In 2014, the Smith Commission, convened in response to the narrower than expected Scottish independence referendum result, proposed to strengthen the legal status of the convention, by placing it ‘on a 26 statutory footing’. This was reflected in the new section 28(8) of the Scotland Act 1998, inserted by section 2 of the Scotland Act 2016, which conditioned the continued legislative sovereignty of the UK Parliament (section 28(7)) with the ‘recogni[tion] that the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament’.