Scottish Labour's 2026 election manifesto at-a-glance

The Labour Party has unveiled its manifesto for the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May.

Below are some of the main policies featured in the document.

• Improve the NHS
• Top up tax-free childcare
• Back nuclear energy
• Replace business rates
• Fix potholes
• 125,000 new homes
• More teachers and classroom assistants
• Build the Glasgow Airport rail link

• No income tax increases in next five years, and lower taxes once economy is growing
• Set up a Parent Works Scheme, with training and support to help parents find well-paid jobs
• Increasing the value of tax free childcare so it is worth £3,000 per child per year
• Raise Scottish Child Payment to £40 per week for children under the age of one to help low-income families

• Create a Scottish Treasury
• Remove the Scottish government's block on nuclear energy
• Overhaul the planning system
• Replace the business rates system with a local business levy
• Bring in financial literacy classes in schools
• £40m for Opportunity North East and the Energy Transition Zone in Aberdeen
• Create regional employability hubs

• End 08:00 rush for GPs and bring back family doctors
• Tackle delayed discharge, with 300 step-down beds in care homes and 1,000 more care at home packages
• Expand residential rehab to tackle the drug death crisis
• Pay social care workers £15 an hour
• Introduce AI scanners, new screening programmes and an NHS app
• Emergency mental health response service
• Cut the number of NHS boards to reduce bureaucracy
• End "corridor care" and get accident and emergency waits down to under four hours
• Speed up ambulance response times

• Support the passporting of skills for refugees, working within devolved powers and with the UK government to help skilled and highly qualified individuals find work and contribute to Scottish society

• Review government freedom of information practice and end "the culture of cover-up and secrecy"
• Reduce the number of quangos - public bodies that operate at arms-length from the government - by at least a third
• Fair funding for local services
• Push power out of Holyrood and give people more of a say over regional services with a Local Democracy Act
• Give constituents the ability to recall MSPs who do not uphold public standards
• Simplify Community Right to Buy

• Build 125,000 new homes
• Create a Housing Bank to direct investment into homebuilding
• Reduce tax for first-time buyers by raising the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax relief threshold to £200,000
• Dropping the age threshold for the Warmer Homes Scotland scheme to 70 and increasing rural grant uplifts by £500
• Speed up cladding remediation

• Ensure police officers spend more time doing frontline work, instead of court appearances and responding to mental health calls
• Give every neighbourhood a named community and crime prevention officer
• Scrap sentencing guidelines for under-25s to ensure "no one escapes justice because of their age"
• Block bail for those with histories of violence against women
• Crush illegal e-bikes
• Create a specialist victims' support team
• Fund 40 legal aid traineeships annually

• 2,000 education recovery teachers and 1,500 more classroom assistants
• Ban mobile phones in classrooms
• Free breakfast clubs in all primary schools
• Two weeks of funded holiday clubs during the summer
• Reform college funding linked to employment outcomes
• Guaranteed apprenticeship places for every qualified applicant, with the creation of 9,000 additional apprenticeships in key growth sectors

• Increase monitoring of sewage overflows
• Tackling littering
• Roll out a deposit return scheme
• Ringfence at least £100m of ScotWind revenues to help fund community-owned energy
• Establish nature targets and a Marine Recovery Fund

• £350m potholes fund to repair up to five million potholes
• Build the Glasgow Airport rail link
• Create a fast rail corridor linking Scotland's cities with electrified trains
• More frequent Glasgow-Edinburgh express services
• Create a single public ferry agency
• Fast-track bus franchising

• Bring in human rights due diligence checks on business support funding for defence, to take account of a product's end use
• Deliver defence technical colleges, match funding UK government investment to deliver two sites in Scotland

• A simple guide to the Scottish election
• Who are the candidates in my area?
• Tell us about the issues affecting you
• How to follow BBC Scotland's election coverage