Meeting of the Parliament 25 March 2026 [Draft]
Before I start, I want to thank Oliver Mundell. He has been a great colleague, and I thought that he gave a really good speech on rural Scotland and what it means.
I also thank Mairi Gougeon for the work that I have been able to do with her over the past year. It is frustratingly difficult to enrage her, which is always annoying for those on committees, but we have had a good working relationship. We might not agree on things, but I am sad to see her go.
Finally, I have a quick message about John Mason. For those of us of Christian faith in the Parliament, he has led by example, and his prayer breakfast will not be forgotten. The pastries have always been welcome on a Thursday morning.
Rural Scotland is, to me, incredibly important. I have spent my entire working life there. I have been on thousands of farms across the north-east and the Highlands and Islands; I have been on many estates; and I have worked with different communities. It is, for me, a passion that I wanted to bring into this chamber when I came here just over two years ago.
At that time, I went to my party’s chief whip and said, “I want to do something on rural Scotland,” and, in the past two years, I have been lucky enough to secure three members’ business debates on the issue. The first was on health and social care, because I recognised very early on in my days on the council that that was an incredibly important area. Indeed, I think to this day that it is not right that basic services are not delivered in rural communities throughout Scotland. It is fair enough that people might have to travel for complex surgery, but we should be delivering basic services as local to home as possible.
My second debate was on the rural depopulation crisis. It is one thing to have a plan to deal with rural depopulation—it is another to deliver it. As Oliver Mundell has said, rurality might cost more, but what would Scotland be if we did not deliver for rural Scotland?
My final debate was on rural bridges and the importance of connecting communities. There are now four bridges in Moray that are falling down, and it is not right that we are disconnecting communities in that way. If I return, as I hope, in the next parliamentary session, I will continue the pressure to bring back the capital funding that is required for rural bridges.
I thank the communities across the Highlands and Islands that are doing so much to keep rural Scotland going, making businesses work, helping each other and working to attract the professionals whom we need across rural Scotland. However, I also want to highlight the challenges and the increasing number of rural penalties that I feel that I see.
I tried to put an exemption for travel on health grounds into the visitor levy, and I think that it represents a rural penalty that my amendment did not get through. The fact that patients have to travel for routine care is a rural penalty. The fact that ferries do not work is a rural penalty. That bridges do not get fixed; that the A9 and A96 have not been dualled; that councils do not receive the funding that they need; that rural buses and services are stopping; and that parcel delivery is more expensive—those things, and many more, are rural penalties that we have failed to deal with and which we will need to deal with.
Finally—this, too, is incredibly important—I want to send a message to the young people of rural Scotland. I know that many of them will want to travel, explore the world and see the lights of the big cities as they get older, but I want them to know that there will always be a home for them in rural Scotland. Therefore, we must ensure that housing, jobs, employment, transport and opportunities are the very best that they can be, if they are to feel safe enough to return to Scotland at some point in their lives.
It is one thing to have a rural depopulation plan, as I have said; it is another thing to live and breathe it. I just want to recognise, as we should all recognise—and as I hope that Parliament will recognise in the new session—that rurality might well cost more, but Scotland would be a very different place without it.