Parents and carers will benefit from a new childcare offer aimed at bringing down the cost of living, tackling child poverty and boosting family incomes, First Minister John Swinney has said. As part of the newly-published Programme for Government, the Scottish Government is transforming its childcare offer to ensure greater childcare support is available to families with children from nine months old through to the end of primary school.
A period of intense engagement is underway to ensure streamlined public services are delivered for Scotland, Public Service Reform Secretary Ivan McKee has said. This week’s Programme for Government set out how the Scottish Government plans to deliver stronger and efficient public services that are sustainable for generations to come.
London hotelier sentenced for exploiting Covid support scheme nine times to fraudulently claim £450,000. Richard Courtenay claimed £450,000 in Bounce Back Loans across nine fraudulent applications.
All residents, businesses, community groups and visitors are being encouraged to have their say on a proposal for a tiered fixed-rate amount Visitor Levy in Highland. The public consultation survey is now open (Monday 7 September) for a 12-week statutory period.
New roads policing centre helping to track down offenders faster and disrupt organised crime groups that rely on England's road network. government funds new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre, stepping up enforcement on illegal number plates across England.
Major lenders have moved to increase mortgage rates to catch up with recent rises to swap rates, according to Moneyfactscompare.co.uk analysis. Over the coming days, more lenders are expected to review mortgage rates in response to higher swap rates, with HSBC and NatWest so far the biggest banks to increase rates since the start of this month.
There is a new nuclear race developing around the world, but Britain could be forgiven for not noticing. For years, nuclear power in Britain has seemed like an argument about one enormous project at a time.
Scotland has an energy problem that sounds almost impossible. It produces far more electricity than it needs and it has some of the greatest renewable-energy resources in Europe.
£2.1 billion is a difficult number for most people to comprehend. It is so large that it can make almost any announcement sound impressive.
Highland Council has been given a powerful new weapon in its attempt to tackle the shortage of housing. It can now make owning a second home considerably more expensive.
Why has buying a home become so difficult for young people in Britain? In this Funding the Future podcast, I talk to my son James about the extraordinary generational divide in housing. When I was 25, I bought a three-bedroom flat in London for £28,500 with a deposit of just £250.
Capital Gains Tax is one of those taxes that can produce an argument almost before the first sentence has been completed. For some people, it is an obvious loophole in the tax system.
Sometimes the most interesting way of looking at a week's local news is not to examine each story separately, but to stand back and ask what it is telling us about the place. And this week, Caithness has produced a mixture of politics, fishing, employment, community issues and questions about the future which are rather more connected than they might first appear.
October has an extraordinary history of sudden financial crashes. Six of the eight largest falls in Dow Jones history happened in October, including 1929, 1987, 1997 and 2008.
John Swinney has made it clear that Scotland's public sector cannot continue operating in quite the same way it has for decades. There are too many organisations, too many overlapping responsibilities and, in some cases, too many layers of management.
There is a quiet revolution taking place in British farming, although you might not have noticed it yet. For generations, farming was something you inherited.
With household budgets still under pressure, making a few simple changes around the home could help reduce the amount of electricity being wasted every day. One of the easiest places to start is with appliances and electronic devices that are left switched on or sitting in standby mode when they are not being used.
Living standards in Aberdeen are now below the UK average for the first time since 2003, with the city’s wage premium having fallen by three quarters since the early 2010s. Debates about extracting the final oil and gas reserves therefore risk missing the bigger picture on where the city’s future employment will come from, the Resolution Foundation said on Thursday 3 Sepember 2026.
Britain has one of the most efficient food distribution systems in the world. Walk into almost any supermarket and it is easy to take that efficiency for granted.
John Swinney has set out perhaps the most ambitious programme of public-sector restructuring Scotland has seen for many years. The direction of travel is clear.