I caught two stories yesterday about Highland Council. The first was that they face a dire budget shortfall even by the extreme standards which are crippling all of Scottish local government.

The second was drawn from a report on initial census findings which will go to councillors on Thursday. It emphasises that while, in the previous decade, the region’s population increased slightly, this masked continuing, precipitous decline in peripheral areas: Caithness, Sutherland and the west coast.

Of course, the two stories are heavily interlinked. The more cash-starved the council, the less it can do to correct such imbalances. So things get worse as services decline and there are fewer people of working age to provide them. It is already a familiar spiral in many rural and island areas.

The scenario is exacerbated in the Highlands by the fact that there are also growth points. If industrial opportunities arising from the ScotWind offshore programme are going to manifest themselves anywhere, it will be around Inverness and Easter Ross. This makes its own demands on the council for substantial funding which it doesn’t have.

The report states: “There is a clear risk of not intervening to deal with the emerging prospect of significant population growth in the Inner Moray Firth and the concomitant population drain from western Highlands and Caithness areas”. In other words, growth in the East Highlands, without counter-balances, will hasten population drift from the fragile periphery.

There is nothing new about this dilemma. It is just a bit depressing that it keeps recurring without any serious recognition of its implications. Efforts to mitigate the trend are now derisory compared to what existed throughout most of the past half century, via relatively enlightened government and generous funding, both UK and EU, for the periphery.

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In the very first annual report of the Highlands and Islands Development Board in 1966, the chairman, Sir Robert Grieve, wrote: “No matter what success is achieved in the East or Central Highlands, the board will be judged by its ability to hold population in the crofting areas” – words that could be coined today with equal relevance.

In that era of more intelligent politics, there was serious discussion about the merits of “growth point strategies”. Was it better to hold people in the region, even if it was at the expense of its own most fragile parts? That conflict was never resolved and public policy tried to balance the two objectives but with the scales increasingly tipped towards parts with more votes and louder voices.

This is where the headline population figures become useful to government. What’s the problem, they say, when the population is increasing, so long as you don’t look at the small print? Why bother developing micro policies specific to rural and peripheral areas that would, by implication, disturb this narrative of “success”, which is actually no such thing according to the Grieve definition? Why bother looking to countries which do it better?

I learned from the Highland Council report that the Scottish Government is working on something called “the draft Addressing Depopulation Action Plan” which “sets out what is being done across government departments and elsewhere … It demonstrates that the Scottish Government acknowledges the depopulation crisis facing rural Scotland.”

The report adds drily: “However, the latest census figures suggest that, taken together, it is having little effect in terms of altering the current trajectory and doing more of the same is therefore unlikely to deliver a different outcome”.

I suppose “acknowledgement” is a start though, heaven knows, it has taken an inordinately long time to reach even that point. Whether they advance much beyond acknowledgement remains unlikely under the current incumbents in St Andrew’s House whose devotion to centralised policy-making and administrative control is the antithesis of devolution.

In its day, the Highlands and Islands Development Board was a radical innovation by the Labour government that proved transformational for the region as a whole. It is an eloquent comment on devolved government that nothing remotely comparable in scale or vision has been contemplated, far less enacted, to address the needs of any disadvantaged part of Scotland.

The Tories re-named it Highlands and Islands Enterprise but did not interfere with its social, as well as economic, functions which allowed it to engage in a far higher – and largely successful – level of risk-taking than was normally permitted of public agencies. Now, its budget and powers have been cut to near impotence in terms of the big, bold investments it was once able to make.

What could a Scottish Government with sufficient interest do now? For starters, it should look hard before publishing the promised Land Reform Bill to check if it will make a blind bit of difference in practical terms to the prospects of Scotland’s rural communities – or is it going to dance around the edges of a subject deemed “too political”?

In every rural community today, the most urgent need is housing. They are surrounded by land, vast acreages of which is inaccessible for any economic or social use. In many areas, the restricted housing supply allied to demand for second homes speeds the trickle of departures. Even if there are jobs, families cannot remain if there are no houses to live in.

I refuse to believe that this issue could not be addressed more effectively at a local level if councils and housing associations were given the powers, money and flexibility to spend it according to local circumstances and by adopting innovative approaches. The outcomes could hardly be worse than they are at present.

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If the Scottish Government is interested in actions that would breathe life into the Scottish periphery, why not these two interlocked starting points? A Land Reform Act which puts social and economic needs before rights of private landownership and a decisive Rural Housing Act which cuts through bureaucratic barriers and empowers local decision-making.

At this late juncture, it doesn’t need a “draft plan” to take such radical action. It just needs a little political will. Let’s see if it exists.