Written evidence submitted by the Rt Hon David Cameron (IGR0012)

Response to The Scottish Affairs Committee call for evidence on the Inquiry:

Intergovernmental relations: 25 years since the Scotland Act 1998

Dear Chairman and Committee Members,

I am grateful to you for inviting me to make a written submission as part of your current inquiry into intergovernmental relations: 25 years since the Scotland Act 1998.

In my submission I will principally focus on my own period as Prime Minister, 2010-2016.

My assessment was that, up until 2007, when Labour was in power in Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff, engagement between the UK Government and devolved governments took place largely through informal channels. The formal architecture that had been established through the devolution agreements was not being utilised.

When Labour lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2007 and the SNP came to power as a minority government, the relationship between Westminster and Holyrood shifted from informal to competitive, distrustful, and distant. It was well publicised that the Prime Minister and First Minister had seldom met face to face, and the relationship had become something of a stand-off.

As I put it in my book, For the Record, in a chapter about Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, “the appetite for self-government had been whetted, but not satisfied. The arrangements were incomplete and unstable. The devolution settlements seemed to have created a never-ending grievance culture, where no matter what the issue, Westminster took the blame. Instead of politics in the devolved nations being about subjects such as housing, education or health – for which they were all now responsible – they were predominantly about the need for further devolution, more money and the shortcomings of the constitution.”

Poor intergovernmental relations – informal at their best, hostile at their worst – played into this grievance narrative. They were one example of the incomplete arrangements which we could complete, by putting in place formal, official channels of communication. In 2010, when I became Prime Minister, we started to do just that. It was the beginning of my so-called Respect Agenda.

What did that look like in practice? There was a lot more engagement: I stipulated that the Prime Minister and First Minister should meet regularly, as should Secretaries of State and their counterparts in Holyrood. There would be a lot more official to official contact too, and if reasonable approaches were made to UK Ministers, I said that they should appear before Scottish Parliamentary committees. I also made an offer to appear once as year as Prime Minister before the Scottish Parliament. Although that offer was not taken up, I believed that the overall engagement vastly improved and, above all, allowed us to deliver a better deal for Scotland.

In 2011 the SNP was elected to Holyrood with a majority. Of course, the SNP’s primary purpose is to achieve Scottish independence, so I believed that result was a clear, democratic mandate for the Scottish Government to hold a referendum on Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom. The greatest proof point for success of our Respect Agenda is the fact that, in 2012, we signed the Edinburgh Agreement to deliver that referendum. It was important, I thought, for the details that would give effect to the inter-government political agreement to be legislated for by the Scottish Parliament. For the result to hold, and be accepted, the referendum should be “made in Scotland”. It was, and the question of Scottish independence was settled for a generation.

Today, many independent observers hold that Edinburgh Agreement up as a gold standard of how administrations can work together.

As well as a mandate for a referendum, I also believed the SNP’s victory in 2011 signalled an opportunity to reinforce more widely the Respect Agenda. There had already been a Memorandum of Understanding between Westminster and Holyrood at the time devolution was established, setting out how the relationships between administrations should work, but I updated this in 2012. This consolidated the place of a Joint Ministerial Committee led by the UK Prime Minister and head of the devolved administration. It was stated that the Committee should meet at least once a year, which it did.

After the referendum came the Smith Commission, an independent commission advising on further steps to complete the devolution settlement. Again, the UK Government stepped up to the plate and delivered the recommendations from Lord Smith in the Scotland Act 2016, giving the Scottish Government greater powers over tax and welfare. During my period in office, there were 24 legislative consent motions – the Scottish Government giving their approval to laws the UK Parliament was enacting – and only one was refused.

Of particular note are the City and Growth deals that we established during my time in office. We started with four – covering Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and Tay Cities. Future administrations continued these deals and now the whole of Scotland is covered by them: an example of the two governments working together to deliver tangible and lasting change for the people of Scotland.

I believe that by making the relationship between Westminster and Holyrood more respectful, we made it more collaborative, effective and efficient during what has been a most challenging period of constitutional politics.

Throughout my time in office, the system was working and steadily improving. The legacy of that Respect Agenda remains in place today and continues to deliver.

I wish the Committee well with this important Inquiry and look forward to reading your conclusions.

Yours ever,