Over the past fortnight this section has reported on a school with no teacher housing, a spring assessed in 1978, an appeal decided against a plan superseded twice, a practice funded for a third of its patients, and a planning framework being replaced by one that has not been written.
Each of those has an owner. Every one of them was somebody’s responsibility and, in almost every case, that body was doing its job correctly within its remit.
So we asked a simple question of twelve organisations: who is responsible for managing rural population change in Scotland?
The answers
Each named a different body. Two named each other.
The planning authorities said they respond to applications and cannot direct where people move. The health board said population distribution is a matter for government. The government pointed to the planning system and to local authorities. The enterprise agency said its remit is economic development. The environmental regulators said they regulate discharges. The housing agency said it funds delivery against local assessments of need, which are produced by the councils, which are produced from the projections, which are produced by the statisticians, who said, accurately, that they publish numbers and do not make policy.
“Everyone I speak to is doing their job properly. That is what makes it difficult to describe. There is no failure to point at. There is a gap where the whole thing should be.”
A former senior civil servant
Why this is the actual problem
Nearly everything in this series follows from it.
The projections update twice a year and the plans update every ten, because two different bodies own those cycles and neither is accountable for the mismatch. Councils are funded on stale data because the formula is owned separately from the services. Consultees miss deadlines because their budget is set by one department and their workload generated by another.
None of these are scandals. They are seams. And rural population change has run straight along every seam in the machine at once.
Who owns a piece
- Planning framework: Scottish Government
- Local plans and decisions: 32 councils
- Population data: the national statistical body
- Housing funding: a government directorate
- Health resourcing: 14 boards
- Water, discharge, designated sites: the regulators
- Ferries, trunk roads, rail: the transport agency and its operators
- The whole: unassigned
What would fix it
Not a new agency. Every person interviewed for this piece was asked and every one said the same thing first, unprompted, which was that another organisation would simply become a thirteenth answer to the question above.
What they proposed instead was duller. A single minister with a cross-portfolio remit and the power to align cycles. A statutory requirement that planning, funding and service data run on one refresh interval. And a standing published account of population change by district, so that the argument happens over one set of numbers.
None of it requires new money in any meaningful quantity. All of it requires somebody to own the thing, which is the one item that has never appeared on any list.
