This short article offers comments on James Mitchell's response to the authors’ original article in this issue. It argues that reforming the Scottish Parliament is required to rebalance power and revitalise Holyrood as a deliberative forum. Good government depends on a strong opposition, and the Scottish Parliament must enable that opposition.

In June 2024, the UK Government ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Convention has virtually global coverage and provides an established framework for the protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). However, its status of ‘soft law’ means that states rely on domestic law, often copyright, to implement the requirements of the convention and provide meaningful guidance to their citizens on permitted uses of ICH. Currently, the UK has no legal framework to administer the convention as the 1988 Copyrights and Patents Act contains no provision for the protection of expressions of intangible heritage. This raises significant questions about the efficacy of ratification for Scotland and, crucially, what meaningful difference it will make at the community level. This article reflects on the authors’ experience of running a series of community consultation workshops in Scotland with Historic Environment Scotland – Ar Daimhean is Dualchas / Our Relationships and Heritage – mainly focused in the Outer Hebrides, during the summer and autumn of 2023. These workshops highlighted that the traditional means of ICH transmission and preservation in these communities have not survived the changes brought about by economic migration, the generational absence of Gaelic in educational settings, technological changes, and the incoming of non-Gaelic speakers. The safeguarding initiatives across Scotland at the community level tend to be under-resourced, over-reliant on volunteers and lacking the infrastructure to ensure that ICH will be passed on to future generations. In this context, the ratification of the Convention presents an opportunity for Scotland to co-create processes for ICH safeguarding drawn from networks and examples of best practice that already exist within the country.

This brief response to the article by Kerr and Bundy in this issue notes the helpful contribution made by their proposals. It also notes that others have previously made such suggestions, and poses the question: why is it so hard to reform Holyrood?

Youth work has long been recognised as a powerful tool in shaping the lives of young people, offering them opportunities to develop personally, socially, and educationally in ways distinct from formal education. Despite a growing body of research on the role of youth work, understanding its full impact remains a complex challenge. This article is based on a recent report for No Knives Better Lives and YouthLink Scotland exploring the impact of youth work through a lifecourse perspective, a method that promises to illuminate its long-term significance. By employing qualitative biographical interviews, it investigated the intricate ways youth work intersects with other aspects of a young person's life, revealing its role as a supportive, preventive service.

This essay critically examines the effectiveness of the Scottish Parliament in fulfilling its role of holding the Scottish Government to account. It evaluates the committee system, chamber debates, parliamentary questions, and public participation, highlighting structural and cultural challenges limiting the Parliament's performance. Despite its unicameral design and ambitions for consensus-driven ‘new politics,’ the Parliament remains constrained by entrenched party discipline, rigid procedures, and limited public engagement. The committee system, intended to provide robust scrutiny and legislative initiative, is overwhelmed by government dominance and high member turnover, restricting expertise and independent inquiry. Chamber debates suffer from restrictive time limits, centralised speaker selection, and lack of parliamentary privilege, resulting in scripted and partisan exchanges. Parliamentary questioning is hindered by early deadlines and rehearsed responses, reducing spontaneity and scrutiny. Public engagement remains weak, hampered by limited digital access and low constituent interaction. To address these shortcomings, the essay proposes reforms: enhancing committee independence and structure, extending and flexibilising debates, revising question procedures, and improving transparency and accessibility. These recommendations aim to realign the Scottish Parliament with its founding aspirations, ensuring it functions as a more effective, participatory, and accountable institution in Scotland's evolving democracy.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the longstanding social care crisis across the United Kingdom. The need for thorough and sustained change in the entire policy domain of care – defined as paid care workers, including childcare workers, and unpaid carers and those experiencing care – is clear. To achieve such change, the prominence of care as a key policy issue needs to increase. This could be achieved through care becoming anchored in outcomes-based performance measurement frameworks. A number of countries, regions or municipalities use such frameworks, for example in relation to health, the environment, or inequality, and often do so in the guise of ‘wellbeing frameworks’. Scotland, in 2007, introduced the National Performance Framework (NPF) This article presents how a ‘blueprint’ for a new Outcome on Care in the NPF was developed by a team of academic researchers, using a policy review and stakeholder interviews and following participatory action research principles. While the campaign which advocated the inclusion of care in the NPF was ultimately not successful, the article argues that the blueprint can inform discussions on how to embed care firmly in the considerations of policy makers, in Scotland and beyond. It also argues that performance frameworks offer opportunities for a visible celebration of policy success and the identification of barriers to improvement and that they can provide a positive focus to sustain systemic efforts to create ‘countries that care’.

The Lord Advocate's dual role as head of the prosecution service and chief legal adviser to the Scottish Government is a distinctive feature of Scotland's constitutional framework, rooted in historical precedent but increasingly contested. This essay critically examines the legal, constitutional, and political dimensions of this dual role, exploring arguments for and against reform. It assesses the political momentum behind calls for change and the practical and legal constraints imposed by the Scotland Act 1998. While complete structural reform would require UK parliamentary approval, more limited functional separations within the current framework appear feasible. The essay concludes that any reform must carefully balance the need for enhanced independence and transparency against preserving coherence, accountability, and the rule of law. Ultimately, it questions whether the existing model remains fit for purpose in a modern, devolved constitutional order.