The silver bullet is already here

We do not start with a miracle industry dreamed up in a minister’s office. We start with the people. Scotland still has extraordinary talent in business, science, education and healthcare. We are not making the most of it because the SNP have raised taxes to pay for ideological vanity projects. Reform’s job in Holyrood is to restore the incentives that once made this country punch above its weight: hard work, productivity, entrepreneurship and community building.

Education used to be the gold standard of the world. In twenty years it has fallen from outstanding to average. Out of just over 700,000 children of school age, 223,000 do not attend regularly. Head teachers do not control their budgets or who they hire. Reform will abolish Education Scotland, another quango sheltering ministers from responsibility. We will put knowledge back at the core of the curriculum, restore rigorous exams, ban phones in class, and give head teachers their schools back.

Then we point that education towards work. Scotland already has ten clusters where geography, science and people make us genuinely world class: financial services, advanced manufacturing, energy, food and drink, tourism and hospitality, creative industries, life sciences, agriculture, fisheries and marine. The manifesto’s skills plan is to get young people and adults ready for those clusters: a First Job Passport from school into college, an apprenticeship or a job; every levy pound actually spent on apprenticeships; an Adult Re-Skilling Taskforce; and a proper technical pathway, instead of sending half of school-leavers to university by default.

A Reform government in Westminster would add a tax credit towards apprentice wages for small firms training 16-to-18-year-olds. That is a UK policy, not a Holyrood one. In Scotland, the job is to stop treating a good trade as a consolation prize.

Sitting on an ocean of oil and gas, yet importing our energy

We are blessed with North Sea oil and gas under the water, and wind above it. Successive governments in Westminster and Holyrood have still managed to give us energy costs seven times China’s and four times those of the United States, while the UK accounts for 0.8 per cent of global emissions. We now import 70 per cent of our gas from Norway, from the same basin where we are shutting our own fields. Not a single blade turning on a Scottish turbine is made in Scotland. No wonder we are de-industrialising.

The manifesto is blunt. There is no “just” transition in Aberdeen or Grangemouth while well-paid jobs are haemorrhaging overseas, because politicians put Net Zero ideology ahead of affordable energy for families and firms. In April 2025 Petroineos confirmed that crude processing had ended at Grangemouth, Scotland’s only oil refinery. The BBC reported around 430 jobs going as the site became an import terminal for finished fuels. A country that used to refine its own oil now pays someone else to do it, then lectures the workforce about a just transition.

Holyrood cannot license North Sea fields. That power is reserved. When a Reform government is elected to Westminster it will use those reserved powers so North Sea oil and gas again give us energy security, and job security for that skilled workforce here. In the meantime, Reform in Holyrood will scrap SNP Net Zero targets, subsidies and quangos, end the ideological ban on new nuclear, and prepare to rehabilitate North Sea gas as our primary energy system. We will fast-track industry on existing industrial sites, create a Scottish Energy Workforce Plan linked to colleges and apprenticeships, and require an Energy Price Impact Statement on related decisions so the public can see the bill before the ideology.

Household bills could fall by £500 a year if Net Zero cost drivers are scrapped. The mechanism under a Scottish Reform government would be to stop pouring about £1 billion into ideological Net Zero projects and to stop pricing industry out of our country.

Cut Scottish tax. Shut the quangos. Stop paying for Net Zero.

Those with the broadest shoulders are now shrugging. Workers and owners are paying too much. Reform will scrap Scotland’s six income-tax bands, match the rest of the UK’s three, and set each 1p below, with the aim of being 3p below within five years. Holyrood cannot touch the UK Personal Allowance, National Insurance or VAT. It can stop charging Scots more than people south of the border for doing the same job.

Aligning the bands is costed at £1.2 billion. Each further 1p costs £850 million. The immediate package is around £2 billion, about 3 per cent of the Holyrood budget. That is not a raid on the NHS or schools. We will find it by reallocating about £1 billion of Net Zero projects, and by taking money from the £6.5 billion spent on 132 unaccountable quangos. Shut the quangos, return powers to ministers, form a department of government efficiency, and reboot a civil service that still treats working from home as a right.

