Meeting of the Parliament 14 November 2023
Not at the moment.
Although the sentiment might be welcome, the fact remains that Scotland’s rural population has been in free fall for some time and the Government has failed to use the Parliament’s existing powers to tackle the root causes of rural depopulation, which include a lack of available and affordable housing, poor infrastructure, unreliable ferries and a higher cost of living.
More widely, there is a desperate need for economic regeneration across Scotland. That is how we attract people to the country. From 2007, that is what should have been at the centre of the Government’s policies.
At its heart, the paper fails to address the reasons for Scotland’s population’s stagnation. As I said at the beginning of my speech, Scotland has had the lowest rate of population growth of anywhere in the UK, and that is for a variety of reasons, namely mortality, fertility and migration. I want to reiterate a couple of points that I have made on those key factors in past debates.
On mortality, data published by the National Records of Scotland states that Scotland has the lowest life expectancy of all UK countries, and it declined for men and women between 2018 and 2021. Scotland also has the lowest fertility rate of all the UK nations, and it has been declining gradually since the mid-2000s. The Scottish Government’s own national population strategy states that Scotland’s total fertility rate has fallen from 2.5 in 1971 to a record low of 1.37 in 2019.
On migration, the Scottish Government might want to state that more people are moving to Scotland from the rest of the UK than are going in the opposite direction, but it cannot ignore the fact that Scotland has consistently taken below its population share of international migrants.