Programme for Government 2026 to 2031

First Minister’s Foreword

In May, the people of Scotland once again entrusted my government with the privilege of serving them. That is a trust we will honour by relentlessly delivering for people now and in the future.

This is a Programme with the highest ambitions for Scotland. It is about delivering tangible improvements in the lives of our people and creating new opportunities for all to succeed.

Our Programme will focus on:

Eradicating child poverty, investing in young people and their families so they can reach their full potential – backed by the most generous cost-of-living package in the UK, including:

• Putting more money into people’s pockets through a strong social safety net and reducing everyday costs.
• Helping more people get a warm, safe, affordable home and ending the use of unsafe and harmful temporary accommodation for children.
• Supporting people to learn new skills, find good, fair work and increase their earnings, backed by a brand-new childcare offering from 9 months to the end of primary school.

Making Scotland the best place to do business, including:

• Attracting more investment and better backing of home-grown businesses and markets with the greatest growth potential – removing barriers to progress, increasing business and investor confidence, and securing growth in priority sectors.
• Delivering economic growth that reflects the unique strengths, opportunities, and ambitions of each part of Scotland.

Tackling the climate and nature crises, ensuring more green jobs and lower costs, while protecting our beautiful and valuable landscapes and environment, and building resilience to the impacts of the climate emergency being felt now, including:

• Ensuring our economy, climate, and communities all benefit from the transition and become more resilient to the damaging impacts of climate change being felt now – realising the twin benefits of emissions reductions and economic opportunity.

Stronger public services, with lower NHS waiting times and easier access to GP services, including:

• Ending long waits in our hospitals and ensuring nobody waits more than 26 weeks for the treatment they need.
• Shifting more care out of hospitals and into communities – reducing unnecessary stays in hospitals and seeing more people cared for in their homes.
• Ending Scotland’s unacceptably high rate of drug-related deaths, treating it as a public health emergency.
• Giving children a safe and positive future – supporting early childhood development and improving the ABCs in our schools, attendance, attainment, behaviour and curriculum.
• Strengthening public protection and helping people feel safe in their communities through earlier, joined-up action to prevent crime and reduce reoffending, while achieving a sustainable prison population.

These ambitions are important in their own right – but they also underpin a more fundamental purpose: ensuring that people see and feel their government that is on their side, working every day to improve their lives.

We are optimistic and hopeful for Scotland, inspired by the potential for our country to be ever more successful.

We recognise that – just like every country – Scotland faces many challenges. Our country has not been immune from the threats of populism promoted by opportunistic and bad faith actors who aim to stoke division, hatred, and harm - often directed squarely at the most marginalised groups and falsely claiming to protect women and girls.

This Programme is vital in creating the kind of Scotland we want to be and for improving how confident people feel about their place in it. We will never pit groups against one another. We will always act for the common good.

To stand up to the divisive behaviour of populists, we must address three key factors in Scotland today.

Firstly, we must have a relentless focus on tackling the cost-of-living crisis. We will put easing that crisis at the forefront of our efforts: eradicating child poverty by putting more money in people’s pockets; an economic strategy focused on creating new jobs and increased prosperity; and climate action that helps people with everyday bills and makes our country more resilient.

Secondly, we must tackle violence against women and girls. Listening to survivors has strengthened my determination to offer clear and emphatic leadership to better prevent violence against women and girls and address the devastating effects of abuse, coercion, and violence. As First Minister, I have pledged my personal leadership to driving the change that is needed in the behaviour of men and in the prevalence of sexism and misogyny. We cannot eradicate violence against women and girls without addressing women’s inequality, so our work to tackle poverty and the cost-of-living crisis, to increase economic opportunities, and to advance public service reform are all critical to tackling violence against women and girls.

Thirdly, we must work hard to promote community cohesion. Scotland’s strength lies in the diversity of its people and communities, including those of different faiths, beliefs, cultures and backgrounds. By fostering belonging, participation and mutual understanding, and by challenging prejudice in all its forms, including Antisemitism, Islamophobia and all forms of racism, we will ensure Scotland is a place where differences are valued, common ground is strengthened, and all communities can flourish.

This Programme is rooted in Scotland’s values and strengths and will help build a Scotland that is truly fair, healthy, prosperous, secure, skilled, sustainable, and connected. But delivering that change means changing how we deliver.

A government that delivers differently

The Public Service Reform strategy sets out the steps Government will take to ensure that every pound of investment is focused on frontline delivery, that there are the right staff in the right roles to deliver real change, and equip us with the necessary tools to realise long-term improvements.

Putting prevention first

Scotland’s specific circumstances – demographic changes, an ageing population and people living longer with more complex health conditions – risk rising demand and costs unless we radically shift course. While the most acute impacts may be felt in our healthcare system, when spending rises there, it impacts our ability to invest in other public services that keep people healthy in the first place.

Scotland has taken important steps toward a prevention-first approach, through our Health and Social Care Renewal Framework and Population Health Framework, both of which provide an evidence-based focus on improving health and reducing inequality. This Programme will build on that – strengthened by the actions we are taking to grow the economy and tackle child poverty, and shifting the focus we take within public services, so that from pre-birth to the end of life, we give people every chance they need to lead a full and healthy life, including:

Proactive leadership and collaboration through a new Prevention Unit sitting at the heart of the Scottish Government and already working to focus spending on preventative actions.

