Devolution and international institutions

What devolution means, and what stays with Westminster

Devolution is the process by which the UK Parliament hands some of its decision-making power down to elected bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so that people in those nations have more say over matters that affect their daily lives. This is different from independence: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland remain firmly part of the United Kingdom, and the UK Parliament at Westminster stays sovereign, meaning it keeps the ultimate legal authority to make laws for the whole country, including on subjects it has devolved. In practice, though, Westminster does not normally legislate on a devolved matter without the agreement of the relevant devolved legislature, a convention that keeps the arrangement workable day to day.

Areas handed to the devolved administrations are called devolved matters, and they typically include education, health, social services, agriculture, the environment and local government, since these are the everyday services people encounter most directly. Anything not specifically devolved remains under Westminster's control and is called a reserved matter; these are the questions judged to need one UK-wide approach, such as defence, foreign policy, immigration, and most aspects of tax and social security. This split is not identical everywhere: Northern Ireland uses similar language but calls some of its Westminster-only subjects excepted matters, and the exact list of reserved and devolved powers differs slightly between Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Scotland's Parliament and Government

The Scottish Parliament sits at Holyrood in Edinburgh and is the law-making body for devolved matters in Scotland. Its members, called Members of the Scottish Parliament or MSPs, debate proposed laws, question Scottish ministers and scrutinise how public money is spent. The Scottish Government is the separate executive branch that actually runs services day to day: it is led by the First Minister and a team of ministers drawn from the largest party or coalition in the Parliament, and it is answerable to the Parliament for its decisions. Scotland's devolved powers are unusually wide-ranging among the UK's devolved nations, covering the NHS and social care, education, justice and the courts, policing, and elements of taxation, since the Scottish Parliament can set its own income tax bands and rates for Scottish taxpayers even though HMRC still collects the tax.

The Senedd and the Welsh Government

Wales's devolved legislature was created in 1999 as the National Assembly for Wales, but in 2020 it took the name it now goes by: the Senedd, also known formally as Senedd Cymru or the Welsh Parliament. The change marked how far its powers had grown since 1999, when it could not yet pass its own primary laws. The Senedd sits in the Senedd building in Cardiff Bay, and its elected members are called Members of the Senedd, or MSs. It can make laws on devolved matters affecting Wales and has some tax-varying powers of its own.

The Welsh Government is the executive arm that carries out policy and delivers public services in devolved areas such as health, education and local government, and it is led by the First Minister of Wales. Just as at Westminster and Holyrood, the Welsh Government is drawn from the Senedd and must answer to it, with MSs scrutinising ministers and voting on Welsh legislation.

The Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive

The Northern Ireland Assembly, whose elected members are called MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly), sits at Stormont in Belfast and makes laws on devolved matters. Its day-to-day government, the Northern Ireland Executive, is built differently from those in Scotland and Wales because Northern Ireland's history of conflict between unionist and nationalist communities made ordinary majority rule too risky. Instead, the Executive is a mandatory power-sharing coalition: it must always include both unionist and nationalist parties, and it is led jointly by a First Minister and a deputy First Minister who hold equal power despite their different titles. Neither can serve without the other, so if one resigns, the other automatically loses office too.

Since the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, the largest party in the Assembly nominates the First Minister, while the largest party from the other main community nominates the deputy First Minister. The remaining ministerial posts are shared out between parties using the d'Hondt formula, a method of allocation based on how many seats each party won, so that the make-up of the Executive broadly reflects the election result. Certain sensitive Assembly decisions, such as budgets or changes to its own rules, need cross-community support rather than a simple majority, meaning enough unionist and nationalist members must both agree.

This arrangement has proved fragile. Because a single party's refusal to nominate a minister can stop an Executive forming at all, Stormont has collapsed and been suspended more than once when relations between the main parties broke down, most recently for several years in the late 2010s and early 2020s before it was restored.

Britain and the Commonwealth

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of independent countries, most of them former territories of the British Empire, that work together on shared goals such as democracy, good government and the rule of law. King Charles III is its ceremonial Head, a role with no power to direct member states, and membership brings no legal obligations between countries. The Commonwealth cannot make laws for its members, though it can suspend a country's membership if it seriously breaches these shared values, as has happened in the past over issues such as military coups or the abandonment of democratic elections.

Current counts of member states vary slightly by source, with recent figures putting membership at 54 or 56 countries spanning Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Americas, Europe and the Pacific. A handful of members, such as Rwanda and Mozambique, have no history of British colonial rule, showing that joining is open to any country that accepts the Commonwealth's values rather than being limited strictly to former empire territories.

Britain's place in the United Nations and NATO

The United Kingdom belongs to the United Nations, a global body of more than 190 countries founded after the Second World War to prevent conflict and promote international peace and security. Within the UN, the Security Council of 15 members has the job of recommending action when crises or threats to peace arise, and the UK is one of only five permanent members of that Council, alongside the United States, Russia, China and France, giving it a lasting seat at the table on matters of international security.

The UK is also a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which brings together European and North American countries under a mutual defence pledge: if one member is attacked, the others agree to help defend it. Beyond collective defence, NATO also works to preserve peace and stability among its member states more broadly.

Britain and European institutions

Britain's relationship with Europe runs through two quite different organisations, and the test rewards keeping them apart. The Council of Europe is not part of the European Union and predates it: the UK was a founding member of the Council of Europe in 1949, decades before it joined the EU. The Council of Europe now has 47 member states and exists to protect human rights, democracy and the rule of law across the continent. It cannot pass laws, but it produces conventions and charters that members agree to follow, and the most important of these is the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UK was the first country to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, signing up in 1951, and Parliament later wrote its protections into domestic law through the Human Rights Act 1998. This means someone in the UK who believes their rights under the Convention have been breached can normally bring a case in a UK court rather than travelling to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, though that international court remains the final avenue for Convention complaints.

The European Union is a separate and much narrower body: a group of European countries that have pooled certain powers to cooperate on trade and other shared policy areas, currently numbering 27 member states. The UK joined what was then called the European Economic Community in 1973, having originally stayed out when the founding six countries signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. A referendum in 2016 led to the vote known as Brexit, and the UK's EU membership ended at 11 pm UK time on 31 January 2020. Since 2024, no general principle of EU law has continued to form part of UK law, marking the final stage of the legal separation that Brexit began.

Together, membership of the Council of Europe and international bodies covered elsewhere in this lesson show a consistent pattern in Britain's foreign policy: rather than acting alone, the UK works through permanent memberships in organisations that set shared rules or standards, while still guarding Parliament's right to make UK law.