At Scottish Land & Estates, we want to see a prosperous and sustainable future for rural Scotland, delivering benefits for all and our members want to play an even bigger role in being part of the solution to the challenges rural Scotland face.
This paper outlines the policy priorities of rural businesses, and the people who live and work in rural Scotland. Whilst the pages that follow take an in depth look at the challenges that our rural communities are facing and how we might begin to tackle them, the message that is coming from our rural communities remains simple and clear: Policy must be designed with rural communities in mind.
There is so much that our governments and politicians can do to help drive rural Scotland forward. This paper sets out a handful of ways that this can be achieved, but the single message that lies beneath all of our work on these topics is that rural issues matter for people, jobs and nature. For a prosperous and sustainable future for the whole of Scotland, we need to get it right on rural issues.