The challenges Sutherland faces are formidable
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Economics professor and Dornoch native David Bell, says Sutherland’s new MSP must fight for more resources and representation.
Two weeks to go until the Scottish Parliament election. Now is the time to find out what the candidates think about the issues that matter to Sutherland and how strongly they will defend its interests.
Although I am old enough to remember when there was a Sutherland County Council, Sutherland doesn’t really exist as a separate political entity any more. Sutherland was the fifth largest county in the old Scotland, but has now been swallowed up inside Highland Council, which itself is one of the largest local authorities in Europe. Highland covers an area 23 per cent bigger than Wales and just 17 per cent smaller than Belgium.
Our politicians seem obsessed with changing the goal posts for all the levels of government other than local government. We have spent five years working out how to get rid of one level – the EU – and haven’t made a very good job of it. And there is hardly a news bulletin now that fails to mention battles between two other levels of government - Westminster and Holyrood. But there seems to be no interest in how local government in Scotland is arranged, even though most of us interact with it on an almost daily basis. Yet I think the organisation and financing of local government should be very much a concern for the candidates seeking to represent this county.
Sutherland’s population is expected to continue falling over the next two decades. Highland Council recently ran some projections showing an 11 per cent fall in the population between 2016 and 2040. Immigration will not stop the decline. It is the small numbers of young people being brought up and staying in the county that is at the heart of population decline. The Highland Council projections mysteriously disappeared from its website after they attracted a deal of adverse publicity from both Sutherland and Caithness, which is also faced with a significant decline in its population.
So perhaps our local politicians can intervene to help support the fragile local economy and help young people stay? Perhaps not. Losing population means losing representation and entry into a downward spiral of decline. Based on the same source of population projections, the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland recently proposed that Sutherland should be reduced to a single local government ward. There are 20 local council wards in Highland and 354 in Scotland. The Boundary Commission recommendation implies that although Sutherland represents 6.7 per cent of Scotland’s land area, it only merits 0.3 per cent of its local government representation. In the absence of effective local democracy, it is not surprising that the views of local people can be easily overridden. Where would the political pressure come to retain local schools?
To its credit, Highland Council has rejected the proposal to reduce Sutherland to a single electoral ward. We await to see what the outcome of this exercise will be.
But perhaps Sutherland’s meagre representation given its size is not exceptional? Well perhaps it is. Take the islands for example. While the Western Isles has one councillor for every 700 people and Orkney and Shetland have one for around 800 people, Sutherland would have one councillor for every 2700 people under the Boundary Commission proposals.
And along with greater representation comes resources. Local authorities are resourced via an arcane formula known as Grant Aided Expenditure (GAE) which is run from Edinburgh and has undergone little change since 2007. The GAE formula accounts for the bulk of spending by local authorities, including Highland. Your council tax is just the icing on the cake. For 2021, the average amount allocated to Scottish local authorities was £2372. Highland Council received £2544 per head – just 7 per cent more. GAE funding per head in the Western Isles was £4146, in Orkney £4063 and in Shetland £4589. The islands are better resourced and better represented. This means more to spend on schools, roads and refuse and greater say in forums like COSLA.
But islands are more remote aren’t they? Depends what you mean by remote. The literature is coming round to the notion that remoteness is best defined in terms local population sparsity and lack of access to larger population centres that provide public services, shopping opportunities etc. These services are usually available in small towns – cities provided other services, though these are often consumed by elites rather than the mainstream population.
Andrew Copus of the Hutton Institute was recently asked by the Scottish Government to draw up a map of Scotland’s remote areas using this approach to remoteness. He recommended a definition that classed as remote those areas that couldn’t access 10,000 people within a 30-minute journey. Based on this calculation, the resulting map shows clearly that Sutherland – not the islands - is the most remote part of Scotland. Only the south-east corner, with easy access to towns in Ross-shire is not classed as remote under Andrew’s definition.
Being remote substantially reduces opportunities for economic development. Areas with very few people do not provide market opportunities. The only enterprises that work in these areas either have little locational choice because of the nature of their product or have very low costs of access to a wider customer base. Promoting economic development in Sutherland is an uphill struggle.
Scotland’s two national parks – Cairngorms and Loch Lomond & the Trossachs – have responsibility to deliver sustainable economic development within their boundaries. The Loch Lomond national park, for example, supported the development of the ScotGold mine at Tyndrum. The managing authorities include a number of representatives from the local community. Thus, quite bizarrely, local communities in the national parks, which were created to preserve their unique landscape, environment and heritage, have more leverage over economic development within their areas than is the case for the local community in Sutherland.
The challenges that Sutherland faces are formidable. The challenge for the prospective candidates in the Scottish election is that they must be willing to use their influence to right what seem to be obvious injustices in its representation and resourcing and to go against party lines, if necessary, to give the young generation a better chance to thrive in this area and so arrest the population decline which by 2040 could fall by 50 per cent from its level at the time of the Clearances if Highland Council projections are correct.
