During my time working on this project, I have relied heavily on one piece of academic research more than any other.
The issue of population decline on the Scottish Islands is not something that has received a lot of attention from the academic community or large media outlets.
The research conducted at The James Hutton Institute by Andrew Copus and Jonathan Hopkins is some of the most in-depth and comprehensive coverage that this issue will get.
I had the pleasure of spending some time speaking with Hopkins as we talked about his researcher and what it means for the future of the islands communities.
TRANSCRIPT:
Nick Haseloff 0:00
Yeah, so can you tell me a bit of your background and your work at the institute? Jonathan Hopkins 0:09 Sure. Yeah. I mean, I joined the I joined the Hudson Institute about seven years ago, I guess my backgrounds as a constitutive, geographer, and so previous to kind of physical geography but moving into moving into human geography, social statistics, I do a lot of data analysis related to demographics. Also GIS, spatial data analysis, indicators, well being and possible survey analysis as well. But the main kind of work I've been doing on this particular project is defining areas in Scotland which are sparsely populated, and so we're not looking so when you talk about sparse population that means poor access to people, it doesn't necessarily mean a low population density or country. Have remoteness from big cities or big towns, it kind of is a combination of those things. And so we've identified areas of Scotland which are sparsely populated. And actually, we've kind of just redone this again. So the publicly available reports which you'll have seen, we're going to be producing an updated revised version of that policy. And we've looked at the past population trends and use the kind of small area beta to project populations into the near near future in Excel 2530 years. And so that's been kind of that's been kind of my main, my main involvement in this work. I've also had a small, very small role in root silence revival projects, which was, which was probably no to do with this kind of anecdotal, anecdotal or qualitative evidence which have population change, which isn't reflected in the statistics. And that's kind of a major, a major kind of issue. I mean, the the most detailed population data comes out every 10 years and the census or 11 years because the one that was going to happen next year, it's been delayed a year. And so there isn't really any, any population information other than estimates in between. And so often you can have small areas, small villages, which have experiencing population growth and there's positivity in the community and there's a sense that people moving back which isn't picked up in the kind of statistics that I'm live in mainly involved in. So yeah, it's it's kind of something I've become increasingly aware of this, this need to accept that there is a there is a kind of spin quite negative picture of a future population in the islands. But that's not capturing every detail of what's happening in villages, and certain different parts of the island. Nick Haseloff 3:08 Yeah, so that's that's definitely something that because I initially had started my research with Ruth's findings and the eyelids or Bible project, because that is what got the most, most coverage in the media, ABC, BBC did a story on it, as well as quite a few other publications. But then you come to your research and look at the actual statistics and the data and look outside of that anecdotal area and you see a completely different picture. So that's, that's really what got me interested in the project and covering it in media in a way that necessarily wasn't covered before. So you've already touched on the dichotomy between those two different projects. Is there is there any similar Word of answer you have, can you put your finger on something that would lead to the difference in data? Jonathan Hopkins 4:09 Well, partly it could be it could be to do with scale. I mean, if you if you're in a small, a very small, you know, village in the in the highlands, or the islands somewhere, the population of that might just be five or six, it might just be a couple of houses with two families in it. Now, it might be that, you know, if you have another, if you have another family move in, if you have another house gets built, that's, you know, population growth of that small scale, and that could be pretty substantial and keeping that place going and then kind of maintaining, maintaining that place as a community. But if you look at the kind of if you look at kind of the statistics for data zones, and areas which are much bigger, you will kind of lose that. lose that degree of nuance, and I don't I mean, I guess I guess I'm biased a bit towards the quantity of beta because that's kind of what I've always I've, I've sort of been experienced in using, but But yeah, I mean, you know, there's definite sensitivity about, you know, you don't want to, you've got to accept that there are issues in the island population, you've got this this population aging. You have had the history of population loss and sparsely populated areas compared with more more accessible areas and areas around towns and cities. But yeah, you cannot. You can't ignore sort of kind of anecdotal among when they experience their everyday life. That's completely valid, valid view. And so yeah, it's in terms of deficiency can be a question of scale. It's small scale processes, which people experience but these kind of wider, wider areas. translate, they probably don't as much. So that's that's possibly one reason. Nick Haseloff 6:04 Yeah, one thing I noticed in your data, talking about the small, relatively small scale is you had, you had looked at projections of how much influx of immigration would need to be on the islands in order to reverse the change. And it wasn't much it was, I think, 458 or something like that on yours. And I mean, that's, that's less than what a ferry can handle. I mean, obviously, there