Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026 [Draft]
As other members have done, I thank my colleague Sarah Boyack for her ambition in and commitment to introducing the bill. A great deal of work has gone into the bill, and I commend her for her on-going dedication to protecting the environment, tackling poverty and promoting collective wellbeing. Scottish Labour agrees with the general principles of the bill and will support it at stage 1.
The integration into legislation of definitions of “wellbeing” and “sustainable development” will not only improve policy coherence and guidance for public bodies but provide structure and accountability that will contribute to Scotland’s progress towards achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals. More must be done to further embed wellbeing and sustainable development principles into public bodies’ decision making. It is clear that, too often, short-term priorities drive decision making over long-term sustainability.
The committee’s evidence sessions supported the value of creating statutory definitions and assisting public bodies to meet their wellbeing and sustainable development obligations. Evidence to the committee overwhelmingly supported the aims and ambitions of the bill. Indeed, organisations such as Oxfam have long backed calls for the bill and see it as a way of enhancing the national outcomes with decision making and delivery. They remain sceptical about whether non-legislative approaches will be sufficient to achieve sustainable development and wellbeing goals.
The Scottish Government has dismissed the bill, because it believes that its aims can already be achieved in the current policy landscape and that additional legislation would be unnecessary. However, despite what the minister said in his speech today, the Scottish Government has been promising a reformed and strengthened national performance framework for years. I believe that those promises were first made back in 2021, but we have yet to see them come to fruition. Instead, we are left with an outdated structure and legislation that is not delivering.
The current approach is clearly not working—that is our position—and the committee’s report found that the proposed legislation is not incompatible with any of the planned reforms to the national performance framework, yet the Government still will not support the bill.
Scottish Labour welcomes the ambition of the bill and the clear structure, guidance and accountability mechanisms that it would give to public bodies and other organisations. The fact that it complements the national performance framework should be welcomed, and the Government should view the bill as something that strengthens existing ambitions instead of something that is unnecessary.
The world has entered precarious times, with some world leaders denouncing the UN’s sustainable development goals. Setting out a clear framework that embeds the principles of sustainability and wellbeing into the heart of public bodies’ decision making can only help to ensure that poverty and inequality, the climate and the wellbeing of future generations are consistently at the forefront of decision making instead of being an afterthought. That can only be a good thing, which is why Scottish Labour will support the bill at decision time.