Committees, scrutiny and the distribution of power at Holyrood

From when the Scottish Parliament was first established, much was asked of its committee system. In a unicameral legislature, without the revising chamber that tempers legislation at Westminster, committees were expected to be the ‘engine room’ of scrutiny and a partial substitute for a second chamber. They were meant not only to examine Bills, but to oversee the executive, interrogate public bodies and provide channels for public participation. In short, they were given a number of constitutional jobs.

As the Scottish Parliament nears the end of its sixth session, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments (SPPA) Committee has returned to those founding ambitions in its recent report, Strengthening committees’ effectiveness, which is the outcome of a wide-ranging inquiry into how Holyrood’s committees work in practice. Read in that light, the report perhaps invites a straightforward question with significant constitutional bearing: are the Scottish Parliament’s committees currently equipped to perform the role that was envisaged for them?

The answer matters for more than institutional housekeeping. It bears directly on how power is distributed within Scotland’s devolved institutions; on whether ministers are meaningfully accountable to Parliament; and on how far Holyrood can deliver on the promise, made in 1999, of a more open and deliberative form of government. Those aspirations, articulated in much of the literature and public discussion that informed the Parliament’s creation, provide an important benchmark against which current debates about committee capacity and culture can be judged.

Committees as constitutional checks, not mere internal machinery

It is tempting to treat the design of committees as an internal organisational matter: what size works best, how many members can reasonably serve on multiple committees, how to schedule meetings around valuable chamber time. The SPPA Committee rightly engages with all of that. Yet the underlying problem it is grappling with is constitutional.

In a majoritarian parliamentary system, the executive is normally drawn from, and depends on, a majority in the legislature. That reality lies behind familiar concerns about “elective dictatorship”, and it is one reason why the UK’s uncodified constitution has relied on a web of institutional and political checks—including a revising second chamber and, in more recent decades, a stronger committee system—to guard against excessive executive dominance. Under Scotland’s devolved arrangements, which provide for a unicameral Parliament without a second chamber, Holyrood’s committees are the sole forum in the legislature capable of systematically checking the executive. If they do not perform that role well, there is no institutional backstop elsewhere in Scotland’s own parliamentary system.

This is not simply about the volume of legislation, or the number of amendments that a committee can realistically process at Stage 2 with the level of scrutiny needed. It is about whether there exist robust, institutionally embedded practices through which ministers can be compelled to explain, justify and, where appropriate, revise their proposals; whether public bodies and regulators created by statute are subject to sustained oversight; and whether citizens can see Parliament, rather than government, as the central locus of democratic authority.

Seen in that light, the SPPA inquiry reads less as a “tidy-up” of procedures and more as an exercise in constitutional maintenance.

Culture, structure, and the role of conveners

One of the recurring themes in the evidence heard by the inquiry and mentioned by multiple elected members in their written evidence and subsequent debate is the relationship between culture and structure. Members repeatedly stress that committees work best when they develop habits of cross-party collaboration, when conveners facilitate rather than dominate, and when questioning is evidence-led rather than performatively partisan. Several pointed to the Finance and Public Administration Committee and the Public Audit Committee as examples where consensual, probing scrutiny has become the norm.

At the same time, there is a clear recognition that culture is shaped—but also constrained—by structural choices. Two aspects have obvious constitutional resonance.

First, the size, composition and churn of committees affect their capacity to develop institutional memory and policy expertise. Large committees, with members frequently reshuffled to and from ministerial office, make it harder for Parliament to sustain focused scrutiny of complex policy areas or particular public bodies. The SPPA Committee’s own membership changes during its inquiry—with more than half its original members replaced before the report was agreed—offer a small but telling example of the difficulty of sustaining continuity and expertise, even on a committee tasked with examining the effectiveness of the committee system. That fragility of membership inevitably has consequences for the balance of power between Parliament and the executive, and between Parliament and the network of non-ministerial offices and regulators formally accountable to it. A committee that is small enough and stable enough to build a shared understanding of its remit is more likely to function as a recognisable constitutional check; one whose membership is constantly in flux may struggle to do so.

Secondly, the method by which conveners are chosen has constitutional as well as practical implications. At present, convenerships are allocated between parties under d’Hondt and filled through internal party processes, so that a convener’s primary accountability is, in practice, to their group rather than to the chamber. The SPPA Committee stops short of recommending any change, but it squarely raises the option of conveners being elected by the Parliament as a whole, drawing on the experience of Westminster and the Senedd. That is not a neutral reform. Making conveners office-holders of the Parliament, with a mandate that depends on cross-party confidence, would modestly recalibrate the internal balance between the executive and legislature. It would not remove party loyalties entirely, but it would strengthen the expectation that conveners act, first and foremost, as guardians of their committee’s independence and of the integrity of parliamentary scrutiny, rather than risk being treated as purely partisan appointments.

The debate following the report shows that there are genuine disagreements about how far to go here, including as to whether conveners should be elected and whether election ought to be coupled with enhanced status or additional remuneration. Those are not simply questions of internal management. They are matters of constitutional judgement about how scrutiny is organised, how far committees are insulated from executive influence, and how responsibility is allocated within the Parliament itself. It matters that they are recognised as such, rather than treated as mere questions of administration.

Capacity, time, and meaningful scrutiny

A second cluster of issues concerns capacity and time. Members from all parties expressed concern about committees being “overburdened”—not simply with the volume of Government Bills, but with extensive Stage 2 amendment rounds, petitions, inquiries and all-important scrutiny of public bodies at regular intervals. The SPPA Committee’s proposals for an earlier deadline for lodging Members’ Bills, better use of Monday and Friday sittings, and more flexible use of time-limited committees and sub-committees are attempts to create room for more considered scrutiny: the kind of continuous oversight on which meaningful accountability in a unicameral system depends, but which committees have struggled to sustain under their present workloads.

The underlying point here is straightforward: serious legislative oversight takes time and sustained attention and does not come cost free. A unicameral parliament that relies heavily on its committees cannot expect them to do much more than process amendments and host high-profile ministerial sessions if no space is left for deeper work. Similar questions about capacity have already been confronted elsewhere in the devolved system. The recent decision in Wales to expand the size of the Senedd, in part to enhance scrutiny capacity, underlines how questions of parliamentary resources and workload are of constitutional magnitude, not merely matters of the Parliament’s internal procedures. For Holyrood, treating capacity in those terms means ensuring committees have time for longer-running inquiries, systematic post-legislative scrutiny and repeated engagement with regulators and non-ministerial offices that currently report to Parliament on paper but are rarely tested in practice. The experience with the Scottish Housing Regulator, raised in the debate on the Committee’s report, illustrates that risk: it has attracted concerns for years yet tends to appear only once annually before a committee. 

Where parliamentary capacity is stretched too thin, significant public powers are subjected to only intermittent, and therefore weak, parliamentary scrutiny. At that point, what is at issue is no longer simply committee ‘effectiveness’; the concern is again a constitutional one: whether statutory powers are exercised in line with Parliament’s intentions and whether Holyrood retains meaningful control over the legal frameworks it creates.

Committees, devolution, and the wider constitutional order

The SPPA report is not, on its face, about devolution or the territorial constitution. Nonetheless, several strands of the debate speak directly to the way Holyrood’s committee system operates within the wider UK constitutional order.

One concerns the interaction between committee capacity and the scrutiny of Bills that engage the boundaries of devolved competence or the operation of UK-wide regimes. Members note the pressure that follows when hundreds of amendments are brought at Stage 2. In some cases, this volume reflects the need of the Scottish Government to respond to late policy changes, including developments at UK level or unresolved intergovernmental disagreements. In such cases, committees are not only engaging in technical drafting; they are, whether they intend it or not, taking decisions that help manage intergovernmental frictions and shape how the boundaries of the devolved settlement are worked out in practice.

If committees lack time and resources to examine competence questions carefully, or to interrogate the “external effects” of devolved legislation on reserved matters, there is a greater likelihood that disputes will be pushed upwards, into intergovernmental negotiation between the Scottish and UK Governments, to Scottish or UK law officers, UK ministers wielding veto powers, or to the courts. Those are perfectly legitimate constitutional actors. However, routine reliance on them to resolve difficulties that might have been anticipated and addressed at the committee stage risks making those governmental and judicial institutions beyond the Scottish Parliament the primary arenas in which the boundaries of devolution are deliberated, and narrows the space in which Holyrood can give effect to its own legislative ambitions.

A second strand concerns the oversight of Scottish public bodies more generally. These organisations frequently exercise statutory powers on Parliament’s behalf, often at one remove from day-to-day political scrutiny. The question, again, is whether Holyrood has, through its committees, the institutional machinery to monitor how those responsibilities are being discharged and then to intervene when concerns arise. That is not simply a matter of “policy effectiveness”. It goes to whether Parliament retains meaningful control over the bodies that implement significant areas of policy through primary and subordinate legislation, and whether questions about the reach and limits of those powers are debated and decided primarily by Parliament and its elected members under public scrutiny, or elsewhere by ministers and courts.

A constitutional moment for Holyrood’s committees

The SPPA Committee’s recommendations appear to be deliberately modest. They do not propose a wholesale redesign of the committee system, far less a codification of its constitutional role. Instead, they suggest a programme of incremental change which may lead to smaller and more stable committees; more systematic support and induction for conveners and members; the potential for elected conveners; greater use of time-limited and joint committees; and steps to address concerns around gender imbalance.

Precisely because the proposals are modest, there is a risk that their constitutional significance will be underestimated. If implemented with care, they could begin to shift the internal balance of Holyrood away from a heavily executive-led agenda and towards a more assertive, committee-centred model of scrutiny better suited to a unicameral Parliament. If neglected—and while most parties have indicated their support for change, there is every chance they might be—there is a risk that longstanding weaknesses, especially in relation to overly large committees, high membership turnover, limited follow-through on inquiries, and thin engagement with public bodies, will become ever more entrenched.

There is, of course, no way to guarantee that any revision to the Parliament’s standing orders, and thus its committee system, can by itself ensure robust constitutional performance. Rather, much depends on political choices—including whether parties are willing to treat convenerships as genuinely parliamentary roles; whether members are prepared to prioritise committee work even when it cuts against short-term partisan advantage; and whether the Parliament as a whole is willing to devote time and resource to meaningful scrutiny rather than ever-expanding legislative agendas.

What the SPPA inquiry has done, however, is to make explicit what has sometimes been implicit: that debates about committee “effectiveness” are, in substance, debates about where power lies in Scotland’s devolved settlement. For a Parliament born out of a desire to disperse and democratise power, that should be recognised as constitutional business of the first order.

Stewart Alexander Duncan is a PhD candidate in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and a researcher at the Scottish Parliament. His PhD examines how the lawmaking process in the Scottish Parliament, and in particular the drafting of Bills, shapes how policy is enacted and implemented in practice.

(Suggested citation: S. Duncan, ‘Reforming Holyrood’s Committees: A Constitutional Perspective’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (27th November 2025) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))