Highland problems will only be solved by taking action on land

When the Highlands and Islands Development Board was set up in 1965, the Scottish Secretary Willie Ross referred to the Highlander as “the man on Scotland’s conscience”. Sixty years on, the burgeoning City of Inverness and its hinterland have no priority claim on anyone’s conscience, as they would surely agree.

Rather, as the first chairman of the HIDB, Sir Robert Grieve, wrote in its first annual report: “No matter what success is achieved in the Eastern or Central Highlands, the Board will be judged by its ability to hold population in the true crofting areas”. These are the places now dying on their feet.

Meantime the dichotomy has intensified. The Highlands and Islands population has risen by at least the same rate as the rest of Scotland while its periphery continues to seep people and potential. That is the challenge which headline population figures have been regularly deployed to disguise.

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If you add up the areas in which population continues to decline, I doubt if they reach 100,000. Yet so much of Scotland’s image, culture and history rely on these places. They have given far more than they ever took. They are surrounded by vast acreages of land, abundant seas and natural resources.

It should not be rocket science to put these factors together, revel in the challenge and proclaim a great success story. In practice, decline continues and a Depopulation Action Plan, cut and pasted in Edinburgh without comprehension or commitment, will not stop it. Thinly-populated communities are heading towards the critical point at which there are not enough people of working age to sustain ageing populations. Yet these are wonderful places to live and raise families. There is no shortage of people who would choose to live in them, if the basic preconditions existed. Too often, they don’t.

Buying a house is unattainable for many in the Highlands and Islands (Image: Colin Mearns)

The part of Lewis I live in is fairly typical. It is virtually impossible for anyone of modest means to secure a house, which is a pretty basic precondition; even less likely they will secure a croft tenancy. They might flit from one short-term rental to the next before heading for Stornoway or, more probably, the mainland. There is nothing mysterious about that process and it does not need an Action Plan to address it. Just action.

Action on housing. Action on crofting regulation. Action on access to land. It might help if the Highlands and Islands Enterprise budget had not just been cut by 13 per cent, making it 40 per cent since 2018-19. Personally, I would split HIE and create an agency with a social and economic remit confined to the peripheries of north and west – i.e. areas of continuing depopulation.

But why stop there? The preconditions for staying - work, home and land - are intricately inter-connected. So why not bring them all together and then devolve operations down to local levels, where people understand the complex challenges? There is absolutely no case for these functions being centralised in Edinburgh or Inverness, except to retain control.

In my Scottish Office tenure prior to devolution, I tried to put all this into practice through Iomairt aig an Oir/Initiative at the Edge which piloted breaking down ”silos” which separate these functions, so that half a dozen public bodies painstakingly administer the decline of far-off places. The civil servants  hated the idea and soon got rid of it. They love their silos and quangos with absolutely nothing joined up. Divide, rule and patronise the natives. It's the same, of course, with ferries and fishing (think HPMAs) but these are other, related stories.

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Crofting tenure, a uniquely Scottish system which kept generations in their home communities, has been hollowed out under political auspices that neither understands nor values its worth. Crofting tenure, properly regulated, should be a defence against the property market. Instead, it has become an enabler, a critical factor in the housing shortage.

Scottish Government papers released at New Year included the civil service response in 2008 to the Shucksmith Report on the Future of Crofting, an excellent piece of work which sought to restore the balance of hard-won crofters’ rights to security of tenure with responsibilities which kept the market at bay. Shucksmight wanted to tie tenancies to residence and decentralise regulation. The civil servants argued passionately against “intervening in the market”. Guess who won?

The whole land question remains crucial. It should never be forgotten that Highlands and Islands demography is dictated by far-off events which pushed population to the edges and cut them off from natural hinterlands. My reason for referring to this is not sentimental but to make the point that without access to land - not least for housing - many parts of the Highlands and Islands have always fought for survival with one hand tied behind their backs.

Again, the lack of political action in the past 20 years has been stunning and is now headed in entirely the wrong direction. The privatisation of peatland restoration backed up by huge sums of public money for very dubious environmental outcomes is further embedding the status quo. Does any minister have a clue why they are doing this, beyond reading out their brief?

Many of these issues are of marginal political interest, within any party. To make any impact, they all need people within them who know enough to care. That is lamentably absent in current Scottish politics so that bureaucratic mediocrity prevails and the issues remain as peripheral as the geography - as I have no doubt the Depopulation Action Plan will confirm if it ever appears.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.