1: Vicky Featherstone, director of the National Theatre of Scotland

FOR Vicky Featherstone, devolution has had an affect on her far greater than she ever thought it would. "It has changed everything for me. When it happened I was based in London working for Paines Plough, a theatre company," she says. "I was incredibly aware of the event, even though it didn't impact me directly at the time. I took note because I had a lot of good relationships with artists in Scotland, so I was very interested about how their sense of identity could change as the country around them changed. I was curious. Change is always good."

Featherstone became aware of the conversation around a national theatre for Scotland in 2000. "I heard it all from afar, but the thing that really connected with me was, in 2003, when Jack McConnell committed to a model of the national theatre that was really radical - not having a national building.

"That's when I really sat up and took notice. It wasn't a conventional institution and could really do something different."

And she believes that the national theatre's much-acclaimed Black Watch production would not have existed without devolution. "The culmination of how it was created, the model we used that allowed the artists to work in the way they did, wouldn't have come about without devolution.

"The National Theatre of Scotland has taken different stories to an international platform."

2: Michael McHugh, publican

THE owner of two pubs in Glasgow and two in Clydebank, Michael McHugh watched the advent of devolution with scepticism and now looks on the works of the Scottish Parliament with horror.

A life in the licensed trade had taught him to expect the worst from the start of the smoking ban in 2006, and he believes he was not wrong.

"One of my pubs, Alexander's in Clydebank, has definitely felt the effects of the ban.

"You're talking about guys who started smoking when they were children. Now they sit at home and smoke, or come to the pub for a couple but then leave early. It's not the same."

The licensed trade gave plenty of warnings about the effect on businesses and jobs, but MSPs just ignored them, said the 46-year-old.

"As always with the Scottish Parliament, things are twisted to suit them. Now we've got changes to the licensing laws to deal with. Licenses I'm paying around £400 for today are going to cost £5000 tomorrow.

"The problem with the Scottish Parliament is that it has to be seen to be doing things.

"They come up with stuff to keep themselves in jobs and leave decimation behind them.

"The only way these people can survive is to screw the taxpayer. If I did that, I'd be bankrupt."

3: Rachelle Money, student

TUITION fees became the unlikely sticking point which caused chaos in Scotland's newly devolved government a decade ago. While English students continue to pay thousands in tuition fees upfront, Scots aren't burdened in the same way.

But when Money compares her brother's experience at university with her own, she wonders if the Lab-LibDem coalition could have gone further with their policy on fees.

Brother Gavin's three years at university were funded by a maintenance grant and parental contributions. He left in 1999 with no debt. But when Money began her studies at Strathclyde University the following year she was already £3000 in debt from a student loan. She said: "Jim Wallace, leader of the Scottish LibDems, turned his back on his own "non-negotiable" manifesto policy of abolishing fees to power share with Labour in the new coalition government.

"The compromise of a buy now pay later' scheme for students came as the result of an embarrassing climbdown for his party. Students would defer payment of fees until they earned £10,000, later raised to £15,000.

"I recently asked my mother how much she thought my education cost her and dad. My heart sank when she replied, I think it's about £15,000 for the five years you were there.' "And Gavin? It was so little it's not worth counting.

"It's difficult to see how the political decision on tuition fees improved matters for students when you learn of the real financial burden university education brought to ordinary families.

"I've decided I am not really in debt. It's a graduate tax, a legacy from a compromise made during the birth of devolution, a compromise many families like mine are paying for."

4: John Loughton, young politician/Big Brother winner

Aged just 11 when devolution was born, John says there was not one devolution eureka moment for him as his family and friends were never really politically involved.

But devolution became more important as he grew up, helping shape his political views, his political activism, and his sense of identity.

"The parliament is part of the bricks and mortar of my Scotland. The first public memory of it was the scandal of the cost of the building, but that didn't put me off.

"As I grew up saw the increased visibility of the MSPs, which started to engage me. If anything the parliament has allowed young people to be heard in an equal voice. It's very much the people's parliament, and the young people's parliament. Every time I'm inside there are school groups running around. It's truly an open doors parliament."

Loughton became involved with the Scottish Youth parliament in 2004. When he was made chair aged just 19, he was the youngest to hold the post.

"What Holyrood has done is inspire and motivate a new generation of active and interested young people, who stand up for what they believe in, engage in the democratic process, and really take an interest in the country they live.

"Without devolution, and all that offered, I probably wouldn't have been on Big Brother - the most high-profile highlight for me in the last ten years. It was great to be able to represent Scottish politics on such a massive arena, and promote the interests and talents of Scotland.

"As a student at Stirling University, devolution saved me £1400 a year thanks to the scrapping of student fees. It wasn't on the cards down south. This was a Scottish solution to Scottish problems.

