Scotland's Population
Craig DalzellEvery year the National Records of Scotland produces an annual population estimate for the nation. While not quite as comprehensive as the once-per-decade census (at least, when the census isn’t marred by the problems of the 2022 Scottish census), it provides a good rolling picture of Scotland’s population both at a national level and at a more local level both on the scale of Local Authorities and per NHS Health Boards (the latter being important for the allocation of healthcare budgets and is gathered because one of the tools used to estimate population change is the number of people who present to the NHS with an illness or injury in a given year). Indeed, a report was published in March comparing the rolling mid-year estimate to the 2022 census and found that the estimate was within around 1% of the census value (which is a fair bit more precise than, say, the 3.4% margin of uncertainty in the revenue estimates in GERS).The headline figure you’ll have gathered from the news is that Scotland’s population is growing faster than it has since the end of the Second World War (itself a statistical glitch as many thousands of soldiers returning all at once tended to bump the numbers) and that the growth rate is being driven by immigration to Scotland.I fully expect that line to get more negative attention than it should given the rabidly anti-migrant stance that the UK is rapidly slipping down, driven by increasingly extreme social media cesspits – certainly a view backed up by the fight going on in the comments section of the BBC article reporting on the new figures – so it’s worth doing the thing I often do with reports like this and taking a dip beneath the headlines for a more detailed and nuanced view of Scotland’s changing demographics.
Scotland’s population is increasing
Scotland’s population rose by 43,100 people between 2022 and 2023 – approximately equivalent to the total population of the town of Greenock. This is a rise of 0.79% and is a substantial jump on the change in population the previous period of 2021-22 (when Scotland’s population rose by 13,900). It is also an increase on the previous average annual growth in the five years leading up to the pandemic when Scotland’s population grew at around 25,000 per year. This indicates that the shadow of the pandemic still looms somewhat over us and that the statistics are still rebounding after that upheaval and will likely drop down again in the coming years.It is worth noting that Scotland’s population growth is still relatively modest even at that “record” level. The average population growth across the entire world is only 0.9% and that rate has been dropping consistently for decades.Scotland’s population suffered a long stagnation in the post WWII period as desindustrialisation and other deliberate policies designed to concentrate Britain’s economy into London and the South East of England took its toll. Had Scotland’s population growth matched that of the UK average since the 1951 census, instead of there being 5.45 million people here today, we’d have more like 7 million people living here.
Scotland’s population is decreasing
Like many developed countries in our stage of the demographic transition, Scotland has an ageing population, people here are having fewer children and more people are dying than are being born. This is portrayed as a “bad thing” but personally I struggle to see why. Surely it is a success of civilisation that more of our children are living long enough to die old? We are in the process of eliminating one of the most enduring traumas of our species. One that followed us around since before we were human. That is that most of the children who were born died young and many of their mothers died birthing them. We have almost forgotten a kind of all pervasive collective grief (well, that and we in the Rich North ignore the places where it still exists) that must have surrounded everything around us. We are still within living memory of that transition though. My recently late grandmother was born into a time when a family could expect to have ten children, of which two or three might live. She had seven children, of which five lived. My mother had two children – both lived (though both me and my brother were so premature that had we been born a few years earlier or a few minutes further away from the hospital we wouldn’t have). And I’m unlikely to have children at all.If all migration – inwards and outwards – was banned, Scotland’s population would have decreased by 19,100 in 2022-23 – approximately equivalent to the complete depopulation of Peterhead. Scotland’s population without migration would have shrunk in every year since 2015. Indeed, even if the previous (and at least implicitly current) UK Government’s target of reducing net migration to the UK “to the tens of thousands” was met then that implies that if a “population share” of those migrants settled in Scotland, then that still wouldn’t be enough to maintain our current population levels. It is perfectly possible to devolve immigration powers to Scotland either partially or almost fully but this would not play into the UK Government’s own nationalism of control so will not happen this side of independence. Both the Conservatives and Labour Governments of recent years have ruled out even considering (never mind rationally refuting) the Scottish Government’s own model paper on devolving migration – a paper that is honestly one of the best papers on the topic to have been written in recent years.
