Programme for Government 2025 - In Review
The final Programme for Government of this Parliamentary session should have been in September but was brought forward, ostensibly to give First Minister John Swinney a full year to fulfil the promises he made this week but in reality, this was much more about positioning a party manifesto for the election rather than running Government for the coming year.
Source: Scottish Government
It was not by coincidence that the SNP used the same day to announce that they had selected all of their constituency candidates for the election. All of politics from here till next May will be gearing up to fighting that election, and it shows in this year’s Programme for Government.
As we said in our briefing the morning after the announcement, there was little new in the Programme that hadn’t already been announced and there were omissions notable for the absence such as the dropping of key climate targets on car mile reduction, abandoning of bills such as the misogyny Bill and, of course, the failure to deliver on last year’s promise to create a National Care Service. It’s notable also that three key “announcements” from the Programme this year were, in fact, the return of policies that had previously been cancelled: a reformed Heat in Buildings Bill, the reinstatement of universal Winter Fuel Payments and the end of peak rail fares.
With only a year to go in this session, there’s precious little Parliamentary time left to conclude just the existing Bills making their way through legislation – including important Members’ Bills from MSPs outwith Government such as Katy Clark’s Bill to extend Freedom of Information regulations to all private companies delivering services using public money (the government’s version of this Bill extends that provision only to private care homes) and Mercedes Villalba’s Bill to put a maximum cap on land ownership in Scotland so that no-one may own more than 500 hectares of land unless they can prove it’s in the public’s interest for them to be able to. Any Bill that hasn’t passed by the close of the Session in March next year will be scrapped and will have to be reintroduced from scratch after the election.
This means that there’s even less time for the Government (or any backbench MSP) to introduce any new legislation if they hope to get it properly scrutinised and passed – be watchful of anyone trying to skimp on the safety checks of Parliamentary scrutiny under such time pressures.
In our briefing this week we were also highly critical of Swinney’s framing of himself as a steadying hand at the tiller as he brings Scotland “back on course” because it’s not entirely clear from his policies that he knows where that course is set to take us. When it comes to Scotland’s economy, it looks very much like it’s just a repeat of his three predecessors’ plans which were “attract foreign companies, sell them Scottish assets, celebrate when they extract profits”.
Normally, I’d take some time in an article like this to review the PfG and suggest the radical policies I would have liked to see but in deference to the lack of time before the election and as an opportunity for the other parties to come forward to try to impress me with their own manifestos. Instead, I’ll look at what is in the PfG and offer three rather smaller tweaks to the policies on offer that I think could have been done in the time remaining.
1. Transport – Cheaper trains, but what about buses?
The cancellation of the peak rail fare reductions was an unforced error by Swinney. He was warned by multiple people that his stated reason – that the pilot scheme hadn’t brought up travel numbers enough – was simply because it hadn’t had time to bed in. I’ll let folk in on a wee lobbying secret now. When the peak fares came back, I made a point of cancelling and rescheduling meetings with Ministers and MSPs if it would have involved me travelling at peak time (and for good non-political reason – a trip to Edinburgh is expensive enough for me!). You’d be surprised for how many politicians that was the moment that it sunk in that the policy was having a real-world impact.
But as welcome as the return of the flat fees are, it’s disappointing not just that the policy of reducing car miles has been scrapped (the Government was warned that they were going to miss that target due to inaction) but that the proposal to bring a bus fare cap to Scotland (as is already in place in England) is still being limited to a single, short running pilot scheme in a single Local Authority (as if we didn’t have an entire country to our south from where to draw data…). I believe that that pilot will suffer the same problem as Glasgow’s “free bus tickets” trial will be and that the rail fare trial was. It will be too short to prove the full impact of moving people out of cars and thus a future First Minister – possibly still Swinney – will use the results to not extend the policy unless they are under sufficient pressure to keep it going. Instead of (re)announcing the pilot in the PfG, they should have simply rolled out a national price cap for all buses (or at the very least, given Local Authorities the power to introduce one of their own and the give them the resources to implement it and to start bringing their bus networks back into public ownership).
2 Care – National Care Service v2.0
The loss of the National Care Service is a failing that I feel rather personally given the thousands of hours I and my far more experienced comrades on our Care Reform Group have put into building one, even after we were forced to help kill the one we were offered in the end. There’s certainly no time now to do the due diligence required to properly redesign the NCS and reintroduce the legislation to build it (next time, can we do it in that order instead of the reverse?).
That work has to begin now though. While things like the National Care Service Advisory Board are still ongoing (Disclosure: I’m part of the group advising the group designing that Board), we should have seen a firm promise to bring back the work to design a National Care Service and a promise, should the SNP be in government post-election, to bring proper NCS legislation in as early as possible in the next session. While there are reforms that can and must be made to the care sector now, these should distract from or replace the idea that many of the problems facing care are structural in nature and can’t be permanently fixed without a major structural change to the care sector – we still need a National Care Service and we need to ensure that it is public-owned, not-for-profit, locally-delivered.
3 Age – Failing children; Ignoring older people
Swinney’s almost sole policy (apart from “increase GDP by selling Scotland to foreign interests”) is to “eliminate child poverty”. “How” he’s going to do that is still an open question (remember, the promise isn’t to slow down the increase in child poverty or merely ensure that there is a lower percentage of poor children in Scotland than in England – his promise fails every day that there is a single poor child in the country) and some of his approaches certainly don’t seem to be moving in that direction (starving children until their parents go to work isn’t what most folk would like to see). Ideally, I would have liked him to reiterate his predecessor’s commitment to Universal Basic Income and to have completed the promise to introduce a Minimum Income Standard in Scotland – this PfG is silent on both but his comments implying that he believes that poor people only work if forced to by the threat of destitution certainly leans on the idea that he, personally, does not agree with either policy.
If he’s failing children though, he completely ignored older people in this programme. There are precisely two mentions of older people in the entire document. One restating the previously delivered promise of free bus passes for older people and another for a new policy of scoping the feasibility of a specialist prison for older criminals. It’s difficult to suggest a “tweak” in this regard (never mind a comprehensive strategy for building a nation that we can be proud to grow older in) because how can you “tweak” absolutely nothing, but I might have suggested a minor cabinet reshuffle to bring back a Minister for Older People and to formally endorse and promise to vote for Colin Smyth’s Members Bill to introduce a Commissioner to advocate for the interests of Older People.
Conclusion
The Programme for Government is supposed to be an ambitious and forward looking moment for a national government – even in the last embers of an outgoing one – so it’s disappointing to not see this one rise to even that challenge – maybe next year, with a new government, a new mandate and (if current polling trends holds) perhaps some new voices in Parliament to effectively challenge the older ones (though I’ll perhaps come back to the prospects of some of those voices coming from parties like Reform in another article). Meanwhile, we’ll all just have to wait a little longer for Scotland to return to its days of “ambitious targets” on climate. Maybe next time, we might even get a Government who’ll try to meet them too.
