating transport policy, scrutinising care, financing businesses, administering taxes, supporting the arts, managing qualifications, protecting the environment and performing dozens of other functions that government has decided should not be carried out directly by a ministerial department.
There are more than 130 national public bodies in the current system. The Scottish Government’s own reform strategy used a figure of 131 public bodies alongside 50 government directorates when it began examining the structure in detail last year.
On 1 September, ministers moved from a general commitment to simplify that landscape to naming organisations that may disappear in their present form.
Transport Scotland is to be brought back inside the Scottish Government. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency, NatureScot and Zero Waste Scotland are to be brought within a single overarching environmental organisation, with Scottish Forestry potentially joining them. The Scottish Food Commission and Scottish Pubs Code Adjudicator are to be integrated into Food Standards Scotland while retaining independent scrutiny functions. Architecture & Design Scotland is to be embedded within More Homes Scotland.
National Records of Scotland and Registers of Scotland are to undergo reform activity. The remaining transport bodies will be reviewed for merger opportunities. Ministers will explore a single ferries body for Clyde and Western Isles routes. Revenue Scotland may acquire additional revenue functions. The health and care assurance landscape is to be simplified. Separate proposals would replace Scotland’s 14 territorial NHS boards with two strategic health boards and reduce the number of special health boards.
The First-tier and Upper Tribunals are being removed from the public-bodies directory because ministers regard them as judicial bodies supported by the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service rather than public bodies of the kind the directory is intended to catalogue.
Some of these changes are decisions. Others are reviews, proposals or explorations whose final form has not been settled. Taken together, they amount to a reconstruction of the machinery through which a substantial part of devolved Scotland is administered.
Scotland has done this before
The number and shape of Scottish public bodies have never been fixed. Governments create specialised organisations when functions require expertise, operational independence, regulation or a degree of separation from ministers. Later governments inherit those organisations alongside new responsibilities and new institutions of their own.
At the beginning of devolution, Scotland already possessed a large public-body landscape. Parliamentary records show 186 bodies in 1999 under the classifications then in use. The total fell substantially during the following years, partly because health-service structures were reorganised.
In 2007, another Scottish Government began an explicit simplification programme. Its target was to reduce the number of national public-sector organisations by 25 per cent. The baseline used for that programme was 199 bodies.
The programme produced 18 mergers and transfers between 2008 and 2011. Skills Development Scotland was assembled from Careers Scotland, the Scottish University for Industry and skills functions previously housed within the enterprise agencies. Marine Scotland brought together the Fisheries Research Services, the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency and a government marine directorate. Creative Scotland replaced the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. The Care Inspectorate combined functions previously distributed among several organisations.
By December 2011, 28 bodies had been removed directly through the simplification programme. Further structural changes took the overall reduction beyond that figure.
The administrative logic was similar to that being used in 2026: fewer boundaries, reduced duplication, clearer accountability and lower overhead costs.
The previous mergers did not come free
Audit Scotland examined the earlier programme in 2012. Most of the mergers it studied had been completed on schedule, but the audit identified weaknesses in leadership, planning and the speed at which the new organisations established stable structures.
It also found that the costs of four major mergers had already reached £42 million, compared with an original estimate of approximately £30 million. At that point the auditor could not confirm total savings across the merger programme.
The individual cases varied markedly. Skills Development Scotland was the largest of the four examined in detail. Its merger had initially been expected to cost £20 million and generate £77 million in savings over five years. Creative Scotland had projected merger costs of £3.3 million and savings of £4.9 million over three years. The Care Inspectorate had forecast £5.6 million of costs and £6.2 million of savings.
Those figures demonstrate the financial character of structural reform. A merger can eventually reduce duplicated corporate functions while initially requiring expenditure on staff changes, information systems, premises, branding, legal arrangements and organisational redesign. Two bodies becoming one does not mean that the statutory work previously undertaken by two bodies disappears.
The current programme is larger than a merger plan
The government published its Public Service Reform Strategy in June 2025. It committed to reducing annualised corporate costs across the Scottish Government and public bodies by £1 billion over five years, equivalent to around 20 per cent of the corporate and core operating costs identified for the exercise.
That £1 billion is not presented as a saving that will come solely from abolishing public bodies. The strategy includes shared services, property rationalisation, digital systems, automation, joint procurement and reductions in corporate functions alongside organisational consolidation.
The Scottish public sector spends more than £16 billion each year procuring goods, works and services. Government wants more of that expenditure placed through common national arrangements. It is also examining shared payment systems, call handling, data services and other functions currently duplicated across organisations.
Public-body mergers therefore form one part of a larger attempt to make government operate more like a single system.
The environmental merger will combine organisations with different legal roles
The proposed environmental body illustrates the complexity.
SEPA is an environmental regulator. It regulates activities including waste, pollution and water use and exercises enforcement powers established in law. NatureScot is the national nature agency, advising government and managing functions connected with habitats, species and protected areas. Zero Waste Scotland works on waste reduction, circular-economy policy and behaviour change. Scottish Forestry performs regulatory and policy functions for forests and woodland.
