Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2025
I thank Finlay Carson for securing this important debate. His motion speaks about the impact of urban-based policies on Dumfries and Galloway, and that is reflected in my Highlands and Islands region, where we suffer very similar challenges—I am sure that any member who represents any part of rural Scotland would say the same.
This week, the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee took evidence from stakeholders from rural Scotland, who talked about access to services. They told us that car ownership is a necessity to enable people to access services, given the lack of public transport. Even where there is public transport, it can be unaffordable.
Accessing the health service is not free at the point of use, because the cost of getting there means that people cannot access the services that they need. Failure to attend can also mean that they come off a waiting list altogether. I was told by a constituent of a case in which an elderly resident could access hospital appointments only if they were made on her GP’s day off, so that her GP could drive her to the appointment. That is an absolutely crazy situation.
We were also told that, although running a car costs about £50 per week, which adds to the cost of living in rural Scotland, it is necessary for people to carry that cost because it is the only way that they are able to access services.
I probably do not need to speak again about mothers from Caithness having to drive to Inverness to give birth. That journey is equivalent to driving from Edinburgh to Newcastle. If people do not have a car, they have to take a train or even a bus, and the journey is much longer. I recently heard of a mother who, just a couple of days after delivering her baby by caesarean section, had to make a four-and-a-half-hour journey by train, on her own, carrying her newborn baby. I know that there are similar issues in Stranraer.
Housing was another theme that came across as a major issue when we heard from witnesses at the committee meeting. There is little or no affordable housing in rural Scotland for local people in order to allow them to stay in the areas in which they were brought up, so many are being forced to move away. Housing was also raised as an issue in relation to recruiting staff to provide essential services. People would apply for posts and some would even start work, only for them to find that they could not find a home, so they were forced to leave. Rural health and care services are left to depend on expensive agency staff and, in many cases, those services cannot run at all.
All of that leads people to leave, so the problems create a downward spiral of depopulation. Centralisation happens in all aspects of daily life in rural Scotland. We saw it with the centralisation of police and fire services, which have since retreated from those areas. Police stations have closed and retained fire stations are not staffed to a level that allows them to go to an emergency.
Those issues are replicated throughout all of rural Scotland. We need to find solutions that provide people in my region—and in Dumfries and Galloway and elsewhere in rural Scotland—with equitable access to services.