Now, more than ever, the Highlands and Islands needs a vibrant, ambitious, outward-looking and growing economy if the demographic decline that is blighting so much of this region is to be reversed.
This means creating strong local economies that provide the wide range of quality job opportunities paying competitive wages needed to retain more home-grown, talented young people and attract new blood into the region.
Simple? Far from it! After all, that is what the Highlands and Islands Development Board was set up to do in 1965, and what its successor, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), have been struggling to do ever since.
Many successes they have had, but the problems remain. Depressingly, HIE’s latest ‘My Life in the Highlands and Islands’ survey, published 13th October 2022, found that nearly a half of all young people plan to leave this region in the next five years.
Business confidence ‘low’
But right now, the priority is to help businesses struggling for survival in the face of spiralling costs, major staffing shortages, covid debts, increasingly shaky consumer demand and more. No wonder business confidence is so low.
So, with money and other resources extremely limited, what can be done to improve the lot of our local businesses, economies and communities, now and in the future? Here are just a few suggestions.
First, we need to keep otherwise successful businesses alive through the current crisis.
Perhaps most pressing is the need for an announcement about what will happen when the business energy price cap ends on the 31st of March.
Given the growing contribution made by energy bills to total costs, how can businesses like hotels confidently set prices for next summer without knowing whether they will be assisted?
Help needs to be given
North of the border, FSB Scotland has identified some important asks for the Scottish Government’s December budget.
Any unspent Covid-19 business support funding (and there’s a lot of it) should be used to help businesses with energy bills and other rising overheads; the Small Business Bonus Scheme should continue; and all non-essential regulatory changes that would place additional strain on businesses should be postponed – things like the short-term lets licensing scheme and the deposit and return scheme.
The Scottish National Investment Bank should be obliged to lend at least 20% of its annual investments to small and micro businesses, and under Community Wealth Building we want to see more of the vast public sector procurement budget being spent with small and micro businesses.
After all, money spent with local firms circulates within communities, bringing much more economic and social benefit than money spent with larger firms elsewhere in the country.
Attract and retain workers
We don’t yet know what impact reduced consumer demand will have on this region’s unemployment figures, but as things stand the shortage is very damaging to the reputations of both individual businesses and the region.
More must be done to help local jobseekers enter the industry, easing their passage with specialist training courses like North Highland College UHI’s new 18-week ‘First Steps into Highland Hospitality’ SCQF Level 5 course, devised with the help of local tourism operators.
However, in far too many parts of the Highlands and Islands there simply aren’t enough jobseekers to fill vacancies, and so we want the UK Government to use this region to pilot a measure proposed by the Migratory Advisory Committee some time ago: a visa that would enable overseas nationals to work in remote parts of the UK.
Of course, retaining and attracting a working-age population means breaking down remoteness barriers by providing excellent transport and digital infrastructure.
We also need more affordable accommodation of the right type and standard in the right places, requiring land, money and construction companies prepared to undertake the work.
All are big asks, but doing nothing cannot be acceptable if we want to create a prosperous region
The recently announced proposal for repopulation zones to be established for Caithness and Sutherland, the Outer Hebrides and Argyll sounds exciting, and we fervently hope that the focus on housing, jobs and boosting economic activity will work.
‘Action’ needed
FSB Scotland is certainly ready and waiting to play our part.
The problems faced by this region are considerable and now is the time for action.
We do have various government initiatives in place already, including the Inverness and Highland City Region Deal and the Islands Growth Deal, but is this enough?
Surely, now is the time for the public, private and third sectors to unite under one Highlands and Islands banner, working together to convince governments in Holyrood and Westminster that our problems are not insurmountable; that with joined-up thinking and appropriate investment we can reverse population decline and ensure that a vibrant, ambitious, outward-looking and growing Highlands and Islands plays a full and active part in this country’s prosperity.
Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job!
David Richardson is Federation of Small Businesses Highlands & Islands development manager
Conversation