If we accept that devolution is a process rather than an event, it is essential to review that process periodically and make necessary adjustments to the constitutional settlement. The tenth anniversary is the right moment to re-examine devolution within the context of the relationship between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. It should be seen as an integral part of the wider constitutional debate launched yesterday by Home Secretary Jack Straw, a debate that encompasses the Act of Settlement, reform of the House of Lords and a parliamentary mandate for taking Britain to war. The election in Scotland of a minority government whose political objective is to achieve independence from Westminster adds impetus to the Scottish part of the process.

The Scottish Parliament Commission, launched yesterday by the three main opposition parties at Holyrood, has had a difficult birth. Gordon Brown's apparent ambivalence and the seeming inability until yesterday to agree on a name for this hybrid infant were, to put it mildly, unhelpful.

However, the choice of chairman, Sir Kenneth Calman, Chancellor of Glasgow University, is an encouraging one. He is a Unionist but one without any particular party stripes, a Scot respected here and abroad. He has agreed to work quickly and without pay.

Central to any discussion must be how Scotland raises the money it spends. This lack of accountability is now widely seen as a weakness of the original devolution settlement, one which has fuelled resentment in England and heightened the myth of Scotland as a "subsidy junkie". The parties to the new body are wrong to tiptoe around the Barnett formula that funds the devolved administrations. Much has changed since its inception. Scotland sustains a proportionately far larger land area and a more scattered population but in terms of income is less relatively disadvantaged. Any new needs-based assessment should take both these factors into account, even if the Welsh have more to gain than the Scots. Barnett is certainly doomed if Scotland moves from a wholly grant-funded settlement to a mixture of assigned and devolved taxes and grant, as Wendy Alexander has proposed. We are likely to hear less of the West Lothian Question, a complex issue that results from the asymmetry between England and the rest of the Union. Even David Cameron has stopped talking about English votes on English issues because he risks getting the blame for breaking up the Union.

We should welcome the commission's deliberations on the potential future of the Union. Voters will then be able to make a proper comparison with the SNP's independence policy, whichcontinues to receive little support in the polls. And unlike the SNP's "national conversation", which has amounted to little more than an online forum, marred by intemperate secessionism, the commission can argue it has a mandate from both Westminster and Holyrood.

However, it would be wrong to overstate its significance. Unlike Scotland's Constitutional Convention, which produced the devolution settlement through a process of painstaking negotiation and compromise, the commission is charged with coming up with a list of recommendations that will be vulnerable to cherry-picking or dust-gathering. Sir Kenneth may be calling the shots but what happens afterwards?