chance to give fresh impetus to rural renewal

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Chance to give fresh impetus to rural renewal

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Friday 30 March 201814 whfp.com

With some innovativepolicy thinking, thePlanning Bill currentlymaking its way throughthe Scottish Parliamentcould help address thedepopulation crisisfacing the Highlands andIslands, says DR CALUMMACLEOD

Talla na Mara arts and entertainment visitor centrein Harris is just one example of what can beachieved on community-owned estates

Last week the James Hutton Institutepublished a report on demographicchange in Scotland’s Sparsely

Populated Areas that makes for grimreading. The Scottish Government-commissioned research estimates thatthese areas — including great swathes ofthe Highlands and Islands and parts of theSouthern Uplands — risk losing over aquarter of their population by 2046 ifcurrent demographic trends are leftunchanged.The core message from Dr Andrew Copus,

the report’s lead author, is stark. “Scotland’ssparsely populated areas have a demographiclegacy which, in the absence of intervention,will result in decades of population decline, andshrinkage of its working age population on ascale which implies serious challenges foreconomic development.”These findings will not be especially

revelatory to readers of this newspaper, many ofwhom live in these very areas. They do,however, raise some fundamental policyquestions about the future of rural Scotland, theplace of people in the landscape, and ideas aboutwhat constitutes ‘sustainable’ development.They also imply an urgent need for a far moreimaginative policy approach to reverse the flowof depopulation from sparsely-populated areaswhich together account for almost half (48.7 percent) the area of Scotland but contain only 2.6per cent of the country’s population.There’s no quick or easy fix for a

depopulation problem that has bedevilled partsof the Highlands and Islands for decades. Thereis, however, one immediate opportunity toinject fresh impetus into rural renewal in theform of the Planning (Scotland) Bill currentlybeing considered by the Local Government andCommunities Committee of the ScottishParliament.According to an accompanying policy

memorandum, both the Bill and a wider planningpolicy review “aim to change planning’soperation and its reputation from that of aregulator to a positive and active enabler of goodquality development; a shift from reacting todevelopment proposals to proactively supportinginvestment and quality placemaking”.On the face of it, the Planning Bill looks like

unpromising fare to kick-start a long-term andsustainable upsurge in rural renewal. It focuseson highly-technical, process-orientated issuessuch as simplified development zones,development plans, and infrastructure levies.Yet, with some innovative policy thinking thefinal version of the legislation that will emergein Parliament later this year could go a long

way towards addressing the demographic anddevelopment crisis forecast in the HuttonInstitute report.Community Land Scotland is already

supplying some of that innovative thinking. Inwritten evidence on the Planning Bill submittedto the Local Government and CommunitiesCommittee, CLS calls for a duty for ScottishMinisters to have regard for the desirability ofrepopulating rural Scotland and resettlingpreviously populated land which is now largelyor wholly de-populated when setting newplanning policies. The organisation is alsocalling for Scottish Ministers to be grantedpowers to designate land for its resettlement,and for Scottish Ministers and local authoritiesto be given powers to purchase land for itsresettlement, including compulsory purchasepowers.CLS advocates granting a community right

to buy land for resettlement by communitybodies nearest to such land. A furtherinnovative policy proposal is for ScottishMinsters to produce a map of ‘no longerexisting communities’ within five years of thePlanning Bill being passed and for Ministers tohave regard for that map when preparing futurepolicies.Community Land Scotland’s proposals are

not about pressing the reset button on theHighland Clearances, important though thatlegacy has been in shaping the evolution of theregion. Neither are they about subtracting fromthe social and economic cohesion of existingcommunities in rural Scotland. Instead theyrecognise that repopulation and resettlementcan reinforce that cohesion by stimulatingeconomic activity based on information andtelecommunications technology and place-based assets to create jobs that are less relianton traditional land-based sectors of the ruraleconomy.As such, CLS’s proposals are concerned

with developing existing and new settlementswith appropriate infrastructure and affordablehousing to encourage in-migration of working-age people to counter the damaging effects ofregional depopulation identified in the HuttonInstitute’s report.

