Swinney’s slimmed-down plans prompt criticism of ‘managed decline’

John Swinney has been accused of signalling “18 months of managed decline” in the run-up to the next Scottish parliament elections, as he set out his inaugural programme for government the day after his finance secretary announced savage cuts to fill a £1bn hole in this year’s government finances.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said the first minister’s programme – the Holyrood equivalent of the king’s speech – revealed “an SNP government with no vision, no strategy and no plan”, while the general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Roz Foyer, said the slimmed-down prospectus indicated “managed decline” ahead of the 2026 elections.

Swinney, who was elected as leader of the SNP in May after the abrupt resignation of his predecessor, Humza Yousaf, told MSPs that eradicating child poverty was his “foremost priority” and public service reform would deliver “whole-family support” across the country, offering greater local flexibility and focusing on prevention and early intervention.

But Foyer said it was “a complete betrayal” of struggling families to drop a previous commitment to extend free school meals to the last two years of primary school because of financial constraints.

John Dickie, the director of the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, said that while “reforming public services so that hard-up families can easily access support is vital, those services need to be available and adequately funded in the first place.”

Peter Kelly, the Poverty Alliance chief executive, said commitments to affordable childcare and extra support to help people into work “need to be matched with adequate investment”.

Swinney stressed that, given the fiscal challenges laid bare on Tuesday, “we cannot continue to deliver public services as we did in years past”.

He told the Holyrood chamber he intended to “change the model of service delivery” across the public sector “to promote positive outcomes, prioritise prevention and reduce demand for future services”.

On Tuesday the finance minister, Shona Robison, announced £500m of cuts to non-essential spending and raided a £460m green energy fund – earmarked for net zero and climate projects – to deal with a shortfall arising from above-inflation pay deals that the government had not budgeted for.

Swinney’s decision to reverse cuts to the Open Fund for freelance creatives, after an outcry from the Scottish arts sector , was one of the few points of positive consensus.

Caroline Rance, a Friends of the Earth Scotland climate and energy campaigner, said there was “next to nothing” in the programme that showed the Scottish government was “serious about getting back on track on climate” after its decision to scrap a critical 2030 climate target earlier this year.

Human rights and equalities campaigners were disappointed by the absence of an anticipated Scottish human rights bill and a Scotland-only ban on conversion practices.

Responding to Swinney’s plans to change the ministerial code, the outgoing Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, asked whether this was “belated recognition that he got it wrong in supporting his friend [the former health secretary] Michael Matheson?”

The bitter row about Matheson, who was suspended as an MSP for wrongly claiming an £11,000 iPad bill on expenses, rebounded on the party at the general election, with SNP members telling Swinney at last weekend’s conference that scandals like this one had eroded public trust, resulting in heavy losses on 4 July.