Hansard

I acknowledge the problem, but it is worth noting that the UK Government took action in 2018, and that that action continues.

I turn to the Scottish Government, which indicated in its national strategy for economic transformation that it wanted to target inward migration from the rest of the UK. The Scottish Government’s strategy said:

“A 25% increase in people relocating from the rest of the UK to Scotland would double net migration and add 100,000 people to Scotland’s labour pool over the course of this strategy.”

I would be interested to hear whether that remains the Scottish Government’s position.

We have to ask a key question: why is Scotland less attractive to economic migrants who come from the rest of the world than it is to those who come from other parts of the UK? That question needs answered. Scotland has consistently taken the lowest population share of migrants of all the UK nations, and that is a problem that we have to solve.

Presiding Officer, I think that the clock might not quite be adequately recording my time, but no doubt you will indicate when my time is up.

I will briefly talk about the rural visa pilot. It is premature for us to support that specific measure today, given that it has only just been published, but I give the cabinet secretary the commitment that we will consider its contents in full. We note the idea’s genesis in 2019, and we acknowledge the role of the UK Government’s advisers, the Migration Advisory Committee, and the comments of the then Home Secretary.

We will communicate, in short order, with colleagues in the UK Government, including the Home Secretary, about the scheme, and we agree with the broad thrust of what the pilot seeks to achieve, because urgent action has to be taken to tackle depopulation in our rural and island communities.

According to the national population strategy,

“8 out of 32 council areas experienced depopulation—the greatest ... declines ... in Argyll and Bute, Inverclyde, and the Western Isles.”

I recently visited a fish and shellfish processing firm in Barra, in the Western Isles, and it told me about the challenges that it faces in recruiting locally.

The causes of rural and island depopulation are undoubtedly varied, and we have discussed them at length. Many of the barriers to growing our rural and island populations have largely come about as a result of domestic policy failures—and here I plan to be more critical. They include a failure to build more houses, a failure to deliver superfast broadband on time and a failure to provide robust and reliable transport infrastructure. They cannot be ignored.

Housing is particularly important, with many rural areas suffering from a lack of affordable housing. Rectifying that has to be a focus when we are simultaneously trying to encourage migrants to live in rural areas.

We point to the fact that the Scottish National Party Government has spent only about half its rural housing fund and islands housing fund since they were made available in 2016. We know about the failure to deliver 100 per cent superfast broadband, and we know about the on-going ferries crisis, which is causing misery for our island communities. The only way that we can ensure that people will want to move to rural and island communities is by resolving those problems. In short, we need sustainable solutions and not short-term sticking plasters.

There will be much that we can agree on today. We all acknowledge the need to address labour shortages in sectors and areas that are experiencing them. We all agree that there is a need to grow the population in a sustainable way and that resolving the issue of rural and island depopulation is key to spreading prosperity throughout Scotland. However, we on these benches believe that both Scotland’s Governments have critical roles to play in addressing the fundamental reasons behind the worrying demographic trends that we continue to see.

I call on Parliament to support our amendment, and I move amendment S6M-06063.3, to leave out from first “notes” to end and insert:

“celebrates the social, economic and cultural contribution made to Scotland by those who have chosen to live here; acknowledges the Scottish Government’s 2021 report, A Scotland for the future: The opportunities and challenges of Scotland's changing population, which states that Scotland faces “very significant demographic challenges” and that the reasons for this are multi-faceted; further acknowledges recent figures from the National Records of Scotland that show that Scotland has the lowest life expectancy in the UK; recognises that rural areas in particular face a significant depopulation crisis; supports an immigration system that assists parts of Scotland that need migration most, in particular, remote and island communities, and believes that a new approach is required to reverse rural depopulation, as well as meet the wider population challenges facing Scotland as a whole.”