Rural Community Gateway

The Rural Advocacy study was commissioned by the Scottish Consumer Council. It brought together a wide range of organisations to look at how people living in rural communities could become more involved in influencing policy decisions that affect them.

The report found that rural communities need to be given a louder voice, and that Scottish Government policies need to be “rural proofed”.

The report makes a number of recommendations, including calls for funding and development of grass roots organisations to promote participation for people in rural communities. It also recommends that communities in lowland Scotland should have access similar levels of community development support and funding as is available in the Highlands and Islands.

The project’s steering group was chaired by Dame Barbara Kelly CBE. She said, "We believe communities need to be actively supported to build capacity at local level to help articulate rural voice to best effect. We are confident that supporting communities to ensure their views come through loud and clear will ensure that national policy can be enriched by the diverse views of all people living in Scotland. This report contains a series of recommendations on how this might be achieved."

Scottish Consumer Council Chair Douglas Sinclair said that the voices of young and old should be heard by policy makers. He said, "Almost one million people live in rural Scotland and 280,000 of them live in remote rural Scotland. Since the demise of the Rural Forum in 1999, there hasn’t been a unified body continually reminding government of its obligation to ensure every plan is ‘rural-proofed’ – tested against the needs of non-urban communities where the priorities are different from towns and cities. Our recommendations are about ensuring that the voices of young and old wherever they are in Scotland are heard consistently by policy makers."

There were 12 recommendations made in the report. You can take a look at them and read more in Rural Advocacy in Scotland. You will find the full report and the summary in our documents library.

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