Scotland’s population is ageing
A direct outcome of the development of there being fewer children and more of us living to die old is that our population as a whole is ageing. It is a topic of great fear and consternation in politics that the relative ratio between the number of people of working age versus the number of retired people is shifting from the former to the latter but we’ve written extensively about why this is a failure of politics not of demographics. The idea that pensions are “paid for” either by current working people or “paid forward” by workers saving for retirement and that this is only possible way to ensure the welfare of older people is, to be frank, simply wrong and leads to both ageist policies as well as confusing politics around migration (working migrants “good”, older retired migrants “bad”, retiring yourself to a beach in some other country “good”, growing economy "good", people helping the economy grow "bad"…). The idea of the “Old Age Dependency Ratio” was comprehensively dismantled in our book All of Our Futures. In short, we should shift from depending on tax from moderately paid working people (I say “shift”, but your income tax and national insurance were never the sole sources of retired social security) to taxes on productivity itself (if it’s going to be a highly automated future – tax the owners of the robots) and tax more static sinks of wealth so that we can all benefit from it
Scotland’s population is migrating
The focus of migration figures in the current climate is almost always on who is arriving in Scotland. The total number of people who migrated to Scotland in the latest reporting period was 131,200 of which 48,400 came from elsewhere in the UK and 82,800 came from international destinations. The international inwards migration figure is amongst the highest it has been in the devolution era but this is also a slight decrease on the previous year. The inwards migration from the rest of the UK is similarly down on the previous few years. What has caused the “record high” in population growth in Scotland this year isn’t a sudden surge in migration from elsewhere but a marked drop in migration out of Scotland. More people might be coming to live in Scotland but also, more people are choosing to stay here too.It’s also worth noting that migration happens internally too. Some 119,600 people in Scotland made a house move that took them across Local Authority borders (house moves within the same Local Authority aren’t recorded in this report – for someone like myself who has lived in four houses within the same village, that’s a significant data point too). I think it’s important to highlight that number because it again refutes the claim that Scotland is being inundated with people when, in fact, we’re just part of a broader tapestry of the story of doing what humans have always done. Many of us have deep roots in a place we call home but some of us find a new place to put their roots. Even as a supporter of Scottish independence, I’ve never been one for subscribing to the concepts of nationalism – certainly not its darker and more prescriptive version of telling people WHO should put their roots WHERE – and I really see the movement of someone across one nearly-arbitrary line on a map (between two Local Authorities) as little different from movement across another nearly-arbitrary line on a map (between countries) and certainly if someone does make that journey then they should be afforded the exact same rights, responsibilities and respect as the people they meet when they arrive there.This all said, the patterns of internal migration in Scotland remain towards our own centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh and this is as big a problem for Scotland as migration towards London is for the UK. Many of Scotland’s rural regions – such as Borders, Argyll and Bute, and Na h-Eileanan Siar – have seen their populations decline. It is immensely frustrating to hear that these are also regions that are suffering immense pressure on housing and land ownership due to multiple ownerships and monopoly ownerships of both. How can it possibly be that some areas of Scotland can be simultaneously emptying of people and impossible to move to? There is a direct failure of politics here – rooted in the over centralisation of Scotland’s democracy. The Scottish Government must devolve more power, more locally – particularly on land and property taxation but also on more local levels of government to match European municipalities, housing policy and support for infrastructure investment that isn’t just FDI and PFI – to enable communities to rebuild themselves and to attract the people who’ll help them do it.
Scotland’s population needs change
I’m sure the debates around immigration will continue but it is clear that Scotland is not being well served either by much of what passes for discourse online and nor by the Governments who benefit from using the movement of people as a playing piece in their own power games. Both the UK and Scottish Governments could do a lot more to improve on their own policies in this regard. For the former, dropping the constant pandering to the worst of the right-wing who will never be sated by any compromise towards them and started addressing migration policies by admitting that the UK has for too long deliberately encouraged an undercurrent of discrimination and outright racism within migration policies. For Scotland, I’m glad to see a more positive attitude towards people choosing to live here but there’s only so far that repeating “you are welcome and valued” can take – especially when actual policies haven’t exactly backed up the second part as well as they could. With the Scottish budget fast approaching, if we don’t see commitments to local democracy at the very least then we’re just going to cycle the same problems without solving them. Scotland might not have all of the powers we need and might be struggling to gain those powers but that should not mean neglecting the powers we do have to make a positive difference for the people who choose live in Scotland. All of Us.