The Programme for Government 2026
The first Programme for a newly elected government is a good time large ambitions. The ones included in this year’s PfG certainly are large, but not necessarily good.
Last year’s Programme for Government was a lackluster affair, as could well be expected. It came just a year before the election and so it was always unlikely that there would be any brand new initiatives given that there would be no time to legislate for them never mind implement them (the tail end of the last Parliament saw many important bills get dropped for ‘lack of time’ such as Monica Lennon’s Ecocide Bill, but that’s a topic to come back to).
In a year where the election results in a change of Government, we would expect the first PfG to be an ambitious period as the new party settles their feet under desks and starts to work out how the hell they’re going to deliver on their promises. It’s slightly different for a returning government. They have to come up with new ideas while remembering that there was little to stop them doing it before. A new plan to reform Council Tax, for instance, has to deal with the problem that next year will be the 20th anniversary of the SNP Government promising that they’ll reform Council Tax.
Still though, this is the first Programme for Government of the returning Government and can use this one not just as a plan for the next year but as a prospective for the next five years in Government. Plans can afford to be a little larger or longer range. And we’ve certainly see that, with some proposals here being substantial, multi-year projects. As we shall see from this list of some of the policies that caught my eye this year, this doesn’t necessarily mean that I think they are projects that we should be doing.
Local Government Reform: Centralising power
This has been headlined as the largest government reform of the devolved era and it’s probably not wrong in that. There has been a lot of talk recently about bring the English model of regional mayors to Scotland – largely driving by people who think that we could do with more folk like Andy Burnham taking unilateral control over large chunks of the country. My own thoughts on that particular plan can be read here...short version – I’m not a fan. A single person cannot be elected via a proportional democratic vote, therefore I do not believe that a single person should ever hold office with executive power.
This isn’t what John Swinney is proposing, in fairness. No mention is made of elected mayors over massive regions. He is, however, proposing the second part. Local Authorities to be combined in some way (it’s not clear if this would be a formal amalgamation or another tier of umbrella organisations) and given executive powers.
He even stole Common Weal’s language to help describe why he wants to do this – the current Local Authorities are simultaneously too large to be be “local” and too small to act regionally (this was the intention of the previous round of reforms after Scottish regional governments proved a nuisance to the Scottish Office). There are indeed powers that could be given to these regional councils that could be useful, like transport or energy strategy.
The big problem is that few of those powers sit at Holyrood or even Westminster. They mostly sit at Local Authority level and will be ‘pooled’ into the regional tier. And thus this reform will not decentralise power but will massively centralise it. The same goes for plans to amalgamate Scotland’s 14 Health Boards into just two.
The ‘local’ part of these reforms is non-existant. Rather than restore Scotland’s district councils (as the Greens propose) or to follow our plan to bring Scotland into line with Europe’s system of municipal councils, the ‘local’ part of Swinney’s reform is merely to “[empower] people to influence local decisions”. Not to control local decision-making. Or to make decisions for themselves. Merely to “influence” them. Which is basically the non-power that our community councils have at the moment.
Inwards Investment: The Scottish Fire Sale Continues
If there’s one thing John Swinney is known for, it’s his great love of ‘foreign direct investment’. FDI has basically been the only game in town (a term once reserved for PFI funding) for Scottish economic development for a number of years now. The problem with inwards investment like this is that, by definition, it demands a return in the form of profits that can be extracted from Scotland.
In our paper on Profit Extraction, we found that Scotland was one of the most intensively extracted nations on the planet – to a degree worse than some of the poorest and most heavily exploited nations in Africa. Between 1999 and 2021, more than a quarter of a trillion pounds has been net extracted from Scotland, largely in the form of dividends paid to shareholders and parent companies based elsewhere. One can only speculate as to what Scotland would look like if that money had been used to bootstrap up Scottish companies or had been paid to Scottish workers instead.
And it’s about to get worse.
The PfG is going to accelerate FDI via several schemes like a “High Growth Unit” and a “Major Projects Office” designed to “unlock private investment across strategic sectors”. Most disconcertingly is that the Government appears to have listened to our plea that the Scottish National Investment Bank should be investing more in housing and energy by instructing it to “leverage further private commercial capital and investment into housing…including social housing”. Even if you are being housed by the private sector, your rent may soon be subsidising the dividends of a wealthy absentee shareholder.
“Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally””
Energy: Fossil Fuels and Data Centres
The Government fell short of growing rumours of a moratorium on data centres. Instead, the Scottish Government will attract more data centres so long as they are “responsible, green data centres”. No, I have no idea what that means either but I suspect that it’s something a bit like Swinney’s support for “climate compatible” oil extraction. That is to say, it’s a thing to say when someone asks about these things that means that he doesn’t have to definitively say that he supports or does not support them.
One thing the Government does support right now is the cutting of profit taxes on oil companies to encourage more North Sea drilling (you know…so long as it’s “climate compatible” and it’s not necessarily any particular named project that you might be complaining about specifically).
I published my own thoughts on how those data centres should be regulated as a bare minimum – I do not expect many or any currently in the pipeline would meet these reasonable expectations. I also do not expect that the Government’s own “strategic approach” will meet or exceed these standards. Or perhaps we need to apply a bit more pressure in our campaigning to make that happen.
Health, Care and Older People: Amalgamated, Subsumed and Ignored
In that order. I’ve already mentioned the proposed centralisation of health in Scotland and we published in one of our Daily Briefings this week that we’re concerned that care is being subsumed into health as Swinney has long been obsessed with “delayed discharge” as the only metric worth measuring – if he can dump people from hospitals into care homes, then who cares, right?
Our Care Reform Group will be discussing this in more detail in the weeks to come. Another point that is missing from the PfG almost entirely is how to better support older people. The term ‘older’ does not appear at all in the PfG and ‘ageing’ only once and strictly in the context of rising pressure on health services. A “prevention-first” health strategy mentioned in this section is laudable – essential even – though it does require actual work to prevent health issues.
Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally” and privatising the funding of housing while maximising the incentives to push up house prices runs directly against the goal of more healthy housing.
Land Reform: This far and apparently no further
Land Reform was high on the agenda in the last Parliament. The Land Reform Bill eventually passed was weak and insufficient, but it was there. This PfG – which I remind is a strategy for the next five years – does not mention land reform or land taxation at all. Some mention is made of more support for crofting communities to support environmental work but with the proposal to centralise of many aspects of environmental governance (such as SEPA, NatureScot and Zero Waste Scotland) into a single body it seems hard to see how more localism over the control of land can come out.
Our coalition partners will be at the SNP conference next month in a campaign for a Scottish Land Tax – I know such a thing is overwhelmingly popular with party members as I’ve seen their response to it myself when I’ve been at previous conferences. Perhaps it’s time for members to make it clear to leadership that this omission is not acceptable.
Conclusion
I know this has been a negative article. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to see ambition and progressive moves for change in this agenda. There are good policies in there (like the well publicised £2 bus fares or, with caveats, the food price caps) that we’ll be tracking and encouraging but they are all relatively small compared to the massive centralising reform that is about to crash down upon us.
The Scottish Government used to believe in subsidiarity – the principle that governance should take place at the most local level possible and only devolved upwards when absolutely necessary. It appears that that principle is not just dead but is being actively held in contempt. This is something that must be pushed back on. Democracy should be for and by all of us, not just for the one person who thinks he should be in control over everything that he can’t sell off to an inwards investor for the lowest price possible.
