Does Highland depopulation mean it is time for their own Parliament?

This morning's Scotsman has an eye-catching headline – Scotland's Highlands now 'have fewer people than lapland'. In many ways this may not be surprising to people given how long population decline in the Highlands has been reported.

The question though is why has so little action been taken to address the issue when it has been known about for so long? Indeed, why has so little been done given that this is a subject on which we have so much knowledge about causes? Something is wrong, we know what it is, we know what is causing it, it isn't technically difficult to solve and yet very little has been done.

The causes of depopulation we well known. The four big factors are housing, transport, services and economy – with a large dash of land ownership added to all of them. The particular report which this story is based on is looking at the NC500 tourist route and so highlights the ever-increasing problem of local housing being converted into short term lets to serve this new and growing tourist market.

But the housing crisis is not just about housing loss to second homes and short term lets (crucial though that is). It is about whether supply meets need in certain given contexts. There is no 'right amount of housing for a community'; everything is about context.

If you are looking at a map of regional demographics and you're averaging housing supply across communities, you're failing to realise that there is a hotel in one community that desperately needs to recruit ten new staff because it is booming – but can't find anywhere for them to live. That puts the hotel at risk and that may put the whole community at risk.

The point is that housing is an issue that should be controlled locally, not regionally. That is what makes it properly responsive to local need. The same is true for local economies; distant regional authorities take broad brush approaches to economy development. It is more chainsaw that precision scalpel and it is poor at supporting growing but small local economies.

Where regional and central government needs to do better is in transport links and service provision. There appears to be a self-reinforcing defeatism about public services in the Highlands. There seems to be a built-in assumption of depopulation. Rather than trying to save services through repopulation strategies, the current pattern is to reduce services in an anticipatory way and thereby undermine hopes of sustaining population.

The Highlands is a perfect example of where high degrees of innovation over public services (including public services which are in the private sector, like banking and food distribution) should be pushed. Scotland has a 'buy it cheap, stack it high' model for services which is ill-suited to our own geography. Technology should be helping to revolutionise and improve rural services, not diminish them.

Behind all of this is Scotland's poor pattern of land ownership and its overbearing centralisation. The former means many communities simply don't have access to the local land resources needed to support an expanding housing sector or economy. Scotland's centralisation means those communities definitely don't have autonomous access to the powers communities like that in other rural-dominated nations do.

How to solve this? Let's start with the obvious; Lapland has about 20 per cent less population as a whole than the Highlands (the study is looking outside Inverness) but has 21 municipalities where the Highlands has one giant regional authority. That is enough there to explain most of the reasons for depopulation in the Highlands – we are a horrendously centralised country.

That also leads to the next centralisation problem – Scotland's central belt holds the population and that is the body of electors the politicians court because there are more of them. MSPs have just been lobbied by the powerful landlord lobbyists and others to reject an increased tax on second homes. This is classic 'pass policy for rich people in Edinburgh so they can harm communities up north – but have a nice holiday and a great little investment' stuff.

This also accounts for the abysmal lack of action on land reform and the broad disinterest in transport policy in the Highlands. The response to this is clearly to seek to save the Highlands through decentralisation of power. Scotland desperately needs another tier of local democracy. The need for this is so overwhelming that the political resistance is disgraceful.

But this doesn't really cover the range of issues that need to be addressed. Common Weal has explored adopting the idea of a Parliament for the Highlands on a number of occasions without reaching a firm conclusion. We have continued to believe that many problems can be solved via local democracy.

Is it now time for the Highlands and, separately, the Islands to have their own law-making body that can set region-specific laws, region-specific taxes, have much more power on regional spending – and have a powerful voice to counterbalance the centralisation of Edinburgh? The depopulation of our north and the failure to take action suggests it may be.