Combining organisations can reduce separate boards, executive structures, finance departments, property requirements and administrative systems. It can also put regulatory, advisory, promotional and delivery functions within a single institutional structure.
The final design will therefore determine more than the number of logos on government websites. It will determine where statutory powers sit, how independent regulatory decisions are protected, how ministers issue directions and how the new organisation is scrutinised.
The Programme for Government says Scottish Forestry is a potential participant rather than a confirmed one. That detail indicates how much of the architecture remains under design.
Transport is moving in the opposite institutional direction from 2002
Transport Scotland was established as an executive agency in 2006, creating a specialised national transport organisation at arm’s length within government. Twenty years later, ministers intend to bring it back into the core Scottish Government.
The wider transport landscape will also be reviewed for mergers, while government explores a single ferries organisation for the Clyde and Western Isles.
Those reforms intersect with another history of Scottish administrative restructuring. Ferry ownership, procurement, operations, infrastructure and policy have for years been divided among government, Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd, CalMac Ferries and other bodies. Transport infrastructure similarly involves national government, councils, Network Rail, ScotRail and multiple statutory and commercial organisations.
A reduction in organisational boundaries can make a chain of responsibility shorter. It can also concentrate more decisions inside ministers’ departments. The constitutional character of a public body therefore forms part of the reform, not merely its administrative cost.
Public bodies exist partly because governments once wanted separation
Scotland’s present landscape was not created accidentally. Public bodies are frequently established because a function was considered better performed by specialists outside a conventional government directorate. Regulators may require operational independence. Funding bodies make decisions that governments do not wish ministers to make individually. Cultural organisations can be insulated from direct political control. Tribunals and scrutiny organisations require varying degrees of institutional separation.
The government’s own public-bodies directory describes those organisations as providing specialist knowledge, delivering services, funding activities, regulating systems, scrutinising performance and offering impartial advice to ministers and Parliament.
Any programme designed to reduce their number therefore has two separate accounts. One records cost, staff, property and duplication. The other records powers and independence.
A body can disappear administratively while every one of its statutory duties survives somewhere else.
The number itself can mislead
Scotland had 249 bodies under the classifications used in 1995, 186 in 1999 and 140 in 2004. The government’s present count is above 130. Those numbers cannot simply be placed on a line and interpreted as evidence that government expanded and contracted by the same amount. Definitions changed, functions moved, health-service structures were reorganised and new categories of institution emerged.
One of the first changes announced in September illustrates the problem: two tribunals have been removed from the directory not because their functions ceased but because government concluded that judicial bodies should not be counted there.
A successful reform therefore cannot be measured solely by reaching a smaller number.
Audit Scotland reached a similar conclusion after the previous merger programme. Structural changes needed clear objectives, stable leadership and measures capable of demonstrating whether the resulting organisation performed better. Savings had to be established rather than assumed from the existence of a merger.
A new law is coming
The Scottish Government intends to introduce a Public Service Renewal (Scotland) Bill during the first year of the new parliamentary term. It will provide at least part of the legislative machinery required for the restructuring programme.
Some changes can be achieved administratively. Others involve bodies and statutory functions created by Acts of Parliament and will require legislation before ministers can abolish, transfer or combine them.
The process will run alongside a proposed reorganisation of local government and social care, the reduction of NHS boards and changes within the Scottish civil service itself. The government has described its intention as a rewiring of the Scottish state.
There is now enough information to identify the first components of that rewiring, but not yet enough to calculate its final cost, workforce consequences or institutional shape.
The previous Scottish simplification programme provides a useful ledger for the one now beginning. Bodies were successfully merged and the national count fell. Some changes produced identifiable savings. Implementation also cost more than expected in several of the major cases examined by Audit Scotland, while the total financial effect was difficult to establish.
Five years from now, Scotland may have substantially fewer public bodies. The more complete measure will be whether the functions they currently perform cost less, work better and remain accountable after the organisations carrying their names have gone.
Sources:
Programme for Government 2026 to 2031
Scottish Government — 1 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/programme-government-2026-2031/
Programme for Government 2026 to 2031: Delivering a Stronger NHS and Public Services
Scottish Government — 1 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/programme-government-2026-2031/pages/5/
Programme for Government 2026 to 2031: First Minister’s Speech
Scottish Government — 1 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/programme-for-government-2026-to-2031-first-ministers-speech/
Scotland’s Public Service Reform Strategy: Delivering for Scotland
Scottish Government — 19 June 2025
https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-public-service-reform-strategy-delivering-scotland/
National Public Bodies: Directory
Scottish Government — updated 7 September 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/national-public-bodies-directory/
Corporate Spend Savings Correspondence and Calculations: FOI Release
Scottish Government — 7 August 2025
https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500472708/
Corporate Spend Savings Correspondence and Calculations: FOI Review
Scottish Government — 11 November 2025
https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202500477100/
Learning the Lessons of Public Body Mergers
Audit Scotland — 14 June 2012
https://audit.scot/publications/learning-the-lessons-of-public-body-mergers
Mergers Need Strong Leadership From the Outset
Audit Scotland — 14 June 2012
https://audit.scot/news/mergers-need-strong-leadership-from-the-outset
