Human rights breaches show how rural policy must change

In some ways the Scottish Human Rights Commission report on the South of Scotland is a shock; in other ways it is hardly surprising at all. It finds that the fundamental human rights of the people of the South of Scotland are being systematically breached, and this sounds shocking.

But when you break down the ways those rights are being broken the list will sound familiar to anyone in a rural area of Scotland – poor coverage of infrastructure and public services, high prices for essential goods and services, local economies and community infrastructure which is poorly funded and could be lost at any moment.

These three categories that are identified by the SHRC (the accessibility of infrastructure and services, affordability of goods and services, fragility of economies and community infrastructure) are a significant, consistent problem for everywhere in Scotland that is not an urban centre (though they are increasingly an urban problem too).

The South of Scotland is genuinely poorly served, even in comparison to say the Highlands. There is no accident and emergency provision in the whole of Galloway (just a community hospital in Stranraer) and the time it takes an ambulance to get from Stranraer to Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary in Dumfries is about an hour and a half with a blue light in normal traffic.

Trying to find a major employer in Galloway which is not the public sector or a supermarket is not easy. The road links to the central belt vary between inadequate and not fit for purpose. The main road from Scotland's primary port serving Ireland to our biggest city Glasgow (the A77) is a slow, narrow winding road ill suited to freight and which is often closed.

The neglect of the South of Scotland is pretty extreme in Scotland and it is unsurprising that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has identified these sorts of areas as being the ones to have lost most faith in the Scottish Parliament and its mainstream political parties. Galloway is one of the regions which has moved most decisively towards Reform.

We don't know much though because, almost to emphasise the point, the sampling done for more surveys does not allow the data to be broken down for parts of the South of Scotland. We neglect it too much to gather the data to assess the level of neglect.

Policy in Scotland is an urban concern. It is made in urban Scotland by people who largely live in urban Scotland or its much more accessible central belt villages. There is a mindset in government that sees Scotland's problems (poverty, drugs, the economy) as being 'urban issues'. There is also a numbers game played – urban policy covers more people. On a spreadsheet it is 'more efficient'.

This creates troubling attitudes in and around policy circles. There is often a poor understanding of rural Scotland. Living there is often treated as if it is a 'lifestyle choice'. If it isn't, if it is accepted that people 'belong there' it is seen as an anomaly. It is some cultural quirk which means the people concerned ‘can't really expect equal or fair treatment’.

There is also ignorance. Often you come across the attitude that 'OK, but this is all offset by cheap housing'. In reality housing in rural areas of the UK is actually 40 per cent higher than average urban prices. The median cost of a house in rural Scotland is £280,500 while the median cost in urban Scotland is around £198,000 (data here).

The Scottish Parliament often makes the case that its core funding deserves to be higher than the UK as a whole because of the extra costs associated with rurality, but it then does not follow through by recognising that life in rural areas needs more investment if the publicly-derived quality of life is to match that of other citizens.

There are many problems here but there are two Common Weal has highlighted over and over. First, this problem is made perpetually worse because not only are rural communities (and particularly the South of Scotland) poorly served, they exist in the most centralised country in Europe. They have little power or agency to do anything about it. The closest centre of local government to Stranraer is, again, an hour and a half away.

The other problem is that rural areas are all different with different economies and different geographies. There is no 'one size fits all' solution to this. That is why Common Weal has called for a proper, granular-level Industrial Strategy for Rural Scotland to be developed.

We have to stop treating rural Scotland as a 'minimum possible service' zone and start behaving like all lives in Scotland deserve the same quality of life since they pay the same taxes.