How is the SNP helping Scotland’s economy grow?

Scotland is open for business and has become a country where growth is recognised as a key enabler of social, economic, and cultural progress.

Our vision is of a Scotland with a competitive, fairer and more sustainable economy. In government, we’ve already delivered a great deal of progress for Scotland. Under the SNP, Scotland’s economy is standout in the UK.

Since 2007, GDP and productivity growth in Scotland has outpaced the rest of the UK. Scotland is the UK’s top destination for foreign investment outside London in Europe, for the tenth year running.

We are setting Scotland up to prosper, supporting businesses and entrepreneurs and creating the conditions for them to thrive. Thanks to sustained focus by the SNP through policies like Techscaler, Scotland is by far the fastest growing start-up economy in the UK and one of the fastest growing in Europe.

We are established a Scottish National Investment Bank to give businesses the long-term capital they need to grow and create jobs. This is in addition to the SNP’s long-standing support for small businesses through the Small Business Bonus Scheme, which has abolished business rates for around 100,000 premises.

We are committed to investing in building a fair, green and growing economy which creates jobs, supports businesses and finances Scotland’s public services and the transition to net zero. We have a strong record of growing the green economy, but to deliver a fair just transition, we must go further.

Scotland’s economy grew by 67% in real terms between 1990 and 2022 at the same time as we cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half, showing how tackling climate change and growing a thriving, green economy go hand in hand.

Scotland is a trading nation and well placed to attract investment and compete on the international stage. We are determined to grasp all opportunities to strengthen Scotland’s reputation in markets around the world.

Demand for Scottish products and services around the world is high and global customers recognise the innovation, quality and ambition of our businesses.

In the last financial year Scottish Enterprise, whose overseas brand is Scottish Development International, reported £2.15 billion in planned international sales from the Scottish companies it has helped – among the highest results ever achieved.

Youth unemployment is now amongst the lowest in Europe and we are outperforming the UK on women’s employment too We believe that building a fairer society goes hand-in-hand with building a stronger economy. We met our target to reduce youth unemployment by 40% by 2021 in 2017, four years early.

In 2015, we became the first government in the UK to become an accredited real Living Wage employer, and there are now over 4000 real Living Wage accredited employers in Scotland.

We are committed to tackling exploitative working practices too. In government, we are making payment of the real Living Wage, transparency on gender-equal pay and exclusion of zero-hours contracts criteria for the award of job-related public sector grants.

We reject the austerity approach of the UK government and believe in a progressive tax system that supports high quality public services. We have used new powers over Income Tax to make the system fairer and support investment in schools and hospitals.

Too many of the powers needed to deliver our vision for a fairer, more prosperous Scotland still lie at Westminster. The SNP will continue to push for the devolution of further powers to the Scottish Parliament over job creation, taxation, social security and wages to allow us to make policies best suited to our economy.