Policy in practice: How Scotland can get it right

The Policy in practice: How Scotland can get it right report brings together the work of three RSE-convened workgroups focused on the economy, the environment, and social inclusion and cohesion. It looks not only at what Scotland might choose to prioritise, but also at how policy can be done differently – how decisions are made, how trade-offs are handled, and how people can be more meaningfully involved in shaping change

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Executive summary

As Scotland approaches the 2026 election, public confidence in politics is declining. This erosion of trust risks deepening political disillusionment and polarisation at a time when democratic values are already under threat. Simultaneously, Scotland continues to face persistent poverty and inequality, growing pressures on public services, a housing emergency, and an accelerating climate and biodiversity crisis. Ambition is not in short supply, but evidence points to a recurring gap between intention and implementation, which further weakens trust and limits progress.

It is in this context that the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) convened multidisciplinary expert workgroups, drew on published research, and engaged the public to examine the issues the electorate identify as most important: the economy; health and social care; immigration and asylum; housing; education and skills; and the environment. These issues are intrinsically interconnected and cannot be addressed in isolation. They require coordinated, long-term approaches that are grounded in evidence and realistic about constraints. This paper presents our proposal for doing policy differently – shifting from paternalism to partnership; from the short-term to the long-term; from systems that merely help people survive to ones that enable them to thrive; and from rhetoric to delivery.

Hence, the paper calls for: whole-system economic reform linking inclusive growth in Scotland’s foundational economy with its growth sectors and a tax system fit for long-term public service delivery; a preventative shift in public health placing mental health, wellbeing, and equity at the centre of decision-making; a coordinated, cross-government migration and integration framework grounded in transparent data and place-based labour planning; cross-party agreement on housing to ensure long-term supply, affordability, and decarbonisation; a coherent national strategy for education and skills aligned with Scotland’s wider priorities; and a cross-party charter to meet statutory climate and biodiversity targets, halting biodiversity decline by 2030, and restoring nature by 2045.

Across all areas, effective policy delivery depends on clearer ownership of outcomes, credible fiscal planning, cross-party stability, and transparent acknowledgement of trade-offs. Without this shift, new strategies will continue to outpace delivery capacity, and commitments will outnumber meaningful changes. The paper concludes that Scotland must move from policy to practice.

This paper is not a manifesto. Instead, it offers an evidence-based framework to strengthen governance and rebuild trust, consistent with the RSE’s founding commitment to reasoned and evidenced debate. Meaningful change will require political leaders to make difficult choices, explain them honestly, and focus on outcomes. When policy delivers tangible improvements to people’s lives and strengthens confidence in Scotland’s democratic institutions, we will know we are getting it right.

Why now and why the RSE?

Scotland faces mounting challenges in 2026 and beyond. Poverty and inequality persist, there is a deepening housing crisis, and public services are under severe strain – not only from rising demand linked to an ageing population, but also from long-term neglect and a failure to invest in, localise, and modernise the systems on which people rely. These pressures are experienced and addressed across multiple levels of government, national and local, and often in partnership with the private and third sectors, which together shape how policy is delivered in practice. At the same time, climate, biodiversity, and economic transitions require clear and deliverable action. For too long, bold ambitions have been met with multiple, often evidence-light strategies, patchy delivery, and fragmented accountability across the system.

We need to seize what is a generational opportunity – Scotland can build a more resilient future through the clean energy transition, technological innovation, public sector reform, nature recovery and a host of other developments. Realising this potential will require moving beyond aspiration to coordinated delivery, long-term investment, and skills development across all regions. The Scottish Government’s Innovation Strategy sets a clear ambition for Scotland to become the most innovative small country in the world, but success will depend on sustained commitment, clear priorities, and delivery of measurable outcomes.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is using its independent voice and multidisciplinary expertise to champion a different kind of politics: stronger delivery mechanisms, better regional decision-making where it makes sense, and clearer public accountability. The focus is on evidence-informed aims that name who is responsible for delivery, and how progress can be measured, so people can see real improvements in their lives. The RSE is ideally placed to initiate such a discussion in Scotland. We were founded nearly 250 years ago in the midst of the Scottish Enlightenment. This is a process in which we can all participate in on an equal footing. We hold deep respect for the truth, and equally in using truth to improve the lot of everyone. This is still reflected in our mission: “knowledge made useful”.

