Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has launched his party’s manifesto focused on the issues that matter most to people right now, and made a plea to voters to back his party on the peach regional ballot to deliver change with fairness at its heart.

The manifesto can be found here.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Food & Drink Academy where he baked peach tarts for journalists, Mr Cole-Hamilton set out the party’s ten target constituency seats which would enable it to block the SNP from winning a parliamentary majority as well as the party’s four key priorities for the election:

• Delivering first-rate health care by embedding 900 new multidisciplinary patient-facing staff like nurses, physios and mental health professionals in GP practices and investing £400m into care over the next three years in order to fix the NHS.
• Helping you with the cost of living by insulating cold homes with an emergency £100m insulation programme, using Scottish renewable energy to drive down household bills and increasing support for unpaid carers by £400 a year.
• Getting Scotland moving again – by driving progress on major projects such as dualling the A9 and tunnels for Shetland, passing a Ferries Bill that will end the SNP’s ferries fiasco for good and making £12m available immediately to compensate islanders and coastal communities.
• Getting Scottish education back to its best by hiring 2,000 more pupil support assistants and banning phones from schools.

Speaking at the launch, Alex Cole-Hamilton said:

Scotland has so much going for it but right now, it feels like our country simply isn’t working.

Household bills are soaring. There are long waits to see your GP. The SNP’s ferries fiasco is a national embarrassment and Scottish education just isn’t what it used to be.

We know you feel let down by the other parties. We think Scotland deserves better than this. But it needs to be change with fairness at its heart.

We believe in fairness for everyone, no matter who you are or where you come from. That’s why we have a realistic plan to get things done, focused on the things that matter most like access to healthcare and the cost of living.

Let me be straight with you. You have two votes. In many constituencies we are on the verge of winning against the SNP but wherever you are, every vote for the Scottish Liberal Democrats on the second peach ballot will deliver change with fairness at its heart.

Scotland deserves better. And with the Scottish Liberal Democrats, you can vote for it.

On tackling the challenges facing health and care he said:

We will get you faster access to GPs and more local staff, driving early diagnosis and bringing down waits, and getting people back to work. It will be the equivalent of giving every GP practice the benefit of an additional member of clinical staff.

We will rejuvenate local healthcare facilities and introduce a new Fair Deal for Rural Healthcare. We will roll out a national lung cancer screening programme, recruit and retain more NHS dentists, create walk-in mental health services, and our 10-year workforce plan for the NHS and care will take the pressure off overwhelmed services and get the right staff in the right place.

You can’t fix the NHS unless you fix care – not with 2,000 people a night stuck in hospital when they don’t need or want to be there, costing the NHS over a million pounds a day. That’s why we will reward care workers with a new career ladder and halve the problem of delayed discharge by investing £400m into care over the next three years. We will increase the Carer Support Payment by over £400 a year for unpaid carers, and give every young carer someone who they can turn to for help balancing learning, life and caring for their loved one.

That is how we deliver first-rate health and care services.

On helping with the cost of living he said:

We will bring down energy bills and protect you from volatile fossil fuel prices through an emergency insulation programme and by accelerating the rollout of smart climate-friendly heating and solar panels. That will go hand-in-hand with re-writing community benefit rules so local people get much more of the money companies make from generating renewable energy near them.

We will help people upskill and improve their earnings potential through new Job Transition Loans worth up to £5,000, and improve early learning and childcare for working families meaning extra help with the challenges and costs of juggling work and family.

All of that, plus we’re calling on the Chancellor to immediately cut fuel duty by 10p to bring down prices at the pump every time you fill up.

Finally we will declare the Scottish Government’s support for the Liberal Democrat plan for fixing our relationship with Europe, including through a new bespoke customs union between the UK and EU. That is the single biggest change that could be made to fix trade, boost growth, help with the cost of living and improve government finances.

On getting Scotland moving again, he said:

We will pass a Ferries Bill to end the SNP’s fiasco for good and give islanders and coastal communities the fair deal they deserve plus compensation for lost business.

We will improve core connections, driving progress on major projects such as dualling the A9 and tunnels for Shetland.

And we will give local authorities the fair funding they need to fix more potholes and deliver a new data-driven Dangerous Roads Programme to ensure that where there is a dangerous road the government can’t ignore it.

That is how we get Scotland moving again.

On getting Scottish education back to its best again he said:

We will hire 2,000 more pupil support assistants, legislate to make classrooms mobile phone-free, and fix the mess the SNP have made of teacher recruitment and retention, ending the excessive use of teachers on zero hours and temporary contracts.

We will help children get off to a good start by using play-based learning until the age of 7, help neurodivergent children and their families receive the right help at the right time, and – and this one is personal to me as someone who was a youth worker for 19 years – we will bring forward a Youth Work Bill to reach young people who are not engaged successfully in formal education.

That’s how we give every child the best start in life.

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