Programme for Government: a welcome focus on prevention, but delivery will be the test

The Scottish Government’s new Programme for Government sets out its plans for the next five years. The central question is what kind of Scotland those plans will help create.

Scotland’s public services are under enormous pressure. Too often, the debate begins and ends with cuts, efficiencies and how services can do more with less.

This fails to recognise how much of the demand on public services comes from harms our economy has failed to prevent: poverty, insecure incomes, unaffordable housing, ill health, inequality and environmental damage.

We are already paying for these failures through greater pressure on the NHS, housing services, social security and local government. The real choice is whether we continue paying to repair harm or invest in creating wellbeing from the outset.

What we wanted to see in the Programme for Government

Ahead of the Programme for Government, WEAll Scotland published our Seven Priorities for the New Scottish Parliament.

We call for Scotland to put wellbeing at the heart of government, ensure everyone can live with dignity, make Community Wealth Building a national success story, act on climate and nature, reform tax and public finance, and shift power closer to communities.

In doing so, we issue a practical challenge to the Programme for Government: will it move Scotland beyond short-term crisis management and tackle the underlying causes of pressure on people, communities and services?

A welcome commitment to prevention

Today’s Programme for Government places prevention at the heart of public service reform. It promises a new Prevention Unit and a Scottish Prevention Investment Framework to strengthen early intervention across government.

This is a welcome recognition that sustainable public services depend on addressing problems before they reach crisis point. Commitments to provide earlier support for families, move more healthcare into communities and prioritise homelessness prevention all point in the right direction.

The test will be whether prevention becomes a consistent way of working across government. That means breaking down departmental silos, improving collaboration between services and focusing on the underlying causes of poverty, ill health and insecurity.

Scotland already has a way to measure progress beyond economic growth: the National Performance Framework (NPF). We know that a long-awaited update to the NPF is coming soon, yet the Programme does not clearly explain how it will be used to assess whether these reforms are improving people’s lives. Prevention must be reflected in delivery, accountability and the way Scotland measures success.

This also raises questions about the Programme’s emphasis on economic growth. Growth is presented as a central goal, but there is little detail about its purpose, who should benefit from it or what kind of economic activity Scotland wants to encourage. This leaves the growth agenda feeling disconnected from the government’s ambitions on prevention, poverty and climate.

Economic policy should be designed to improve wellbeing by creating secure incomes, affordable homes, good work and a healthy environment. If growth fails to deliver these outcomes, or creates greater inequality and environmental harm, it will simply generate more demand for already stretched public services. Without a clearer connection between economic policy and prevention, Scotland risks remaining trapped in the same costly cycle of creating harm and paying to repair it.

Reform must improve people’s lives

The government proposes significant structural reform, including reducing the number of public bodies, replacing Scotland’s 14 territorial health boards with two strategic boards and considering regional local government alongside greater community empowerment.

Streamlining services and breaking down silos can be positive, but structural change should not be judged by savings alone. Reforms must improve wellbeing, strengthen local democracy and bring power closer to people. Larger and more remote institutions risk making it harder for communities to influence decisions, so well-designed community participation needs to be built into every stage of the reform process.

Invest in the foundations of a good life

Prevention requires investment in warm and affordable homes, secure incomes, childcare, public transport and thriving communities. It must happen alongside properly funded services and a strong social safety net. We cannot cut support today on the promise of benefits tomorrow.

The commitment to deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, with at least 70% for social rent, is therefore significant. So too is the £50 million Homelessness Prevention Fund. Delivery must now match the scale and urgency of Scotland’s housing emergency.

The Programme also commits to implementing the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 and using procurement and collective budgets to strengthen local supply chains and create jobs. This is an important step towards retaining wealth locally, but communities must have genuine power in shaping its delivery. Community Wealth Building is more than a procurement exercise - to realise the full transformative potential of the Act, it needs to be recognised as preventative economics. Keeping wealth and ownership local builds resilience so communities need less crisis intervention.

Fund services fairly

Cuts are not the only way to balance Scotland’s finances. Through Tax Justice Scotland, we have called for those with the greatest wealth and environmental impact to contribute more while protecting people on low incomes.

The proposed Council Tax Bill will introduce additional bands for high-value properties by April 2028. This is a welcome step towards greater fairness, but it falls short of the nationwide revaluation and fundamental reform needed for a tax still based on 1991 property values. The Programme also lacks broader action on wealth and pollution that could help fund preventative services fairly.

Our Sharing Our Wealth research found that 85% of respondents favoured increasing taxes on wealthy people rather than reducing them. It also found that 67% preferred higher taxes to fund public services over tax reductions accompanied by further cuts.

Claims that the Scottish public will not accept fairer taxation are not supported by the evidence. Our research showed that the public is open to progressive taxation - so long as it is clearly linked to improved public services and social outcomes, with fair and effective design.

Delivery will be the real test

The focus on prevention, affordable housing, Community Wealth Building and fairer property taxation provides foundations on which the government can build. But it remains unclear how wellbeing will guide budgets, communities will share power and preventative investment will be funded fairly. Without these systemic shifts, we risk a continuing gulf between rhetoric and implementation.

Public sector reform cannot only be about doing more with less. It should be about needing less crisis intervention because people and communities are doing well.

The test will be whether these commitments change where money and power flow, and help create an economy that delivers good lives for everyone within the limits of our planet.