Vetting Bills in the Scottish Parliament for Legislative Competence

Abstract

In this article, Christopher McCorkindale and Janet Hiebert present the first empirical examination of the process by which bills in the Scottish Parliament undergo vetting for legislative competence. Based on a series of interviews with officials in the Scottish Government, Scottish Parliament and UK Government the paper makes a two-fold argument. First, that – despite the susceptibility of Acts of the Scottish Parliament to strong-form judicial review – the statutory requirement that the responsible minister and the Presiding Officer report to parliament on the competence of every bill, and the discretion of the Scottish and UK Government Law Officers to refer any bill to the Supreme Court before Royal Assent, align the devolution scheme with an emerging family of systems that favour legislative to judicial constitutional review. Second, that the deference shown by political actors to the advice of officials on questions of competence at each stage supplants legislative review – and its aspiration to engender a new culture of constitutional engagement – with a more closed form of bureaucratic review.