2026 Scottish manifesto analysis: Reform UK

Reform UK’s Scotland leader Malcolm Offord was joined by party leader Nigel Farage to launch their manifesto for the Scottish Parliament election this coming May. This was a very early manifesto launch – even before dissolution.

We’ll go through the main announcements on tax, spending and public sector reform, and we’ll look at whether the level of detail matches what we would expect from a manifesto.

Tax proposals: income tax cuts dominate the announcements

The most headline-grabbing part of the manifesto is the promise to bring Scottish Income Tax below the rates in the rest of the UK. These seem broadly in the right ballpark: around £2 billion a year to bring all thresholds in line with the rest of the UK and to make each rate 1p lower; and another £1.7 billion a year to make rates 3p lower than in the rest of the UK.

This is a perfectly legitimate policy to pursue. It is, however, an expensive one. The income tax net tax position – that is, the difference between Scottish Income Tax receipts and the block grant adjustment – would go from around +£1 billion in 2026-27 and +£2.7 billion by 2030-31 to -£1 billion in both cases, respectively.

The manifesto states that “[t]his tax cut will boost economic growth in Scotland and deliver higher tax revenues to the Exchequer. And because every additional 1% of growth in the Scottish economy delivers £8bn of cumulative additional tax revenues over 10 years, this will easily repay the £2bn up-front cost four times over.” This is a strange claim. First of all, the £2 billion is not an ‘up-front’ cost – it’s a recurring cost, because revenues are reduced in every future year. And the additional cost to make the difference in rates 3p is incurred on top of the £2 billion.

The implication of the paragraph in the manifesto is that these cuts in income tax would mechanically lead to 1% additional economic growth per year – there is no evidence presented that would support this.  There is also no evidence provided that this tax cut would create enough additional income to pay for itself once, let alone four times over. It is perfectly plausible that very high marginal tax rates can be counterproductive, and indeed we have some very high ones in Scotland (when both income tax and National Insurance Contributions are considered): 50% for employees between £43k and £50k; nearly 70% in the personal allowance taper; and 50% for employees in the top rate of income tax.

But saying that does not imply that a small cut in income will generate very large revenues. The increase in the top rate from 47p to 48p was estimated to raise under £10 million in additional revenue, and reducing it slightly would likely cost a small amount. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that’s a good idea – that’s a political judgement – but it certainly does not make it a revenue raiser. And for the lower bands, there is clear evidence that higher tax rates have raised revenue – hence the positive income tax net position in the Fiscal Framework Outturn Report and in the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s forecasts. There is no credible evidence to suggest this tax cut would pay for itself, and indeed behavioural responses of the kind mentioned by the Reform UK manifesto are already incorporated into the costings of these policies.

Again, this says nothing about its desirability or otherwise, which is for others to opine on. But as far as raising revenue, it’s a non-starter. And it’s worth noting that the Scottish Government cannot borrow for resource purposes other than for reconciliations, which means that it cannot equivalise revenues like this over time. It can raise them upfront and not spend them by putting them into the Scotland Reserve, but not the other way around. Equating upfront losses in revenues with subsequent potential revenues belies a fundamental misunderstanding about how the Fiscal Framework operates.

There are also proposals to abolish land and buildings transaction tax (LBTT) and to reform non-domestic rates (NDRs), as well as scrapping the new council tax bands on higher-value properties. There is no costing to latter, although to be fair, the Scottish Government hasn’t costed their introduction either.

LBTT raises £1 billion a year, and the block grant adjustment for its England and Northern Ireland equivalent (stamp duty) would remain regardless of the decision of the Scottish Government to charge LBTT or not. So in the absence of any other decisions, this would add another £1 billion to the £3.7 billion that the income tax cuts are projected to cost.

Section 5 on local authorities has a proposal for a ‘single’ Annual Property Tax that would replace LBTT and non-domestic rates. LBTT is a bad tax for the efficiency of the labour and housing markets, and in an ideal world it would be replaced by something else: many economists would argue for the desirability of this change. And NDRs have lots of disincentives to grow business in them, as well as being designed for an economy in the pre-digital age. So these are not well-designed taxes to begin with, and reform of their structure should definitely be on the table.

But this is a peculiar proposal, as for one it makes no mention of council tax, and it seems like this annual tax would sit alongside it – so not a single tax. There is a mention of revenue neutrality, although no detail is provided as to how this would be achieved. LBTT is only paid by buyers of properties transacted, and so this would seem to imply a big increase in the effective tax paid annually by most households, perhaps by as much as a third – given LBTT raises roughly a third as much as council tax.

Spending and public sector reform proposals: confused messages

Health and social care

On the health section, the assertion that spending on health has grown at 6% a year is true in nominal terms, but of course that is not that meaningful when looking back a quarter of a century. Nearly half of that is just inflation; real-terms growth has been 3.1% a year.

Proposals on how to reform the health service are not very detailed. Reading between the lines, a proposal seems to be freezing pay beyond the already agreed pay deals, leaving any improvements in net pay to come from the lower income tax rates already proposed.

Other proposals they include “fixing delayed discharges,” “removing inept and bureaucratic management,” “improving staff retention and morale,” and “creating new pathways of care.” We would expect no political party to disagree with any of this. But fixing delayed discharges is much harder than saying one will do so, otherwise it would have been done already. It requires careful planning and integration with social care and – crucially – additional funding for local government.

Local government funding forsocial care is alluded to, but not in a detailed way. The manifesto says the “new deal for local government will also give councils greater flexibility and control over their social care services, while simultaneously providing a secure basis of long-term funding” but stops at that.

Welfare spending

There is a proposal to taper carer support payment instead of the current income cliff-edge. This is sensible design, and would be supported by organisations who advocate for carers. Just like the cliff-edge that exists for the Scottish Child Payment at the moment, these design issues provide poor incentives for people earning more money from work. It is worth highlighting that this would certainly cost money – and add further to the budget imbalance already created by tax cuts.

Other welfare proposals include unspecified changes to welfare aimed at saving money by reducing the number of people in receipt of social security payments. Although the first paragraph seems to be against the ratio of administration costs of Social Security Scotland’s system, the proposal to increase face-to-face assessments would increase the cost of administration. Regardless of whether that is desirable or not, if – as seems the intention – payments would fall, the ratio would further increase.

The figures in the section about economic inactivity don’t tally with the labour market statistics published by the Scottish Government. Only around 790,000 people of working age were economically inactive in the year to September 2025, not 1 million as the Reform manifesto claims. After exempting all the categories mentioned by the party, we are left with temporarily sick (around 20,000), looking after family/home (around 125,000) and others, including discouraged workers (around 70,000). This is around 215,000 people, not half a million, and it seems unlikely that most of these could be brought back into the workforce – especially in the case of people looking after family/home. Even if all others were discouraged workers – which is not the case – the universe of people potentially enticed back into the labour market on Reform’s definition is short of 100,000, and so less than a fifth of what the manifesto claims.

Energy

The main message of the manifesto is the backing of North Sea oil and gas exploration and the opposition to “all SNP Net Zero related targets, subsidies and quangos.” We’ll cover so-called quangos in more detail below; but on net zero targets, this would represent a departure from the overall direction of the Scottish Government’s policy. But it’s worth noting that (a) the Scottish Government had to admit a couple of years ago it wasn’t on course to meet the 2030 interim targets; and (b) the UK would still have a 2050 net zero target as a whole. It also looks likely that other parties (such as the Scottish Conservatives) may well call for something similar in their manifesto.

North Sea oil and gas exploration is a reserved matter – although to be fair this is recognised in the manifesto. But there are onshore developments and planning hoops that can make even offshore exploration more difficult, and that in Holyrood’s control. Despite the reserved nature of some of this, we would expect all parties to say something about their position on this issue, especially given the current situation on energy prices, the importance of considering energy security, and the way the electorate is likely to link this to cost of living concerns during the election period.

Education

The ambition of this part of the manifesto is focussed on equipping young people for work, supporting many of the conclusions of successive reviews of the skills system in Scotland over the last few years that there need to be more vocational routes for young people that have parity of esteem with going to university.

The focus, for both the vocational routes they advocate and for further and higher education, is around their “10 natural clusters of excellence [which] comprise: Financial Services, Advanced Manufacturing, Energy, Food & Drink, Tourism & Hospitality, Creative Industries, Life Sciences, Agriculture, Fisheries and Marine.” It’s worth saying that these priority sectors are similar to the industrial sectors prioritised by the Scottish Government and in the UK Industrial Strategy, although maybe with a bit more focus on agriculture and fishing.

On schools, the claim that 223,000 out of 700,000 don’t regularly attend school is much more simplistic than what the statistics actually mean. A pupil is classified as having a persistent absence if they missed more than 10% of all sessions, so 19 full days (38 half-day sessions). This has clearly increased since the pre-pandemic period, but the percentage of absences drops very quickly as the absence rate increases, as shown in figure 37 in the link above. 11.9% of students are absent for 20% or more sessions; just 2.5% are absent for 50% or more.

This does not mean there aren’t issues with school absences, or that it doesn’t have an effect. But portraying the figures in such simplistic terms is not particularly illuminating.

One of the proposals is to abolish Education Scotland and bring functions into executive control away from a ‘quango’. We’ll discuss this in more detail below, but not all quangos are born equal. Education Scotland is an executive agency of the Scottish Government, and therefore already answerable to ministers.

Housing

Instead we note that in terms of funding social housing, the manifesto puts forward “[a]n innovative, long term funding model with UK pension funds will be developed by Reform UK to build a sustained supply of social housing owned by the local authorities.” There is no detail as to what this means, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that it would be in the realm of mandating pension funds to invest in particular projects. This is not a particularly new proposal, and it’s in fact not unlike the “reserve power” that Rachel Reeves announced and was defeated a few days ago in the Lords. It’s also not something the Scottish Parliament has competency over.

Efficiencies and changes to overall spending

The appearance of these projections adding up relies on what are objectively implausible assumptions about savings and efficiencies. Reform UK say they will cut £7.5 billion of spending: £1 billion from “ideological Net Zero projects” and £6.5 billion from 132 quangos.

We’re not sure what makes up the £1 billion on net zero spend – the recent climate change budget for 2026-27 shows £5 billion of spending which has been assessed as having a positive impact on Scotland’s climate change goals (although that includes things like the whole affordable housing programme) – so which of these Reform considers “ideological” spending is not clear.

What are these quangos? To get to 132 – a similar number to that quoted by Scottish Labour recently – requires adding together:

• 12 devolved government and executive agencies (which should really be 11, given one of the public bodies is the Scottish Government itself);
• 53 non-departmental public bodies (which is what quangos originally referred to);
• 8 tribunals;
• 4 public corporations;
• 23 health and care bodies, of which all but two are NHS Boards;
• 8 commissioners and ombudsmen;
• 24 other bodies, including inspectorates, the Crown Prosecutor and Procurator Fiscal Service, Police Scotland, among others.

The first thing to note is that these bodies in large part perform delegated functions, not duplicated ones. So while there may be some minimal savings in terms of shared back-office functions if they were all brought together under one umbrella, it’s not clear it would really save any money if the functions were still performed. Under TUPE regulations, simply bringing these functions in-house would just move people across to direct employment by the Scottish Government. Considerable savings are only likely to come from performing fewer functions and providing fewer services.

And what do these bodies spend their money on? Let’s abstract from health and care bodies, which are simply delivery arms of the NHS and which we can assume are not included in this modern version of the ‘bonfire of the quangos.’ We’re left with around £11.2 billion in total spending. But just four bodies or programmes account for £7.6 billion of that:

• The Scottish Funding Council, which funds teaching at universities and colleges (£2 billion);
• Scottish Rail Holdings Ltd, which runs ScotRail services (£1.1 billion);
• The Scottish Prison Service, which runs and pays for the building of Scotland’s prison estate (£1 billion);
• The Scottish Teachers’ and NHS Pension Schemes, which spend a (gross) £3.4 billion, but which is funded by the UK Government in any case.

All these represent spending on actual delivery of services – not simply administration.

This leaves us with £3.6 billion spent on everything else – already a substantially smaller amount than the £6.5 billion the manifesto claims. And while there is no doubt that there could be some rationalisation of public bodies, the level and assumed ease of savings stretches credulity. One need only look at the poor results of the UK Government’s 2010 ‘bonfire of the quangos’ and the difficulties of the NHS England restructuring to see how these intentions can be derailed.

Overall level of detail

It was good to see costings for the large income tax cuts being costed – these are large sums, but they are credible costings for a large change, and in line with what we would expect. This of course says nothing about their desirability as policy or whether all of the plans presented subsequently add up.

Regarding that, it’s disheartening to see the mantra of tax cuts paying for themselves with no evidence; and little understanding of the constraints of the Fiscal Framework by equating upfront losses in revenues with subsequent potential revenues – even if that were likely, which it is not.

The remaining proposals on tax and spending are less costed, if at all. Health service and local government proposals lack detail; in many cases, no one would disagree with the sentiment – e.g. fixing delayed discharges – but the problem is much more complex. And the planned efficiencies by slashing so-called quangos lack credibility: the proportion of savings is implausible without deep cuts to actual services delivered to an extent that is incommensurate with the additional legislative and delivery action put forward in the rest of the manifesto.

This is, of course, the first manifesto to be published, and it may be that there are similar concerns over level of detail int he plans put forward by other parties. We wait to see if this is the case: you can check in back with us to see our analysis of all others’ proposals on tax and spending.