This paper sets out how policy in Scotland is currently delivered and how this needs to improve if the political process is to re-engage the public. In doing so, it recognises that while national policy direction is set by the Scottish Parliament and Government, delivery capacity also rests with local authorities and their partners across the public, private and third sectors. The sections that follow consider five of the key issues for voters identified by the Scottish Opinion Monitor (Scoop), the Scottish Election Study’s regular opinion poll based on a representative sample of Scottish voting-age adults.3 These priority concerns (the economy; health and social care; immigration and asylum; housing; and education and skills) are examined through the lens of doing policy differently, exploring how this approach could shape responses to each issue and illustrating what it might look like in practice. To the above issues we add the environment as it is central to all policy areas and is underpinned by a pressing need to address the rapid change in our climate and loss of biodiversity. Unless we can mitigate and reverse these changes, their consequences will continue to multiply. The recently published UK Government’s national security assessment on global biodiversity loss4 points to a potential collapse in resilience, security and prosperity.

These issues are framed explicitly through the lens of voter concern – rather than academic disciplines, institutional remits, or sectoral interests – reflecting the priorities that most strongly shape how people vote. This framing recognises a core democratic reality: political attention is significantly driven by voter priorities. If evidence-based policy is to influence debate in the run-up to the 2026 election, it must be presented in ways that connect directly to those priorities. Public feedback and engagement indicate that many citizens feel a disconnect between their concerns and policy outcomes, contributing to declining trust in political institutions. Therefore, this paper adopts a doing policy differently approach. Drawing on evidence already published by the RSE and other specialist organisations, it calls for policy approaches that are grounded in evidence, realistically deliverable, and supported by clear mechanisms of accountability.

Additionally, the RSE convened three thematic workgroups on economic prosperity, social cohesion and inclusion, and environmental sustainability, which comprised RSE Fellows, Young Academy of Scotland, and external experts, who met regularly to share their expertise and inform this paper. By organising existing knowledge around the issues voters care most about, this paper seeks to make expertise both politically relevant and practically useful for future politicians and policymakers.

Three points to note:

1. The RSE is not a political party, and this paper is not intended as an alternative manifesto. Rather, it seeks to encourage a politics that confronts intricate realities with honesty and clarity.
2. Although various calls to action (and policy options in the appendix) are presented, based on available evidence, the paper does not claim to have all the answers. This paper’s objective is to prompt a conversation that we hope will engage the widest possible range of voices across Scotland.
3. The issues confronting Scotland are complex and only growing in intensity. Rising disillusionment, combined with growing pressures in daily life, create space for extreme voices that challenge and are harmful to the very principles Scotland’s democracy is built upon: openness, inclusivity, tolerance, and decency. These uncomfortable truths must be confronted in a sincere and non-judgmental way if any of the changes outlined in this paper are to take hold.

The 2026 election: Choices, trade-offs and priorities

Elections – and indeed, the policies of any future government – are about choices, trade-offs, and priorities. For the next Scottish Government, there will be enduring challenges to overcome as well as new opportunities to seize. Many of these will fall into one of three categories, reflecting the RSE’s own strategic agenda: Economic prosperity, environmental sustainability and climate, and social cohesion and inclusion. Although these themes may come as no surprise, there is often still disagreement on how they should be addressed. This highlights the need for evidence-based, responsible, and constructive debate, which this document aims to inspire.

Economic prosperity

Scotland’s economy faces persistent low productivity, regional inequalities, and economic leakage when potentially high-value local enterprises are bought by multinationals. It also continues to underperform relative to the UK and other developed economies, showing low growth in recent years.6 Without a radical improvement to Scotland’s economy, it will be increasingly difficult to create a tax base – and corresponding tax returns – to fund even the current level of public services. In 2026-27, as a result of the slower growth of the Scottish economy relative to the rest of the UK, Scotland’s taxpayers will pay £1,754m more tax than their counterparts in the rest of the UK, though this will only bring in £969m more to the Scottish budget. Just under £800m is lost due to what the Scottish Fiscal Commission calls Scotland’s ‘tax base performance gap’. This has grown from £540m in 2020-21.8 An ageing workforce and skills gaps in key sectors such as renewable energy, digital innovation, and social care further threaten productivity and public service resilience. Scotland has untapped potential in advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, life sciences, and financial services, but realising it will require innovative policies,10 workforce planning, and collaboration between academia, industry, and government. Politicians need to prioritise plans to deliver growth and monitor and report on its wider impacts.

Tax and spending

The Scottish Government’s choices on tax and spending are shaped by a complex funding system, combining devolved tax raising and borrowing powers with a block grant from the UK Government. Whatever the mechanics, public finances are under increasing strain, with the government’s own forecasts showing a funding gap of around £4.7 billion by 2030.

