National Islands Plan: implementation route map 2023

Introduction

Within the National Islands Plan (NIP), Scottish Government committed to publishing an Implementation Route Map (IRM) that addresses each of the 13 Strategic Objectives and accompanying commitments listed in the Plan.

NIP Annual Reports are published each year which look back at the actions that have been taken across Scottish Government in the preceding year, to deliver on the NIP commitments. The IRM is published after this and takes a forward looking, action-focussed approach, detailing the specific actions Scottish Government will then take over the coming year, to continue to deliver on the Plan.

The IRM has been developed in collaboration across Scottish Government to ensure all policy areas with responsibility for commitments within the Plan, outline how they are delivering for island communities.

Commitments in the Plan that were already fulfilled during 2020-2022 do not feature in this document, but you can read more about the actions that have been taken to fulfil them in the respective years' Annual Reports.

Annual Report 2020

Annual Report 2021

Annual Report 2022

In the IRM you will find the as yet unfulfilled commitments from the National Islands Plan with the specific actions assigned to each of them. Each action has been given an indicative timescale for delivery as follows:

Short: One-two years

Medium: Two-five years

Long: Over five years

As the Cabinet Secretary has highlighted in her foreword, many of the commitments within the National Islands Plan have an ongoing nature to them, and therefore assigning a timescale for fulfilment is not always appropriate. For these commitments, they are marked as 'ongoing'. Each year in the Annual Report, we will update on what work has taken place during the year for these commitments.

In addition to this, some actions have been 'implemented' since the publication of the 2022 Annual Report and are now marked as such in the IRM. These commitments will be fully reported upon in the 2023 NIP Annual Report when it is published in early 2024.