Can Scotland’s islands force a move to decentralisation?
Scotland has three island councils and they have come together to campaign for better financial support. There is little doubt that investment in infrastructure and particularly housing is greatly needed on the island, but the move also highlights a bigger problem – they are not alone in having a strong case for better support.
It is a result of Scotland's failure to take regional development seriously and the central government's 'hands off' approach to measuring and assessing the needs of individual communities and geographic areas.
This affects many parts of Scotland outside the central belt. The story of second-rate infrastructure and transport links, weak local economic development, lack of housing and access to land for development, inability to gain benefit from local economic assets (like energy generation), centralised budgets and power and lack of a voice for communities is consistent.
One of the main reasons for this is the centralisation of power and the Scottish public sector's reliance on performance indicators to measure success. The latter means that Scotland is often measured as an average of performance across the whole nation, which part-explains the obsession with inward investment that doesn't do anything to create new jobs.
And then without the former, regions are unable to do anything about it themselves. What is quite difficult in resolving this isn't that the means to do so isn't at hand, it's that it relies on the people who have presided over the problem recognising it and deciding to do something better.
Common Weal has been campaigning for over a decade for reform of procurement laws so that public procurement can be treated as a local economic development tool. This is wholly justified by the success of the concept of 'local wealth building' but steps towards this have been glacial as centralised Scotland still pushes for a 'biggest contract, lowest cost' model.
Recent legislation may change this, but lip service to reform has been paid before. Likewise the refusal to create a more coherent local government system. Local authorities are far too big to be local but too small to act strategically at a regional level. Nearly 35 years since that system was put in place it remains unreformed.
Along with that problem goes the centralisation of budgets with local income-generating powers greatly restricted. Again, central government cannot stop itself trying to direct local government through ring fenced funding and by making announcements of policy which by rights should be the preserve of the local authority.
And beyond this we have a lack of planning for the kind of nation Scotland is. We have an enormous coastline but we do not have a strong coastal strategy which would enable coastal communities to unlock the value of the marine economy – from energy to transport to fishing.
Town, rural, coastal, island, borders – we fail properly to take account of the decentralised reality of Scotland as a living community and instead generate policy on a one-size-fits-all manner.
The three island councils coming together is therefore a welcome sign that Scotland may be fighting back against centralisation and that communities are becoming increasingly unhappy about what they see as neglect.
The problem is that this problem is equal parts culture and structure and has generated a governing mindset in Scotland which has for decades been overtly hostile to local decision-making. Scotland has these same problems across the different examples given above – communities, regions and types of area which all deserve tailored approaches.
Actually solving this problem is not technically difficult but it requires political will power. At the moment faith in government and public institutions is dropping. It may take a crisis of confidence in the Scottish public realm to force change – and there is a good chance it may start with the islands.