needs to be housing and jobs and all that sort of stuff in these small communities. But for the for the numbers that have been projected, the solution to it seems rather small. Do you have anything you can say on that? Jonathan Hopkins 6:47 I mean, I mean, something. I mean, I'm did Andrew did that particular calculation, and we earned it actually, in the most recent one. We haven't. We haven't kind of reproduced that but but yeah, it's it's I mean, the thing that Because across all the time on the islands is the shortage of affordable housing. And then there's this kind of, I mean, you'll be aware of kind of the, you know, the Airbnb and people buy housing as an investment, and there isn't any affordable housing and, and so, yeah, it's it's kind of, it's kind of very, it's kind of very difficult to kind of report to get a movement of people back to the islands without without addressing burnout. And I'm, I'm not best placed to advise on the best way to do the mean, in some areas or meanings. I mean, as a country, we haven't built you know, the UK hasn't built affordable enough affordable housing for the last 40 odd years. So that's why they Nick Haseloff 7:48 It's definitely not being focused on these Island communities either. The affordable housing. Jonathan Hopkins 7:53 Exactly, exactly, exactly. But But yeah, I mean to to attract people to the islands. I mean, you know, you It's difficult. I guess it's difficult to to have that population movement without addressing the housing issue just because you hear it so often. I mean, you hear you hear this this issue of portable housing and available housing. And a lot of people, I think you might have seen the surveys that cheney have done on and on. And I forget exactly what it's called. I think it's about young people. I think, young people wanting to return and there's there is a desire of people to return to the islands to live there. But yeah, in order for that to happen, you need to get housing and you also need, you know, things like broadband and things like access to, you know, access to the sort of jobs that people want to do. So there's that there's a number of kind of issues, which are, it's not, it's not just housing, it's having economic, economic conditions where people can go back and solve what they want to do as well. So So yeah, I mean, it's it's it's, yeah, I mean, often when you do you do kind of demographic modeling and you work with economic data, it's easy to assume that, you know, people can they often assume that people didn't move around very easily. Well, in reality, there's there's a lot of values to this kind of this kind of migration, which people don't necessarily consider. Nick Haseloff 9:23 Going back to that modeling. I don't have a big background in human geography. What what type of modeling, have you relied on to make these projections? And how accurate Can we say they are? Has this modeling been used in the past in other communities and has it shown promise? And I'd know that you mentioned that there's another report coming out. Could you speak to that as well? Jonathan Hopkins 9:50 Yeah, I mean, I mean, for the I mean, for the I mean, we've got a couple of reports coming out one, it was kind of a reproduction of the kind of our sort of revived version of the report which I did with Andrew which is used on newer data and slightly slight changes, the other one's a bit more experimental, which, which is perhaps a bit less easy to explain. But the population projections is kind of a method that's been applied to other areas. You look at the current population structure. So you have details of the number of people in sparsely populated areas who are five year age groups, men and women, and then you apply birth rates and birthrate prediction and so you know, how many people are being born, you know, you apply mortality rates. So, you know, which are specific to different age groups and gender groups and different locations. And you also apply migration assumptions and that's that's the tricky bit because migration is the hardest is the thing that there's most uncertainty over birth rates and death rates tend to be fairly slow moving in time, but migrations the so what we did for that was we used recent migration assumptions, which are based on recent migration data. So it's kind of assuming a status quo assumes that each migration will be similar to that in the recent past, I guess. And through this use of, you know, small population data and population structures, you can then apply, you could then get a five year periods out to 2043. I think, the population structures for those years and you can then get, and then you can get kind of the statistics from that. So it's kind of an established, it's kind of an established method. We've obviously applied to quite small areas, using small area data. There's a lot of assumptions in that kind of work. Which I think we've acknowledged. But it's kind of wait, I think we've done a decent job with the data that we've we've got available. You can, you know, I mean, you can never, you can never have too much faith in modeling. Because as you know, as we, as we all know, how does now you can get these completely unforeseen events which can change everything. But yeah, Nick Haseloff 12:23 How close is the new data that you've been working on to what you had modeled in that report? Jonathan Hopkins 12:29 It's pretty, it's pretty similar. I'm just trying off the off the top of my head. They this new report, which is updated projections, it's a slightly different time period. So I think in the first report, Andrew use 2011 data and it went to 2046. Because there's population data in this new report available for 2018. We've done it to a slightly different period. So it's now projected in 2043, I think, and I think we get similar results we get pretty soon Similar trends happen actually something I actually haven't done this is to to compare across the two, but you tend to see, you tend to come in to see similar things. So the regions where some of the kind of violent weakens