• Investment of an initial £200,000 in Social Impact Partnerships to develop early intervention and prevention programmes. If these prove successful, we will build upon them to establish a £10 million fund over the Parliamentary term.
• Strengthened support for families from before conception, through pregnancy, and during a child’s earliest years.
• Shifting more healthcare closer to home through a Community First approach, maximising the opportunities for people to get the care they need in their own home or local community.
• Prioritising upstream homelessness prevention measures, ensuring that people receive support before reaching crisis.
• Breaking down the barriers to work, particularly for those inactive through ill-health or disability, and ensuring that everyone has the support required to enter and sustain well paid employment.

Underpinning this work, will be a decisive shift towards early intervention across public services through the development of a Scottish Prevention Investment Framework. Building on Scotland’s preventative budgeting work, this will provide a consistent approach to identifying, assessing and prioritising investment in prevention and early intervention, helping direct resources towards actions that improve outcomes for people and reduce future demand on public services.

National renewal through public service reform

Public services underpin this Government’s priorities. They have a transformational impact on people’s lives and are critical to delivering economic growth, eradicating child poverty, and tackling the climate crisis. But as precious as those services are, in a changing world with changing demographics, we must be clear eyed about where the status quo is no longer enough. Services designed in and for the 20th century must adapt to the realities of the 21st century.

Over the course of this Parliament, we will rewire the Scottish state to ensure services fit around people, rather than expecting them to fit around a static system, and deliver improved outcomes for them – including putting more power in the hands of people and communities – by:

• Empowering regions and communities: Engaging in an intensive dialogue over the next three months with partners in Local Government, and other parties across Parliament reach a clear shared direction about the future of local governance in Scotland. The Government believes there is a need for regional local government, alongside community empowerment, and will engage with partners to find common ground.
• Reforming social care: Using the next three months to reach agreement on reform of social care which makes best use of the funding in the system, delivers fairer and more efficient services and achieves economies of scale, while maintaining a focus on community need.
• Empowering school leaders, raising standards and reducing variation: Working closely with local government, school communities and headteachers to maximise the opportunities that reform of governance and service delivery will bring.
• Making early progress in healthcare: Simplifying the NHS by replacing the current 14 territorial Health Boards with two Strategic Health Boards and build on planned reforms to further reduce the number of special Health Boards.

Decluttering the public sector

At a time of tight public finances and in pursuit of maximising spend on people, a starting point for delivery must be how we maximise service efficiency and agility to make them work for people, businesses, and communities. Scotland currently has more than 130 public bodies, all doing important work but often with overlapping and duplicating functions, too often making them less efficient than they could be and more difficult to navigate for the people they serve.

Over this Parliament, we will embark on an ambitious programme of rationalisation of these bodies to ensure they deliver excellent services for people in the most efficient way possible.

We will also act, across all areas of Government to remove barriers to delivery, simplify the way Government works, and speed up decision-making, all with the purpose of ensuring we deliver tangible improvements in people’s lives as swiftly as possible.

A Fresh Start with Independence

This Government believes that to fully deliver on our ambitions, independence is the fresh start Scotland needs. In May, voters again returned a pro-independence majority, the largest ever elected. That reflects a belief, held by many across our country, that decisions about Scotland’s future are best taken in Scotland – making real change to reduce bills, eradicate child poverty, grow our economy and improve our public services. We have published a draft Referendum Bill and will continue to make the case for the right of the people of Scotland to decide their constitutional future through a lawful independence referendum.

The Government will take forward sustained actions to ensure the democratic right of the people of Scotland to determine their own future through Independence is honoured. The desire to have that choice about Scotland’s future has been made clear again in the Scottish Parliament election in May and it cannot be ignored by the UK Government.

We will also co-operate with the leadership of Governments in Wales and Northern Ireland to ensure our respective peoples are able to exercise that democratic choice.

This Parliament holds a strong pro-European majority, reflecting the view that remaining outside the European Union is a significant obstacle to Scotland’s ambitions. Independence will enable Scotland to pursue a return to European Union membership, which offers the best route to securing and improving Scotland’s long-term interests.

As we work towards the fresh start of independence, we will utilise our full powers to deliver for people now, take every opportunity to expand our powers, be ambitious for the future, and make tomorrow’s Scotland better than the Scotland of today.

A commitment on how we will work

As we deliver on our Programme, I give a guarantee that this Government will always look to find and create common ground in our pursuit of a better Scotland – based on unwavering values of fairness, compassion, and inclusion which underpin Scotland’s identity.

I invite all parties represented in the Scottish Parliament, who support those values, to echo that guarantee and send a clear message that we will work together to protect and promote those values to ensure a better tomorrow. I pledge my Government to work collaboratively in that endeavour.

We will work to create common ground with the business community, Local Government and the Third Sector. We will work constructively with the UK Government in seeking more powers for Scotland to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, strengthen economic growth, and address issues that have eroded the devolution settlement over the last ten years.

I am profoundly grateful to the people of Scotland for placing their trust in my Government, and in giving my Government the opportunity to serve them. I pledge to use all my energy to bring our country together in common purpose, to improve the lives of the people and to deliver the best future for Scotland.

John Swinney MSP
First Minister