In a digital world, our parliamentary politics is out of date

As one might expect, I have been paying attention to the passage of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill through parliament. 

On 28 October, five hours of parliamentary time was lost due to the failure of the voting system. In a parliament that has over 25 bills still to be concluded and has cancelled February recess due to the pressure, five hours is precious time indeed.

The fault, as it turned out, was with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Quite why a key part of parliament’s resilience is dependent on Microsoft remains a mystery. The fact that unlimited hybrid working has been allowed to continue adds to the problem as members continue to have connection problems and waste further precious time making points of order to ensure their vote has been recorded properly.

We live in a digital world. The majority of our private and public affairs are now stored, processed and interrogated on digital platforms and so I was fascinated to be interviewed last year as part of research into how this digital state has emerged and how it relates to policy development and law making.

The land reform bill makes provision for mandatory management plans for all large landholdings. Such plans must be publicly available but the bill does not specify what this means in practice. And so amendment 258 surprised me. 

It was a modest and seemingly innocuous amendment that provides Scottish ministers with the power to require them to be published on “a single website” by regulation.

A single website… it feels so 1980s. And it is.

Such information will cover over 1,000 landholdings totalling more than 50 per cent of the land area of Scotland. It adds to a long line of iterative, ad hoc expansions to the landscape of land information including such elements as land valuation, environmental designations, planning consents, wayleaves, ownership, real burdens, crofting tenure, ancient monuments and flood risk. Such data is held by different organisations across multiple digital platforms held by numerous public agencies with totally different specifications standards and accessibility criteria. Some is not even publicly available.

During scrutiny of the bill, civil servants themselves noted the inadequacy of similar data in a register created 20 years ago to facilitate agricultural tenants to buy their farms. Some of the maps submitted consisted of “a blank sheet of A4 paper with only a couple of lines serving as a map” or measurements given as “from a giant tree in the corner of a field, going a distance of 200 yards and then coming down a hill”.

The fact that unlimited hybrid working has been allowed to continue adds to the problem as members continue to have connection problems and waste further precious time making points of order to ensure their vote has been recorded properly.

Over 20 years later we still await regulations to sort out this mess. But this mess is not arbitrary. It is part of a much wider failure of policy makers and parliament to understand the implications of the digital world.

Last year a fascinating report was published. Gordon Guthrie is a tech guru who has worked in Silicon Valley and the Scottish tech sector. Two years ago he took up a role as a research fellow under the First Minister’s Digital Fellowship Programme. For 18 months, in an unpaid capacity, he forensically examined how our laws are made from beginning to end. Over the past 25 years of evolution, virtually every law on whatever topic has either created, adapted or relied upon digital architecture to implement its provisions. 

He interviewed MSPs, senior civil servants and technical experts. He found that in this digital world, much of the policy making and legislative procedures pay scant attention to the need to ensure that the impact of whatever measures are being implemented takes proper account of the functions and means by which they will be delivered in the real world.

A potential purchaser of land in Scotland is already faced with the opaque information that some land bounded by a giant tree (which Storm Amy may well have blown down) and an indeterminate point on some unspecified hill will be subsequently bought from her or him by the farming tenant.

And now in 2025, a law is passed giving ministers the power not to enhance, expand and integrate land management plans into a modern digital platform with clear standards, operating protocols and design specifications, but as “a single website”.

Guthrie’s report is ambitious in scope, forensic in detail, and makes recommendations intended to endure for at least 100 years. It recommends fundamental changes within government and the Scottish Parliament.

Developing anything like a modern digital state will take political leadership. And yet the tendency is to neglect such meta reforms to governance and the architecture of government. They are of no immediate relevance to the electorate and so they gain no political traction.
And yet they are of the utmost relevance. Recent decades are littered with failed IT projects, complex and disjointed data and legal complexities. All of this comes at significant cost to the taxpayer. Guthrie is currently trying to stimulate a conversation at Holyrood and the Senedd in Cardiff about all of this.

In the next Scottish Parliament, the relevant committee should take Guthrie’s report and use it as the basis for a proper parliamentary inquiry into how we got to this point and how the problems can be remedied.