INTRODUCTION

Any assessment of the Scottish Parliament's contribution to child and family law necessarily involves measuring its output against criteria. Happily, selecting the criteria is one of the privileges of the author. In this chapter, what the Parliament has achieved will be assessed in the light of the problems it was designed to solve; the promises held out for it by its creators; and the subject-specific goals of child and family law itself.

Scotland has long had an embarrassment of riches when it came to proposals for reform of child and family law, many emanating from the Scottish Law Commission. In common with other areas of Scots law, the pre-devolution problem lay in these proposals having to compete for precious parliamentary time at Westminster. Thus it was that no-fault divorce reached Scotland seven years after similar reform was implemented in England and Wales. Other Commission proposals, like those on cohabitants, simply languished, unimplemented, in the bowels of the Scottish Office. There was also a perception of a degree of indifference at Westminster to Scottish matters: something demonstrated when Ian Lang, then Secretary of State for Scotland, rose to inform the House of Commons that he had published Lord Clyde's report on the highly controversial Orkney child protection case. Such was the exodus from the House that the proceedings were interrupted by the noise of departing feet. These concerns were acknowledged in Scotland's Parliament, the White Paper that preceded devolution, when it noted the need for a “more effective democratic framework” for Scotland.