"That's one fine example of a number of flagship policies, such as free personal care for elderly and no smoking in public places. These are massive policies that have impacted on everyone's lives."

Loughton is a member of the Calman Commission, charged with steering the future of devolution. "The fact that it has a young person in such an influential role is very forward thinking. That isn't something that happens outside Scotland.

"I wouldn't want to see a Scotland without its own parliament. It's been a wholly positive experience. I want to see that grow and prosper and see devolution work the best it can to serve the Scottish people. In ten years it has come a long way and a strong way."

5: Iain McKie, campaigner

IAIN McKie is the father of the victim of one of the biggest scandals of devolution and shared in her pain.

In 1999 his daughter Shirley, a former policewoman from Troon, was put on trial for perjury after denying in court that a fingerprint left at a murder scene was hers.

The Scottish Criminal Records Office insisted it was, but was left humiliated when their identification was undermined by independent experts.

McKie was acquitted, but her career was shattered, and after a long fight to clear her name, she won £750,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the then Scottish Executive.

A separate judicial inquiry was later ordered by the SNP government into her case. It holds its first hearing later this month.

"The wonderful thing about the parliament has been the accessibility of MSPs and the media," says the 69-year-old former policeman.

"We hitched our wagon to the MSPs, and they were the right people. There's no doubt in my mind that under the Westminster government there would have been no inquiry.

"This is a parliament that's open to campaigning, is open to listening. The country used to be run by a wee cabal of lawyers and civil servants.

"Now it's so much different. We had cross-party support and they made the parliament listen. That's what democracy is about."

6: Tina McGeever, NHS campaigner

IF life had gone as planned, Tina McGeever and her husband Michael Gray might never have seen the inside of the Scottish Parliament.

But in 2007, Gray was told he had "months to live" after being diagnosed with bowel cancer. The only drug that offered respite was Cetuximab, which was not available on the NHS. Paying for it privately meant the Buckie couple, their families and friends had to scrape together £26,000. Because he was going private. NHS Grampian also told Gray he had to pay for his NHS chemotherapy as he couldn't have both public and private care for one illness.

Determined that others shouldn't have to suffer the same way, Gray and McGeever wrote to the Scottish Parliament's unique petitions committee, which hears complaints from the public on almost every subject, to look at making Cetuximab available on the NHS.

"It was seamless," said McGeever. "It was so easy. From the moment the petition was lodged online, the parliament was in contact within half an hour. When Michael and I went to parliament to speak to MSPs, we were blown away by how they listened to what we had to say and asked us lots of questions about our experience. We both left the parliament with a spring in our step."

Although NHS Grampian relented almost immediately the parliament became involved, Gray, a housing association worker, died last April aged 53.

However, McGeever carried on the petition they'd started together.

The petitions committee also expanded its inquiries to look at other issues raised by Gray's case, taking evidence from the national bodies on drugs, and looking at whether "co-payments" should be allowed to let patients top up their care privately without forfeiting their existing NHS care.

A committee report making 16 recommendations and a parliamentary debate followed, with health secretary Nicola Sturgeon announcing in March that co-payments would now be allowed.

McGeever, a 57-year-old artistic director at the Out of the Darkness Theatre Company in Elgin, is pursuing her petition and still fighting for more exceptional drug treatments on the NHS.

"From sitting at a computer 300 miles away one day thinking, What else can we do?', we went to this hearing, to get justice for Michael and other people in the same situation," she said.

"For me, the public petitions committee was an exceptional model of good practice. It really works. We went from people in the street to sitting at a table with a cross-party group of MSPs discussing these serious issues. How many other countries can you do that in?

"If you look down the road to Westminster, they have nothing like that. One man in England recently asked me who he could turn to. He didn't have a system like ours.

"It's a desperate thing when you hear something like that. The same thing happened to me, but at least in Scotland we're doing something about it.

"The petitions committee really enabled things to move forward. Maybe in a few years I'm going to be sitting back watching things coming into place and thinking, Things are never going to happen to anyone else the way they happened to Michael,' and that would be wonderful."

7: Kevin Dunion, Information commisioner

IT was hailed as a ground-breaking advance in democracy, quickly became the bane of the MSPs who passed it, and is now being feted as a Holyrood beacon to lead Westminster's cavemen out of the dark. The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 opened the books on hundreds of public bodies, GPs and fiscals, as well as the expenses of the country's parliamentarians.

Many of its biggest victories - including the release of PFI contracts and every receipt from those MSPs - are attributable to the man in charge of policing the act and ensuring no one ducks their legal duty to be as open and transparent as possible.

