Blog: Scotland’s declining population – a crisis looming?

Blog by Eric Hildrew, Communications Lead, David Hume Institute

28 April 2022

Image credit: Photo by George Clerk from iStock 28.04.2022

As demographers, you might think Esther Roughsedge and Michael Anderson deal firmly with hard facts, however as they were keen to stress at our recent event on Scotland’s changing populations, predicting future population size is a practice laced with uncertainty. In the 1930s, it was estimated that Scotland’s population by the first quarter of the 21st century could be as low as 1.5m (fewer than now live in the central belt alone), though thankfully methods of projection have also improved since then.

So the headline of recently released figures from National Records Scotland – that Scotland’s population will peak at 5.48m in 2028 before declining, making Scotland the only UK nation to forecast a downturn – should be treated with caution. If accurate, a 1.5% decline would put Scotland in the company of Italy, Slovenia, and Finland (all predicting similar reductions) but significantly more stable than either Iceland (predicting 30% growth in population) or Latvia (23% decline).

Graph courtesy of National Records Scotland.

What is more certain is that whether births, deaths, and migration combine to decrease or grow Scotland’s overall population, the age profile of the country is going to change dramatically. In just 23 years’ time, Scotland is expected to have almost a quarter less children and almost a third more over 65s. The proportion of working age people is also expected to decline, particularly in the 30-and-under age-range.  The Scottish Government established a population taskforce in 2019 to investigate barriers to having children in light of the country’s steadily declining birth rate, but current estimates don’t predict a significant change in this trend is on the horizon.

To complicate this picture, we don’t know exactly how these changes will be distributed across our towns, cities and rural areas, but we do know that population decline will affect some areas more than others, with west, south west Scotland and the islands likely to see steeper a drop than central and eastern areas. On a more granular level, specific council areas are likely to see significant decline while others nearby grow, creating markedly different pressures and life experiences for residents. 

Graph courtesy of National Records Scotland.

These changes have huge implications for local, national, and UK governments. From the size of Scotland’s tax base and the UK Government block grant, to education, housing and social care provision, matching resources with demand will be an ongoing challenge. Much like climate change and inequality, population change is an underlying structural issue which outlives any  election cycle or immediate crisis. 

Scotland’s slow but steady population growth this century has been fuelled not by babies but by migration, specifically (until Brexit) from the EU though also from the rest of the UK. Other countries have tried incentivising couples to have more children, but there is little evidence to suggest this approach works. Uncertainty about future circumstances such as home ownership and job security is unlikely to be assuaged by modest cash incentives or tax breaks. 

Instead, an effective adaptation strategy will need to reconsider outdated attitudes to ageing and older people, ensuring that they stay economically and physically active for longer as well as being offered better options to combat loneliness, isolation, and declining health. The delivery of effective social care must be seen as an investment, not a cost. 

Scotland has been shaped by outward and, more recently, by inward migration. As the trajectory of our population growth begins to diverge from that of other UK nations, so must our ability to implement a devolved migration policy which fits the needs of our labour market and which encourages movement of labour to those parts of Scotland most affected by population decline in the years to come.

Population change is inevitable, but its consequences are not.