With the possible exception of the 1987 UK General Election, when Margaret Thatcher famously – and rather ambiguously – voiced her new Government’s intention to “do something about those inner cities”, regeneration rarely features prominently in the election campaigns of political parties. Indeed, none of the party manifestos for the 2026 Scottish election campaigns feature “big ticket” promises or commitments under a headline banner of regeneration. With the exception of Scotland’s Regeneration Forum’s (SURF) Hustings event on the 12 March, the lexicon of regeneration – “the process of transforming the economic, physical and social potential of places” achieved via integrated, usually inter-sectoral, and holistic intervention – barely featured in the build up to the 2026 election.
While the paucity of manifesto promises regarding regeneration indicate a lack of electoral capital, this is not matched by a paucity of governmental action. Thus, in the forty-year period prior to the onset of austerity in the 2010s, there was no shortage of special initiatives focused on transforming the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole quarters of Scottish cities. Indeed, there was concern that “initiativitus” characterised UK spatial and regeneration policy: that is, a tendency for successive governments to announce waves of interventions with new names, adjusted funding pots, levels and criteria, re-configured geographies, institutional arrangements, timeframes and goals. Indeed, Patrick Diamond and colleagues argued that the UK’s spatial policy once warranted the descriptor “hyper-active incrementalism” . Thus, the absence of regeneration in party political manifestos has not equated with the absence of action once a new government was established.
However, a lot has changed since 2010. Austerity led to the end of intensive help for neighbourhood regeneration, alongside a dismantling of needs-based models of resource allocation to local government, especially in England. Under successive Westminster Governments, regeneration was re-purposed for economic growth via instruments such as City Deals with scholars characterising the post-2010 period as post or after regeneration. In Scotland, the most recent Scottish Government Regeneration Strategy was published in 2011, just after the SNP achieved its first outright majority. Supported by the 2015 Community Empowerment Act, the focus in Scotland has been on “community-led” regeneration and on public service reform.
It is against this more recent “post regeneration” background that 2026 manifestos and the implications of the election result should be understood. It helps contextualise the fact that while some individual components of place-based regeneration are present across the manifestos, there is no indication of a step-change in approach. Thus, the SNP manifesto promises continuity in focusing on town centre revitalisation, although it does, interestingly, also note plans to develop an Urban Development Company to drive growth in Glasgow. Should the Scottish Liberal Democrats play a prominent role in any coalition government, it is possible that they may push for more innovation in the regeneration agenda: their manifesto – alone amongst the manifestos promises – “a new model to support forgotten communities, as the next step after city and region deals”.
Whatever the configuration of the new government, public transport is likely to feature strongly in its new programme. Scottish Labour’s manifesto includes “a plan to put local buses under public control” and to retain free bus travel for the under 22s and older people, while the Scottish Greens, in possibly one of the most prominent policy promises of all of the manifestos, promise free transport for all. However, as SURF’s manifesto analysis points out there is a likely tension in the resources required to live up to this commitment and the ability to invest in the public transport infrastructure required to contribute to the regeneration of many communities, villages and towns.
Likewise, all the manifestos share a commitment to increasing housing supply. While there is an emphasis on affordable and social housing, there is not much detail on the places where housing will be located, and it therefore looks unlikely that the new government will agree a targeted intervention strategy. And while all the manifestos propose change to the planning system, the election result makes it highly likely that this will be incremental, for example, via further investment in the planning workforce. Only the Scottish Conservatives and Reform UK had proposed retraction of planning policy. As the Scottish Greens proposed that “all new homes must meet net zero standards and be connected to zero carbon public transport” it is possible that the new Parliament may deliver a more integrated place-based orientation to housing, climate and transport policy.
The election result may result in some policy focus on community empowerment – one of the orthodoxies of regeneration policy in the 90s and 2000s. It is therefore possible that Scottish Labour’s proposed Local Democracy Act designed to give citizens more influence over public services and elected mayors, may gain traction as may the Scottish Greens commitments on citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting and long-term funding for community organisations. Thus, while the election result largely suggests little substantial change in the regeneration landscape across Scotland, there are some signals that some of the component policies within it could develop in interesting ways.
