Free Prescriptions, Land Reform, Minimum Unit Pricing, the Named Person Scheme, the Ferries Scandal, and the Lessons of a Quarter Century of Devolved Governance
Twenty-Five Years of Making Different Mistakes From Westminster
The Scottish Parliament was established in 1999 on the premise that Scotland, given the opportunity to govern itself in devolved matters, would make different and better policy choices than Westminster had made for it. The premise has been tested across twenty-five years and found to be partially correct: Scotland has made different policy choices. Whether they are better depends substantially on which choices are being assessed, which metrics are being applied, and whether the assessor arrived in Scotland by train or by ferry.
The successes are genuine. Free personal care for the elderly — introduced in 2002, before Westminster — has protected older Scots from the catastrophic care costs that English families face. Minimum unit pricing for alcohol — introduced in 2018 after a lengthy legal battle with the Scotch Whisky Association — has been followed by measurable reductions in alcohol-related deaths and is now being replicated in other jurisdictions. Land reform legislation has begun to address the extraordinary concentration of Scottish land ownership — approximately half of Scotland’s private land is owned by approximately 432 people — that had persisted since the Highland Clearances. Free prescriptions, free university tuition for Scottish students, the smoking ban (introduced earlier than England), and a smoke-free environment in public places were all Scottish policy innovations that Westminster subsequently followed.
The SNP Governance Record: Achievement, Complacency, and the Ferries That Weren’t
The SNP governed Scotland from 2007 — first as a minority government, then with majority, then as minority again — accumulating a record that its supporters describe as transformative social democracy and its critics describe as competent management of existing services with insufficient reform of what wasn’t working. The NHS in Scotland — Nicola Sturgeon’s signature brief — received sustained investment and maintained performance that, while not uniformly better than England’s, avoided some of the most severe waiting list crises of the COVID aftermath.
The ferries scandal — the commissioning of two Caledonian MacBrayne ferries from Ferguson Marine shipyard in Port Glasgow at an initial cost of £97 million, escalating to over £300 million with significant delays, a nationalisation of the shipyard to prevent its closure, and an inquiry finding ministerial decisions that were not adequately scrutinised — became the symbol of SNP governance failure that critics had been waiting for and supporters found difficult to defend. The Audit Scotland report on the ferries found decisions made without adequate business case, cost escalation without adequate management, and a governance culture in which ministerial accountability was insufficiently exercised. The ferries, as of 2024, are partially operational and considerably over specification.
The Named Person Scheme: Policy That Was Right in Principle and Wrong in Almost Every Practical Detail
The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 introduced the Named Person scheme — assigning a designated professional (health visitor, teacher, or equivalent) to every child in Scotland to coordinate support and identify early needs. The policy’s intent — providing a single point of contact for vulnerable children rather than leaving them to navigate multiple fragmented services — was sound. Its implementation raised fundamental questions about state intrusion into family life, data sharing between agencies without parental consent, and the compatibility of the scheme’s information-sharing provisions with Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (the right to private and family life).
The UK Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that provisions of the scheme were incompatible with the ECHR. The Scottish Government spent several years attempting to modify the scheme to address the legal objections. It was eventually abandoned in 2019. The policy illustrated something important about devolved governance: the capacity to innovate is a capacity to innovate in both directions — toward better policy and toward policy that is well-intentioned, poorly implemented, legally challenged, and eventually expensive to unwind.
What Holyrood Has and Hasn’t Changed
After twenty-five years, the honest assessment is that devolution has delivered policy divergence — Scotland is a different policy environment from England on several significant dimensions — without delivering transformation. The persistent challenges of Scottish governance — drug deaths (Scotland has the highest drug death rate in Europe), educational attainment inequality, health inequality, regional economic divergence between the central belt and rural Scotland — have not been solved by devolution. Some have got worse. The SNP’s decade of governance produced a settled devolved administration, a confident national politics, and a governance record that is neither the transformative social democracy that its rhetoric promised nor the failure that its opponents claimed.
Devolution has worked in the sense that the Scottish Parliament has governed, passed legislation, made different choices from Westminster, and sustained democratic legitimacy. It has not worked in the sense that the structural problems of Scottish society — inequality, poor health outcomes, drug deaths, inadequate housing — have not been solved by having a Parliament closer to them. Proximity to problems and solutions to them are, it turns out, related but not equivalent.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. Scottish policy innovations include free personal care for the elderly (2002), free prescriptions, free tuition for Scottish students, the smoking ban (introduced before England), and minimum unit pricing for alcohol (2018). The SNP governed Scotland from 2007 in various configurations. The Caledonian MacBrayne ferries procurement at Ferguson Marine shipyard escalated from £97 million to over £300 million; Audit Scotland found inadequate governance. The Named Person scheme was ruled incompatible with the ECHR in 2016 and abandoned in 2019. Scotland has the highest drug death rate in Europe. Land reform legislation has begun to address concentrated private land ownership. The Scottish Parliament uses the Additional Member System of proportional representation.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Somewhere a civil servant is reading this and recognising their Tuesday morning.