Every extra 1 per cent of growth in the Scottish economy delivers about £8 billion of extra tax over ten years. The manifesto says the £2 billion up-front cut will repay that four times over. The growth target is at least 2.5 per cent a year over ten years. That is how you fund the NHS without taxing a teacher, a nurse or a tradesman until they cut their hours.

£2bn

Immediate tax package, about 3% of the Holyrood budget

132

Quangos soaking up £6.5 billion

£1bn

Ideological Net Zero spend to be reallocated

2.5%

Growth target a year, over ten years

Let small businesses grow: raise the VAT threshold

Holyrood sets Scottish income tax, Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and business rates. VAT is reserved to Westminster. Reform’s Contract with Small Business is clear: raise the VAT registration threshold from £90,000 to £150,000, rising with inflation. The published cost is £2.4 billion a year. That is not money lost to the economy. It stays with the tradesmen who earn it and the households who hire them.

Around 44,000 firms currently cap their turnover just below £90,000. Another 280,000 turn over between £90,000 and £150,000. That is 320,000 sole traders and small businesses who would benefit almost immediately. The ceiling is turnover, not profit. After materials, labour and the van, a tradesman can keep £30,000 or less, then hit 20 per cent VAT on everything he supplies. Small VAT-registered businesses already spend an average of three days a year on the paperwork. Lift the threshold and the florist, the hairdresser and the coffee shop can grow, instead of closing early to stay under the line.

Put that with Holyrood reversing the April 2026 business-rates revaluation, cancelling the extra council-tax bands, and phasing out LBTT without raising the overall take, and you have a country that stops punishing a firm for succeeding. Add cheaper energy, and you get jobs that pay, not another strategy document from a quango.

A home for local families, then a path to own it

Scotland has the highest homelessness on record, with 40,000 adults and 10,000 children in temporary accommodation. Shelter says 15,000 affordable homes a year, 75,000 over five years, would fix it. Reform agrees, and will give councils the power to build them: town-centre brownfield, compulsory purchase of vacant stock, pension-fund social housing owned by local authorities, and small-site SME builders.

Supply is only half the scandal. Before 2022 a homeless person could not apply to a council unless they had a local connection. The SNP abolished that test. English councils restored theirs after Covid. Scotland did not. Glasgow had 35 no-connection applications in 2022. Since 2023 there have been 4,449, and 76 per cent came from outside Scotland. Scotland is housing 10 per cent of the UK’s asylum seekers; Glasgow alone houses 6 per cent. Working-class communities are at breaking point because strangers are being housed ahead of local families.

Reform will restore the local-connection rule and end Glasgow’s status as a dispersal city. That will not set UK asylum policy, and Holyrood cannot stop Channel crossings. It will put a young couple from the town back at the front of their own housing list. We will also introduce a progressive rent-to-buy model for young people, first-time buyers and working families, and repeal SNP private-rented rules for new tenancies so supply can come back.

No stable home, no children

National Records of Scotland counted 45,763 live births in 2024, the lowest annual total since civil registration began in 1855. The total fertility rate fell to 1.25. Replacement, without migration, is about 2.1. Edinburgh is already below one child per woman. Glasgow and Aberdeen sit just above. There is no baby bonus in the published papers. There is a UK pledge to cut the costs that stop working people starting a family, to support parents, and to get rid of policies that make children unaffordable.

Young couples are not failing some cultural test. They can count. If tax takes the extra shift, if the energy bill eats what is left, if the housing list goes to someone with no local connection, and if there is no honest path from a rented roof to a home they can own, they delay children, or never have them. A stable future is not a luxury. Without it, there is no next generation.

That is why they belong together. Lower Scottish income tax. Less money wasted on quangos and Net Zero. Cheaper energy from the basin under our feet. A VAT threshold that lets a small firm hire. A local-connection rule so a young family can get a home. Rent-to-buy here, and Right to Buy as national policy in England. None of that replaces a family. It is what a serious country does so a family can afford a home and a child.

Let Scotland flourish

We do not need to invent a new country. We need to stop running this one as a welfare economy that punishes the people who still get up in the morning. Cut the tax. Shut the quangos. Stop spending a billion on Net Zero theatre. Put energy, skills and housing back on the side of the people who live here. Then a young couple can see a job, a home and a child as one future, not three things they keep putting off.

Scotland has immense potential to become a powerhouse of growth, employment and innovation. Vote like you mean it.