in the West tend to have the most negative population changes. And I think Shetland Islands spot popular parts of the Shetland Islands, I'm not sure they have the most positive to populating trends. And again, I mean, I guess something I mean, when we're doing these projections, you're reporting statistics for different regions and obviously within that region, while the population projection for the whole region might be negative, there could be bits, which are positive, there could be smaller parts of it which are positive. And if you look at the reports, which national records of Scotland to produce looking at the working age population, something that But to some of the comes out of them is the whole of Scotland is going to have a slight decline in the working age population by sort of 2043. I think. So, you know, demographic issues aren't just affecting sparsely populated areas, they're affecting all parts of Scotland to some to some degree, I guess. Nick Haseloff 14:19 I don't know if you know, off the top of your head, what percentage of the area of these islands is considered sparsely populated? Jonathan Hopkins 14:27 Well, that's, that's a tricky. One. Isn't that Oh, I've got them. I've got map, which I don't know if I can. I don't have I don't have available. But for instance, if you take if you take, say the islands, which is sparsely populated, isn't the kind of you know, there's a mainland of Army and you've got luik, the main town and you've got the mainland area, that bit of it is actually not sparsely populated. The popular bit important is kind of Outlying Islands and the kinds of edges of mainland Island I think So because there's something that we've picked up on is there's kind of a contrast between the kind of Central towns and Island areas, so stone away. And Kirkwall. These kinds of areas, you know, tend to be kind of key kind of hub towns for the islands. And so it's a kind of maintain population economic activity in a different context, the more remote parts of the island, so that's why we think it's useful to have it's useful to have that back kind of split. Nick Haseloff 15:35 So you feel that these Kirkwall, Stornoway, those sort of hub towns, you don't feel that they will see the same amount of decline as the spark sparsely populated areas. You don't feel that it's reflected. Jonathan Hopkins 15:49 I touched on serasa I'd have to double check on the kind of results for that, but they've, they've got kind of advantages which the more remote parts of galleries don't have, you've got this agglomeration. of service such as an economic activity and people and that kind of support population, that kind of agglomeration you just don't have in the mall kind of areas. So the theory would suggest that, yes, the remote areas are going to have that threatened more by that kind of the population, which is a horrible word. I really don't like the term the population. It's a bit of a, you know, it's just not a nice, not a nice to, but that but yeah, maintain population, although it's going to be it's going to be harder, just because you don't you don't have access to that kindof agglomeration. Nick Haseloff 16:37 Are you aware at all of the Isle of Rome and the Eco homes that they're building there? Jonathan Hopkins 16:44 I'm not No, I mean, I'm aware of Rome, but I mean, it's, I mean, it's, I know that there's groups in the islands who are kind of kind of doing similar thing. Please tell me more about that sounds sounds very interesting. Nick Haseloff 16:57 Yeah. So I think their population hovers between 30 and 40. And they're in the process. They're hoping to finish next month that they're building for eco homes. So they're all powered off the grid. No, no traditional sewage, that sort of stuff. But they're, they're hosting applications for people to move there. So they're hoping to almost double their population, hopefully. Jonathan Hopkins 17:24 So that's right now that's the recipe that's really, really interesting remembering. Yeah, I mean, how big is how big is Rome? I can't remember. It's. Nick Haseloff 17:33 Yeah, it's very small, though. Jonathan Hopkins 17:35 Yeah, but I mean, I guess I guess the polling population these remote islands. Yeah, I mean, I mean, what what do you know what the kind of, you know, are they are they are there jobs that people are going to be doing on the island or Nick Haseloff 17:49 the main thing is, there's there's aren't a ton of jobs there. Most of it has to do with tourism, and obviously, most of its seasonal. So it's going to be interesting to see what their criteria is we're getting people on the islands. I think they're hoping for most people to have remote jobs that they can work from. Jonathan Hopkins 18:06 Yeah, man. I mean, that's really interesting, because it's kind of, you know, you know, I mean, time we've all become more used to home working than than ever before. It's kind of Yeah, mate, enabling people to kind of participate in economic activity sort of wherever, wherever that happens, I guess. Yeah, that's very important for places like that. But now that I've not I've not heard about, but I think there's a few similar communities, but it's not something that I'm very, I mean, I'm very much sort of quantitative data, yeah, data person. And an all the time you can kind of you kind of learn the value of what you might pass as anecdotal evidence, as you know, it's, you learn about the values of people's experience and all of the colleagues or with a more called seven. So I'm involved in, I'm involved in are involved in this kind of interviews, focus groups and shops and things like that good. Yeah. And often you can have these two sets of data which, you know, present very, very different, different pictures of both, but both can be validated that so it's something that I suddenly I know about. Nick Haseloff 19:19 Alright, thank you so much. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Jonathan Hopkins 19:21 You too. Nice sweet too. Thank you. Bye. Cheers. Bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai