This post summarises my article (in 2013) that reflected on the Scottish Parliament’s role and influence as a legislature after its first decade. After 25 years of devolution, how many of these points still ring true? The aim is to work with the Centre for Scottish Public Policy to prompt debate among key people in Scottish politics.
Twenty-five years of devolution gives us plenty of evidence to assess the role and influence of the Scottish Parliament. In this blog, I summarise five previous concerns to prompt discussion about their contemporary relevance.
1. The Scottish Parliament did not live up to ‘new politics’ expectations.
It was once common to describe the gap between pre-1999 hopes for the Scottish Parliament and reality. Those hopes began with the Scottish Constitutional Convention’s description of a new political culture. They continued when the Consultative Steering Group (set up to design the Scottish Parliament’s standing orders) highlighted power sharing ‘between the people of Scotland, the legislators’ and the Scottish Government, and proposed strong powers for parliamentary committees, including to monitor government departments, assess the quality of government engagement with stakeholders, scrutinise legislation, and initiate its own legislation. Yet, the CSG also expected the government to govern, and envisaged improvements to a Westminster-style process in which the government would propose most legislation and parliament would legitimise policy via enhanced scrutiny.
2. The Scottish Parliament does not scrutinise government legislation sufficiently.
From 1999-2007, the problem was that a coalition government oversaw a punishing legislative schedule, giving insufficient time to scrutinise legislation. From 2007-11 a minority government passed less legislation, but the new threat of parliamentary opposition translated into the non-introduction of some bills rather than more time for scrutiny. From 2011 we saw majority government business-as-usual, then minority governments with less reliance on cross-party cooperation.
Committees could also engage in scrutiny via the inquiry process: to assess current policy and encourage new legislation to fill gaps, or to conduct post-legislative scrutiny to evaluate policy following implementation. However, the big splash reports tend to stand out as exceptions to the rule, and Scottish governments tend to reply with a polite ‘thank you’ rather than a substantive commitment to respond.
3. The Scottish Parliament does not have a sufficiently large professionally trained staff
These problems relate partly to capacity, in which dozens of committee staff try to keep track of an increasingly complex statute book delivered by a public sector with half a million employees. To be effective, committees need to prioritise a small number of issues. Even then, they often struggle to get enough information about legislation, and its impact on policy and public sector practices, to make an informed judgement. Still, few demand a boost to the capacity of the Scottish Parliament as an organisation (rather than a venue for party competition).
4. The party whip undermines independent scrutiny, or parties do not engage with the legislative process
These problems relate mostly to the party-political nature of parliamentary proceedings. The Scottish Parliament is a slightly more consensual mini-Westminster. From 1999-2007 a majority Labour-Liberal Democrat government had minimal interest in working with an opposition SNP. From 2007-11, and 2016 onwards, the SNP had to work with other parties to get things done, but minority government did not spark a new consensual culture of government-opposition relations.
5. The Scottish Parliament would benefit from an upper chamber
Of course, there is no prospect of a second chamber. The new Scottish political system was modelled as an alternative to ‘old Westminster’, containing an unelected second chamber in dire need of reform. Rather, the focus in Scotland regarded the extent to which a well-designed unicameral process could make up for the absence of the second chamber’s function, largely by front-loading scrutiny and investing high powers in committees. If so, it makes sense to reflect continuously on the gaps between hopes for design and actual execution.
In all five cases, a key difference is the passage of time, to move away from the highly optimistic language of reformers in the 1990s, and the initial honeymoon period of devolution, towards more pragmatic assessments in relation to real world politics. For example, the Commission on Scottish Parliament reform in 2017 focused largely on tweaks to current processes rather than radical redesign, and Steven MacGregor’s award-winning PhD research makes a convincing case for the non-trivial influence of the Scottish Parliament on government legislation. If so, in the absence of a big constitutional event, like devolution in 1999 or independence some other time, the Parliament will largely continue in its current form. The unexciting but satisfactory conclusion is that people may be vaguely satisfied with the Scottish Parliament because it performs its expected role competently.
Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy 