THE Highlands and Islands in the springtime is a glorious place. As the snows linger on the high tops, the birch trees are turning into bright green blankets over the hills and the weather is dramatically shifting between hail and bright sunshine.

As we come out of the Covid pandemic, everyone is re-assessing what normal means. Tourism businesses and destinations cannot operate as normal with social distancing, and their incomes will remain precarious for some time to come.

But this tourism season is an ideal opportunity to reconsider how tourism is developed across the Highlands and Islands. For too long, it has been regarded as an easy economic opportunity. So long as the magnificent scenery, history and culture are here, they will come and they will spend money. Far too little effort has been made to develop sustainable tourism and to manage the inevitable adverse impacts on the social fabric of small communities or on the environment.

Promotional concepts such as the North Coast 500 have been developed by external interests oblivious to the concerns of local people as to whether their fragile infrastructure can cope. As usual, the public purse is left to pick up the pieces, undo the damage and try and deal with the consequences.

Housing is another issue that remains unresolved to this day. Too many young people and too many local people cannot find or afford a home in the community they live in, want to stay in and wish to work in. As families are priced out of the market by external buyers of short-term lets and holiday homes, school rolls have fallen, depopulation is endemic across much of the north and public services are hollowed out.

Early on in this election campaign, a group of young people from Skye, Iomairt an Eilein, made a heartfelt plea to candidates in the Scottish election. “Skye is in danger,” they said. “Rising house prices and a lack of sustainable work make it almost impossible for young people to stay in the communities they call home. Whether our families have lived here for generations or we have been lucky enough to have become new Sgitheanachs, most of us are priced out of the villages we grew up in. Profiteering investors are ransacking our island.”

In their 1000-word letter, they make an urgent plea to prospective politicians to address jobs, housing and democracy. It is a shocking indictment of the past 20 years of devolution that this impassioned plea has to be made today. In 1994 I wrote a report for Shelter Scotland highlighting many of the same problems.

At root this is a question of property rights. Like landownership more broadly, houses are land and property. There are no regulations on who can buy them and ineffective controls on how they can then be used. Just as Scottish land is sold to the highest bidder, so too are homes in the communities that Iomairt an Eilein is seeking to protect.

Housing is a human right and everyone is entitled to a warm, affordable and secure home. That an advanced economy like Scotland is still, after two decades of home rule, unable to deliver on such a basic right is a scandal and an indictment of governments of all political persuasions. As Iomairt an Eilein acknowledge in their open letter, this is a complex problem facing not only Skye but the wider Highlands and Islands region. They also argue that history will not reflect well on the governments who did not address these problems ­seriously and let communities and culture die.

So what is to be done? First of all we need to recognise the scale of the problem and that it manifests itself differently in different parts of the country.

Fundamentally, the housing market needs to be regulated. If, as I hope most people would agree, the use of a property to provide someone with a permanent home is more important than providing someone with a second home, then the law needs to reflect that.

THE easiest way of doing this is to make any change of use from a main residence to a second home a change of use in planning law and one that requires planning consent from the planning authority. Local Councils can then adopt policies on how they will deal with such applications. In highly pressured housing markets, they may adopt a universal policy of no consent, whereas in other areas, consent may be given in certain circumstances.

In theory, such a change of use requirement is already in place for short-term lets but this is frequently ignored and even new regulations to allow councils to create short-term let control areas can only be implemented with the approval of the Scottish Government – so much for local ­decision-making and local control! The SNP proposes residential conditions on new property following the example of St Ives in Cornwall but this misses the point because it is the conversion of existing homes that is the main problem.

Other measures can include ­capital gains tax on sales of property for second homes, rights of pre-emption at local market rates and making it easier for councils and housing associations to buy land for new housing at its existing (typically agricultural) use value rather than the inflated value that arises with planning consent.

To the tourist and visitor, all of this is too often hidden from view. The lovely cottage, apartment or croft house does indeed provide for an affordable and pleasant stay. But too often this comes at the cost of fewer opportunities for local people as they are priced out of the market. When key workers such as health, care and hospitality workers can’t afford a home, the impact extends further to poorer public services for residents and visitors alike.

So when you visit, as I hope you will, take an interest in what is happening locally. Ask your host ­whether the property you are renting is part of a local self-catering business or owned by an absentee owner, contributing to a rising tide of homelessness and emigration and seeking to profit from it. Whilst only local and national governments can fix this problem for good, you can be the responsible consumer who tries not to be part of the problem.