In May 1999, for the first time in 300 years, elections were held for a Scottish Parliament. This body, to be located at Holyrood in Edinburgh, had a remit that consisted largely of powers in the area of social welfare. As we shall see, much of the argument for political devolution had revolved around social policy concerns. Elections to the Scottish Parliament, in 1999 and again in 2003, have resulted in the return of a Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition. Both these parties had been, and continue to be, leading advocates of devolution. Their declared aim in government was to reform and improve public services, if necessary by following a rather different path from that of the London government, and thereby to show that devolution could and would make a difference in real terms to the lives of the Scottish people. Devolution could thus bring, in a much-used phrase, Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. The implicit and explicit contrast here was with the alleged neglect, and indeed undermining, of social welfare in Scotland by the UK's Conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s.

This book examines the specifically Scottish aspects of social welfare since devolution, focusing primarily on the role of the Scottish Executive – put crudely, Scotland's government. Much fine work has been done on both the historical and the contemporary dimensions of social policy in Scotland, and this is extensively drawn upon. Nonetheless, there have been few attempts to paint a larger picture, a surprising situation given the long-standing significance of social welfare to a large number of Scots. The former is partly explicable by the understandable historical and sociological attention given to questions of nationhood, identity and class. Equally, many works of social science, social policy, and the history of social welfare that purport to deal with Great Britain in fact focus almost exclusively on England (see, for example, Stewart, 1999)! This work addresses this absence and in so doing focuses on two broad areas that have had, and continue to have, identifiably Scottish characteristics: children, education and lifelong learning (Chapter Four) and health policy (Chapter Five). Context is provided by this introduction, which describes the historical and contemporary environment in which Scottish social welfare policy is formulated and implemented. Chapter Two focuses on funding and expenditure priorities, while Chapter Three deals with poverty, inequality and social disadvantage.