Labour to pledge £100bn investment in Scotland over ten years

The Labour manifesto will include a pledge to  invest £100bn in Scotland's economy over a decade, the party has announced.

With the UK Labour manifesto released later today, the party will increase promised investment.

Scottish Labour said the new figure, up from the £70bn previously promised, will include £20bn of National Investment Bank funds plus £30bn from the National Transformation Fund and £50bn in Barnett consequentials.

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is expected to focus on the housing crisis in his launch speech, pledging that by the end of its first term, a Labour government would build 100,000 council houses a year, and 50,000 social homes through housing associations.

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the investment in Scotland would lay the foundations for “a better, more just and fairer society where no-one is left behind and where every person is given the opportunities to lead a decent and fulfilling life”.

He said: "This extra investment will provide the funding that Scottish Labour would use to build 120,000 new council and social homes, invest £6 billion in retrofitting homes to the highest energy efficiency standards, and bring dignity back to care workers and care users alike with a 25 per cent increase in investment in social care.

"Back in 2014, many of those who campaigned and voted for independence did so because they saw it as an opportunity to challenge the failed status quo. Now the SNP's own blueprint for independence prescribes a decade of cuts in a separate Scottish state. This is not a challenge to the status quo - it is a recipe for disaster, and a bid to turbocharge the failed austerity politics that Scotland has suffered for far too long already.

"Under my leadership in Scotland, and Jeremy Corbyn's across the UK, Labour is now offering the people of Scotland a chance to break free from the failed policies of the Tories in Westminster, and from the SNP's cuts, which they would accelerate in a separate Scotland.

"The choice is clear: investment under Labour or more cuts and chaos from the Tories and the SNP.

“This investment is the transformation that only a UK Labour government can make. This is the difference a UK Labour Government can make to Scotland. There is one way to challenge the failed status quo on December 12, and that is a vote for Scottish Labour."