Before he landed the job of Scottish Information Commissioner in 2002, Kevin Dunion, 53, had been campaigns manager for Oxfam and director of Friends of the Earth Scotland.

At Westminster, such a CV would have ruled him out of contention as too radical, but not at Holyrood.

"The whole thing about devolution is about driving decision-making closer to the people, and making their voice heard.

"The creation of the parliament gave people like myself the opportunity to hold positions that, quite frankly, would probably have been closed to us without the Parliament.

"If we hadn't had the parliament, we would have had a UK FoI act enforced from Wilmslow. People's use of the FOI act, and people's preparedness to appeal, is significantly higher in Scotland than the rest of the UK.

"I think it is because of the closeness of the decision-making process. In the first year, we had something like 700 appeals."

8: Donald Urquhart, pensioner

When Sir Stewart Sutherland - now Lord Sutherland - delivered a ground-breaking report recommending Scotland offer elderly people free personal care, there were warnings from the start that it would be unaffordable.

When it was first proposed, it was argued that the policy could be funded for just £100 million a year. Critics branded the sum hopelessly unrealistic.

Official figures published last summer showed that the actual cost of delivering the policy has soared to £321m. Nevertheless, free personal care for the elderly was one of the iconic policies of devolved Scotland. Over the last six and a half years, tens of thousands of older Scots have benefited from that difference.

Donald Urquhart is one of them. The 71-year-old suffers from Parkinson's Disease and has mobility problems. He receives round-the-clock care, which until recently was provided by Glasgow City Council, but is now delivered by Cordia, the limited liability partnership company created by the council.

"It is one of the best things the Scottish parliament did," he says. "I have been receiving personal care since Henry McLeish brought it in, but I get enhanced care now. "

Without the policy, Urquhart, who never married and so has no children to turn to, isn't sure how he would have managed.

He was on disability living allowance when the Scottish parliament was elected. "You had to rely on your family at that time. Fortunately my sister came up and helped and my nephew gave up his spare time. But lots of people were left to suffer in the community."

9: Alastair MacAskill, land reformer

SOME of the most beautiful landscapes in Scotland, the Glencanisp and Drumrunie Estates in Sutherland and Wester Ross, were also at the centre of one of the most famous achievements of the Scottish Parliament.

The Land Reform Act allowed communities to buy the land where they lived and worked.

In June 2005, it was instrumental in allowing the Assynt Foundation to strike a £2.9 million deal with the Vestey family, when it put the estates up for sale.

With the help of £2.2m in public money, around 900 local residents were able to buy 44,000 acres of farms and crofts, as well as the mountains of Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag, the first such purchase under the act.

At the centre of the buy-out was butcher Alastair MacAskill, now chairman of Assynt.Biz, the estates' trading arm.

If it wasn't for Holyrood putting its back into legislation which Westminster would never have got round to, the 63-year-old says the land would still be in private hands.

"The long term hope is that it will take us towards financial stability for the area.

"At the moment we rely on subsidies from Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Natural Heritage.

"The wind turbine plan, now on the back burner, caused a certain amount of division within the community, but we want to live in peace. The Assynt Foundation did not come into being to divide the community. It came into being hopefully to unite the community for its greater good.

"At least with it being a community ownership we are sensitive to local opinion.

"On the day of the buy-out I was realistic enough to realise that the hard work was really only beginning. Nevertheless it felt that we were part of history. The community achieved this. It still gives me a feeling of pride."

10: Gus Jones, naturalist

Red squirrels, capercaillie and the unique beauty of the ancient Caledonian pine forest are all within easy reach of naturalist Dr Gus Jones' front door. "I live in a wonderful wildlife paradise," he said of his home at Nethy Bridge, near the Cairngorm mountains.

So when devolution brought the prospect of Scotland's first national parks, he was optimistic that the area's stunning natural assets would be safeguarded. "The minister at the time, Sam Galbraith, spoke of a new way of doing things and hopes were high that old mistakes could be corrected," he said.

In 2002, the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park was created, followed closely by the Cairngorms National Park in 2003. But since then, Jones has become disillusioned.

"It quickly became apparent that the Cairngorms National Park Authority was in favour of rapid growth and housing, housing, housing," he said.

The park authority's current plan is "spectacularly inappropriate", he argued. It proposes more than 1800 houses, including nearly 500 second homes, many of them in areas where they will destroy rare or endangered animals and plants.

"For national parks to work, more than lip service has to be paid to the importance of conserving and enhancing natural heritage," argued Jones. "The present flawed local plan needs to be revised. We owe it to future generations not to abdicate to our responsibility."

INTERVIEWS: TOM GORDON, ROB EDWARDS, EDD McCRACKEN, STEPHEN NAYSMITH