Scotland’s Island Demographies – Diverse Pasts, Presents and Futures

‘Scotland’s islands’ have increasingly been treated by the Scottish Government as a distinct set of places, with their own ministerial remit and, since 2019, their own ‘Plan’, the first ‘strategic objective’ of which was ‘to address population decline and ensure a healthy balanced population profile’. Over the past forty years, however, Scotland’s islands, taken together, have experienced no significant population decline, while their collective age profile is not very different from many other parts of the country. This paper looks below the ‘all-island’ aggregates, exploring the huge diversity in patterns of change, and examining these in the context of past and recent variations in the three key demographic drivers: fertility, mortality, and, especially, migration. A particular focus is the widespread belief that population decline is above all due to out-migration among older teenagers and young adults. New data from the 2022 census, supplemented by figures provided by National Records of Scotland, show clearly that the key determinant of population trends in individual islands has in recent years most often not been out-migration, but the rates and age profiles of in-movements. Even where islands’ populations are in decline, in many cases they have overall net in-migration. The falling populations of these islands are a direct result of there being too few couples at child-bearing ages and/or too many deaths because of their age profiles.