Health and social care spending is the largest part of the Scottish budget, and highest in relation to people aged over 60. It is anticipated that by 2030, health and social care spending will account for 40% of public spending, placing further demands on an already limited public purse. At the same time, as an answer to this deficit, the government has made ambitious assumptions about efficiency savings and tight public sector pay growth, especially in health, which will be difficult to deliver.13 It is also using sources of revenue, such as from Crown Estate (mostly coming from the ScotWind leasing programme),14 to support day-to-day spending.

The Scottish Government must find a more sustainable way to improve its financial picture. This necessarily involves balancing limited funding from the fiscal framework, borrowing powers, and the block grant with rising demands on health, social care, and other services. Clear, resilient, and transparent fiscal plans are essential, including considering all tax (including Council Tax) options, making strategic investments offering longer term sustainable returns, and avoiding16 short-term measures that defer hard choices.

Education and skills

Scottish education is undergoing significant transformation; most recently, the Education (Scotland) Act (2025)17 established Qualifications Scotland, while also creating a new office, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education in Scotland. The RSE has previously argued that surface-level changes to education bodies cannot substitute for the foundational cultural change required to develop a future-facing education and skills system. Transforming education and training is central to economic and social wellbeing and achieving Scotland’s wider objectives. This must be driven not only by policy narratives, but also by the respective actions taken to deliver them. It is also important to recognise that a more consequential reform agenda is being advanced through the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) Bill,19 at a time when college and university finances are increasingly precarious across the sector. In this context, funding and governance reform may prove far more significant for system outcomes than institutional rebranding alone.

Significantly, Scotland remains committed to an ambitious programme of decarbonisation and nature recovery and protection. Achieving underlying targets requires a transformational increase in the number of people trained and employed in key jobs. However, “green skills” shortages continue to be a problem. This illustrates the importance of effectively linking national priorities to decisions taken at the delivery level – from careers advice and subject choices to articulation between different stages of the learner journey (e.g. school to college, college to university, or into apprenticeships, etc.).20 Therefore, improving the “absorption rates” in the education system, from education into productive employment, is a key enabler of both individual and economic prosperity.

Environmental sustainability and climate change

Scotland is globally committed to be a net-zero nation21 by 2045, balancing greenhouse gas emissions with removals to combat global warming, through its Climate Change Plan.22 To do this, a radical transformation is needed across land use, buildings, transport, and energy policy to support carbon budget trajectories. The energy transition can be a catalyst for regional revitalisation and upskilling for net-zero jobs. Crucially, this must be aligned with the principles of a just transition, ensuring that people and places are not left behind in the shift to a greener, more circular economy – while also maximising opportunities for economic growth. Embracing environmental support systems – the natural processes, resources, and ecological infrastructure such as clean air and water, healthy soils, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and vital life forms – should galvanise major transformational change to enhance ecosystems’ health and protection. Investing in climate resilient infrastructure, healthy natural systems, and public understanding is essential to reduce the far higher economic and social costs of inaction, such as extreme weather impacts on homes and energy bills to longterm damage to soils, marine ecosystems, and livelihoods. We also cannot overlook the human element. People need to understand how to adapt to a changing climate and contribute to a just transition, underscoring the importance of effective outreach.

Social cohesion and inclusion

Scotland’s Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy sets out a framework for the Scottish Government and the public sector at large to embed equality and human rights across all their work. However, social cohesion cannot be achieved through policy intent alone. It depends on how policies are delivered, who holds power in decision-making, and whether adequate resources are in place to enable meaningful participation.

Across Scotland, rising inequality, most acute and persistent in the places that deindustrialisation left behind, where insecure incomes, and underinvestment in social infrastructure, are driving violence and disengagement as well as eroding political trust (Coid et al., 2021). Divides in current and potential wellbeing between younger and older Scots now generate tensions too. Social division and reducing social mobility are not borne out of misunderstanding or a lack of empathy, but of unequal outcomes resulting from overlapping structural inequalities (e.g. due to disability, race, gender, class, etc.) that limit people’s ability to participate fully in social, economic, and political life (Francis, 2025).

Any future Scottish Government will need to move beyond rhetorical commitments to empathy and inclusion and instead make deliberate political choices: prioritising equality of outcomes, investing in income security and public services, working across government portfolios, as well as reforming funding and commissioning models that currently undermine the third sector’s role in sustaining social cohesion. Without these choices, efforts to bring people together risk placing responsibility on communities themselves, rather than addressing the structural conditions (e.g. inequality, poverty, digital exclusion, poor housing, etc.) that continue to leave many feeling excluded from Scotland’s future. This challenge is compounded by polarising and binary narratives in social and mainstream media, which can entrench division and undermine constructive public dialogue (Vasist, Chatterjee and Krishnan, 2023).

Importance of evidence-based policy

Across each of these challenges and opportunities, greater emphasis should be placed on cross-governmental evidence-based policy, supported by realistic delivery plans. However, evidence does not operate in a political vacuum. The generation, interpretation, and use of evidence are often shaped (and at times distorted) by political priorities and media narratives. As a result, even where there is a strong and well-established evidence base for action, political pressures can delay, dilute, or derail implementation. Recognising and addressing this gap between evidence and decision-making is therefore essential to achieving meaningful and sustained policy change. Evidence from successful interventions,24 such as the Scottish Child Payment25 and targeted crime reduction initiatives,26 demonstrate that progress is possible when priorities are clearly defined, enough resources are allocated, and delivery is sustained over time. These examples reinforce a central message of this paper: outcomes improve not simply with ambition, but when choices are made and followed through. It is imperative that the next Scottish Government, with the cooperation of all parties and MSPs, establishes long-term, cross-party frameworks for policy alignment, transparency, and continuous evaluation across key portfolios. This addresses the false starts, siloed policymaking, and short-termism that hinder investment, delivery, and public trust.

How should we do politics differently?

1. From paternalism to partnership

Too frequently, politics is experienced as something imposed upon people, rather than undertaken with them.

Doing policy differently requires a transition from paternalism and top-down governance to a process of partnership, driven by meaningful engagement and co-production with all sections of the community from start to finish.

2. From surviving to thriving

Democratic participation is about more than casting a vote. It is about ensuring that people have the ability, resources, and information to participate meaningfully in decision-making and self-organise in the pursuit of change.

Effective democratic politics creates the conditions in which every individual can thrive, ensuring that individuals and groups have access to the information, tools, and resources necessary to participate meaningfully in decision-making and to organise themselves in pursuit of shared goals.

3. From short-term to long-term

Political decision-making is often constrained by short electoral cycles and the immediacy of the news cycle. The difficulty is compounded where the costs of intervention are immediate, while the benefits accrue only over time. Addressing systemic challenges requires sustained investment and foresight.

Climate change illustrates this concept: as extreme weather intensifies, consequences cascade across systems – migration patterns shift, food production falters, disease burdens rise, energy security is undermined, and security risks proliferate. Adopting a holistic and forward-looking
approach can ensure complex challenges are effectively addressed.

4. From rhetoric to delivery

As we have seen, doing policy differently depends upon partnership, tolerance, thriving, and a sustained, long-term perspective. But none of these processes will succeed unless rhetoric becomes reality. Research suggests that political disillusionment can stem from perceptions that
candidates face pressures to make ambitious commitments during campaigns which prove difficult to sustain or fully implement once in office (Rose and Wessels, 2019). Thus, what is required is less talk about “what” will be done and more talk about “how” it will be done.

Delivery requires honesty about choices and priorities, about what can and what cannot be delivered. Trade-offs are inevitable, and winners and losers will emerge. This makes it more important that decisions are made with public input. Scotland is an ambitious nation, but too often its strategies have failed to deliver real change. The problem is not ideas or resources. Instead, it is governance, delivery, and the appetite for risk when it comes to delivering policies.

From principles to policies to practice

This section applies the four principles outlined above (partnership; thriving; long-termism; and delivery) to the five policy areas of greatest public concern; ranked in order of priority according to Scottish Opinion Monitor (Scottish Election Study, 2025).

• Economy
• Health and social care
• Immigration and asylum
• Housing
• Education and skills
• Environment

We include the environment as its impacts are far reaching, from environmental stability to human wellbeing, to economic sustainability. Each of these priorities aligns with one or more of the three societal challenges recognised by the RSE – economic prosperity, social cohesion and inclusion, and environmental sustainability and climate change. All of them are interconnected. For example, education supports economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental action; housing and health policies advance social cohesion while shaping economic and environmental outcomes; and environmental considerations influence every priority area. Recognising these interconnections underscores the need for joined-up, evidence-based policymaking that addresses systemic challenges holistically.

Each priority area is discussed under the four principles of partnership, thriving, long-termism, and delivery, followed by a call to action that any future government should prioritise. More detailed policy options for each priority area are listed in the Appendix.

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Download the Policy in practice: How Scotland can get it right report (5MB, PDF)