Chamber and committees

Given how different even the outer and inner Shetland Islands are, is there potential for an islands policy to cover the various extremes that we can see in the feedback? How will the survey help to form policy, given that the feedback is so different? There is quite a difference, even between different age groups, without even looking at whether it is the inner or outer Shetland Islands. How are we going to use the survey?

Karen Adam has some specific questions on how the pandemic and Brexit might affect the survey.

Thank you.

That is a fine note on which to conclude. I thank the witnesses for their evidence this morning.

I suspend the meeting so that we can get our next panel in front of us.

I welcome to the meeting our second panel of stakeholders. We have Camille Dressler, the chair of the Scottish Islands Federation; Douglas Cowan, director of communities and place at Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Artemis Pana, national co-ordinator at Scottish Rural Action; Derek Logie, chief executive of Rural Housing Scotland; Jenny Milne and Alex Reid from the Scottish Rural and Islands Transport Community; Jane Craigie, director, and Kieran Sinclair from the Rural Youth Project; and Ailsa Raeburn, chair of Community Land Scotland.

We have a very big panel and only 90 minutes for a huge range of questions, so try to keep your responses as brief as possible. I will kick off with a question that it will be difficult to give a brief answer to: what is the main challenge facing Scotland’s various island communities? I will start with Camille.

Thank you; I appreciate your opening comments.

I have one more question before we move to questions from other members. We had quite some debate about how organisations ensure that they represent the islands and we were going to try and select representatives who had first-hand experience of living on islands. How do you ensure that your organisations represent the diverse nature of islands, particularly given the diverse nature of the survey results?

Thank you; that is most helpful. We move to further questions from members.

I move to Ariane Burgess, who has questions on population.

I will kick off the questions. About 22 per cent of islanders responded to the survey, and some of the slides show that there are huge differences between islands. Data in itself is not bad, but how it is interpreted can lead to the wrong conclusions being made and the wrong policies being put in place. If we want to know how the policies that we put in place are improving things, we need to have an idea of what our targets are. The survey is the first of its kind, so we have no baseline information by which to decide whether things are improving. How can we measure the success of future policies that are based on the survey?

Those are important points, and I am glad that we have got them on record.

We have only five minutes left, so we will move to final questions from Beatrice Wishart and Rachael Hamilton.