Trends in Rural Scotland: a working paper (2025)

Introduction

Policy Background

The Scottish Government has committed to publishing a Rural Delivery Plan showing how it is delivering for Rural Scotland by 2026. This is set out in the Scottish Government's 2023 policy prospectus Equality, opportunity, community: New leadership - A fresh start and the 2023-24 Programme for Government. The 2023 policy prospectus sets out three missions:

1. Equality: Tackling poverty and protecting people from harm

2. Opportunity: A fair, green and growing economy

3. Community: Prioritising our public services

The Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance has stated:

"Reforming public services will mean that, by 2026, in partnership with Local Government, trade unions and the third sector, amongst others, I will have:

Published a Rural Delivery Plan, showing how all parts of the Scottish Government are delivering for rural Scotland. As well as policies on agriculture, land reform, marine, and our Islands Plan, this will cover areas such as transport, housing, social justice, repopulation, digital connectivity and economic development."

The vision for the Rural Delivery Plan is:

"…for a vibrant, sustainable, equal and inclusive rural Scotland, with its diverse rural, island and coastal communities thriving across economic, social and environmental dimensions, feeding, powering, inspiring, providing homes and livelihoods to, and nurturing the wellbeing of current and future generations".

Other relevant policy includes the National Islands Plan, Just Transition agenda which commits Scotland to meeting net zero targets by 2045, and the Scottish Government's Agricultural Reform Programme.

Scotland's National Performance Framework monitors 11 national outcomes for the whole of Scotland. Not all indicators have had breakdowns for rural Scotland.^[1]
A tailored set of Key Performance Indicators will be produced to monitor the effectiveness of policy in Rural Scotland, including the new Rural Delivery Plan.

The Rural Scotland Data Dashboard was produced in 2023 as a compilation of available data evidence to inform the development of the Rural Delivery Plan.

Further Rural Scotland time series data has been compiled to highlight trends over time. This current Key Trends in Rural Scotland publication should be regarded as a background working paper.

Topics

Key trends data has been compiled for nine different topics:

1. Agriculture and Marine

2. Transport

3. Housing

4. Population and skills

5. Environment and Climate Change

6. Economy and Digital

7. Health and social care

8. Culture

9. Social Justice

Geography

Data in this report uses the Scottish Government Urban Rural Classification, which provide a consistent way of defining urban and rural areas across Scotland. The most recent data uses the 2020 SG Urban Rural Classification whereas earlier data from previous years uses the most relevant classification at the time of publishing.

The classification is based on two main criteria:

1. Population as defined by the National Records of Scotland

2. Accessibility based on drive time to a settlement with a population of 10,000 or more.

The Scottish Government core definition of rurality classifies areas with a population of fewer than 3,000 people to be rural. The Scottish Government Urban Rural Classification can be collapsed to this core definition, to create a 2-fold classification:

• Rest of Scotland – (1) Large urban Areas, (2) Other Urban Areas, (3) Accessible Small Towns, and (4) Remote Small Towns
• Rural Scotland – (5) Accessible Rural and (6) Remote Rural Areas

Where further classification is possible by accessibility, multiple forms exist including a 3-fold classification which distinguishes between remote rural, accessible rural and the rest of Scotland, and a 6-fold classification which distinguishes between large urban areas, other urban areas, accessible small towns, remote small towns, accessible rural areas and remote rural areas. The form of classification used depends on the source data in question; some surveys and datasets are unable to split data into lower-level geographies.

An 8-fold classification further distinguishes between remote and very remote regions. Scottish islands are included in these categories.

On occasions where data cannot be categorised by population and accessibility, this report uses the Scottish Government's Rural & Environmental Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Classification of Local Authorities, which clusters local authorities according to their level of rurality and establishes four different groups, which are labelled as 'larger cities', 'urban with substantial rural areas', 'mainly rural' and 'islands and remote.'

Some datasets do not use these definitions of rurality, including the Cost of Remoteness publication which uses categories 4 and 6 (remote small towns and remote rural areas) of the SG 6-fold Urban Rural classification 2016 as its definition of remote and the Ofcom data which uses Locale classification of urban and rural premises.

Classifying by population and accessibility does not allow for the separation of island and mainland rural data. To remedy this, bespoke data has been requested from sources which have data-zone level collection. The Scottish island regions 2023: overview data-zone based classification for Scottish island regions allows for the identification of island areas which can be extracted to produce Scottish mainland only data. Some data-zones overlap both island and mainland areas, so there is a degree of error with this data.

Scottish Mainland-only data can also be produced by separating those local authorities which are completely made up of islands: Shetland Islands Council, Orkney Islands Council, and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar. However, according to the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 which defines an Island as a 'naturally formed area of land that is surrounded on all sides by the sea ignoring artificial structures e.g. bridges, and is above water at high tide,' Argyll and Bute Council, Highland Council and North Ayrshire Council also encompass islands in addition to a significant amount of mainland. Thus, there is also some degree of error with this method also.

It has been explored on a practical level whether the Rural data could be produced just for Mainland Scotland Rural areas. Where possible, Island data has been extracted and separated. Due to a lack of availability of separate data, islands are generally included. While some useful outputs can be produced from this process, much of the data has significant errors and should be approached with caution.

In terms of geographic classification, islands are split between Remote Small towns and Remote Rural Areas.

Time Series Trends

This time series trends report primarily involves the use of secondary and published data.

The time period covered by the data in this report means that time series results were affected by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The impact varies by dataset. For survey sources which were impacted (Scottish Household Survey and Scottish House Condition Survey), data from 2020 and 2021 has been excluded as it is not comparable to other waves of surveys/reports. For others sources, 2020 and 2021 data is comparable but the impacts of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic must taken into consideration when interpreting the findings.