Former high profile MSPs told the think tank in a series of “exit interviews” that the parliament is not living up to its consensus-building potential, contributing to key targets being missed.
It is not just the public who are deeply frustrated and disillusioned with the way politics and policymaking are working in Holyrood, new research from IPPR Scotland has found.
MSPs themselves have been feeling the same malaise, with a record number of them having chosen not to stand for re-election at this year’s Scottish parliamentary election.
In a series of detailed “exit interviews”, MSPs from across the political spectrum – including former backbenchers and senior cabinet figures – told researchers that the parliament has been underperforming. The findings come at a time of declining trust in politics and growing frustration with the way democratic institutions function. Voter turnout fell dramatically at the 2026 election and various polls showed voters felt Scotland was headed in the wrong direction.
The Scottish parliament was designed to bring competing ideas together to find productive compromise. But interviewees described a shift towards shallow partisanship, with MSPs increasingly falling back on party lines and formulaic debates where politicians speak past each other.
This disconnect between the parliament’s consensus-building design and adversarial politics undermines the quality of scrutiny and legislation.
The problems show up in the way parliamentary committees operate. When the parliament was set up in 1999, committees were imagined as spaces for sustained, collaborative discussions, allowing MSPs the time to develop subject expertise and contribute meaningfully to policy matters.
But interviewees said members pay little attention to one another, and serious engagement with the substance of issues is all too rare.
Researchers found that:
- Short committee tenures are limiting the development of expertise. The median time MSPs serve on committees has hovered around one-and-a-half to two years, compared with five-year parliamentary terms. This restricts their ability to develop the kind of subject expertise that longer tenure would provide.
- Instead of interactive discussions, MSPs increasingly resort to monologues. In the first parliamentary session, a committee member spoke an average of 117 words before another member spoke. By the sixth session, this had doubled to 232 words.
This affects the process of legislation making. Committees were intended to scrutinise legislation in detail, drawing on members’ expertise, expert witnesses and detailed evidence. But MSPs said debate has shifted to the final stages of legislation with poorly thought through amendments introduced at the last minute.
The researchers’ analysis of parliamentary data backs this up. In the first session (1999-2003), final-stage debates were about half as long as committee discussions. By the sixth, (2021-2026) the pattern had reversed, with final debates longer than committee stages.
IPPR Scotland has argued that the parliament needs to strengthen its consensus-building mechanisms, both to build trust with the electorate and because the challenges the country faces need long-term policies with widespread buy-in.
The think tank recommends that reforms to parliament be designed by a new Citizens’ Commission on Scotland’s Democracy, giving citizens a formal role in reviewing and reporting on the functioning of Scottish democracy through citizens’ assemblies and juries.
Dave Hawkey, senior research fellow at IPPR Scotland, said: “Scotland faces formidable challenges, from cutting emissions and mitigating the impacts of climate crisis to managing the ageing population and reducing inequality.
“Solving each of these will need bold and far-reaching policy, including ideas from every corner of Scottish society.
“Low trust in politics is a major barrier to building the consensus we need to successfully guide Scotland through these changing times. Concretely, if citizens lack trust in politics, they will not agree to pay the taxes we need to fix our shared problems.”
Anonymous MSP1 said: “If you go as a minister to be interrogated by the opposition or backbenchers, the greatest disappointment is always how rubbish their questions are because they’re all sitting on their phones, you get to their shot, they ask a pre-prepared question.
“It’s either political or general most of the time. And then they go back to scrolling on Twitter.”
Anonymous MSP2 said: “You have legislation that grows arms and bells and whistles. [During recent debates] I was thinking: I cannot believe we’re actually accepting or agreeing to this amendment that, in one line, will give somebody a headline but will cause a huge tail end of policy issues.”