SUCH AN APPROACH is not withouthistorical precedent. In the 1890s, a RoyalCommission was established to report on

and map depopulated land in the Highlands andIslands that might be suitable for repopulation.The commission’s findings were influential

in shaping subsequent legislation —particularly the Land Settlement (Scotland) Act1919 — which returned significant amounts ofdepopulated land to crofting occupation.As CLS’s Planning Bill evidence submission

notes, many of today’s crofting communities

— on the west side of the Uists and Harris, inthe north and west of Skye, in Raasay andelsewhere — owe their existence to the earlytwentieth-century governments whichundertook these resettlement initiatives. It’sworth noting too that in community-ownedestates such as in West Harris, decades ofdepopulation have been reversed as a result ofaffordable housing developments andopportunities for new local businesses to beestablished.

MORE RECENTLY there has beendiscussion about resettlement initiativeswithin an urban context, primarily

informed by the need to address a shortage inaffordable housing in Scotland.In 2014 the Royal Institute for Chartered

Surveyors called for the Scottish Governmentto create six to eight major new communities inthe form of new towns, “strategic regeneration”within existing towns or as extensions toexisting communities. That proposal to create ageneration of new towns was echoed by RuthDavidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives,in a speech to the Institute of Public PolicyResearch last year, in which she also called forpowers to be given to local authorities over thedevelopment of new towns if necessary.So, if it is legitimate to consider resettlement

within an urban context, then it is surelyequally legitimate to do so within the contextof rural Scotland.That, in turn, raises a wider question about

the legitimate place of people in the landscape.The next stage of the James Hutton Institute’sresearch on which its report on demographicchange is based will apparently includeexamining “the potential of sparsely populatedareas as an environmental resource to supportthe wellbeing of urban Scotland”.That strand of forthcoming research rather

depressingly sums up how chronically out oftouch the view of rural Scotland is from anurban vantage point. One in which extensiveareas of the Highlands and Islands are portrayedas a wild idyll, uncontaminated by human handsand pristine in their rugged majesty.Beguiling though it seems, that portrayal

masks an inconvenient truth; the Highlands andIslands were never ‘wild’. Instead these aresocially-constructed imaginings of the Highlandlandscape, reinforced by an externally-imposedpolicy narrative of ‘wild land’. The applicationof this narrative to these areas effectivelyappropriates the meanings attached to landscapesand determines dominant ideas of ‘stewardship’and ‘sustainability’. In turn, these ideas,transformed into policy, shape how landscapesare experienced and consumed via a successionof statutory and non-statutory designations.The most obvious example of this

phenomenon relates to designated ‘wild land’maps (of which there are 42 in Scotlandtotalling 3,798,817 acres). Although notstatutory designations, planning policy statesthat consideration should be given to thesemaps, alongside other factors, in makingplanning decisions. Many of the qualitiesascribed to ‘wild land’ by Scottish NaturalHeritage in developing these maps are highlysubjective with — according to research beingconducted on behalf of CLS — apparently littleor no community engagement in the process.The critical broader point — which CLS’s

proposed ‘map of no longer existingcommunities’ seeks to amplify — is that it isunacceptable to attempt to airbush generations ofhuman intervention from the mosaic ofcharacteristics that comprise landscapes.Moreover, it is legitimate for people to beinvolved in defining and characterising thelandscapes they inhabit, as a matter of justice.Consequently, the key challenge from a ruralrenewal standpoint is how to rebalance theprocess of characterising landscapes in ways thatempower existing and new rural communities touse environmental assets for their sustainableeconomic development.

THERE IS much to play for in terms offinding ways to repopulate and renewrural Scotland and, as the Hutton

Institute’s report indicates, the stakes couldscarcely be higher. In important respects,community ownership continues to act as atrailblazer in that regard.The Scottish Government recently approved

the North West Mull Community WoodlandCompany’s application to exercise a communityright to buy the Isle of Ulva together withan award of £4.4 million from the Scottish LandFund to finance the purchase. Thesedevelopments confirm the ScottishGovernment’s continuing ambition forcommunity land ownership as a means for ruralrepopulation and renewal, given that the NorthWest Mull company has made substantiallyincreasing the island’s resident population of sixpeople a key objective of the proposed buyout. However, that ambition must not halt on the

shoreline of Ulva. A wider mix of imaginativepolicy interventions is required if policymakersare genuinely serious about renewing ruralScotland. Delivering a Planning Bill thatincorporates repopulation and resettlementprovisions for sustainable rural developmentwould be a good start. Dr Calum MacLeod is a sustainabledevelopment consultant and Policy Directorfor Community Land Scotland. This article iswritten in a personal capacity.

Twitter: @CalumMacleod07

CALUM MACLEOD

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