It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. I congratulate Torcuil Crichton on securing this debate. The issue is as important to me and my communities as it is to him and his.

The yardstick by which I have for many years now measured any proposal for anything to happen in the Northern Isles is to ask a simple question: will this make it more or less likely for people to want to live here? Without a healthy and growing population, we risk losing the critical mass and, within that critical mass, we do not have the mix. Every population—every community—needs to have a mix of the professional, the technical, the skilled and semi-skilled, and the unskilled. In a city, where there is mobility within the different districts, we can take that sort of thing for granted; when we live in an island community it is a different story.

In some ways, I am the living, breathing example of how depopulation happens. I was born and brought up on Islay; I left as a 17-year-old to go to university and I eventually qualified as a solicitor. Islay has a population of between 3,000 and 3,500 people. It would not have been possible for me to return to Islay to go into legal practice with a population of that sort. I have lived most of my adult life in Orkney, where we have a population of about 22,000, which is big enough to sustain that professional community. The legal and accountancy firms, the wide range of doctors and the bigger hospital are things that allow us to maintain that mix so that we can keep our community functioning properly.

The history of Orkney and Shetland is slightly different from that of the Western Isles. Our population in Shetland was down to about 16,000 in the mid-1970s, at which point the oil industry came. Since then, the population grew quite rapidly, and it rests at around 22,000 or 23,000. That tells us that the critical thing to grow a population is the availability of a good mix of well-paid and varied jobs in the local economy.

Fifty years later, as we enter a period of decline in oil and gas as part of our economy, the just transition matters to us more than anywhere else. We see opportunities for our community in the development of, for example, marine renewables, tidal power and tidal stream generation, but if we push oil and gas off a cliff before the technologies are mature enough to come on stream, people will not hang around in places such as Orkney or Shetland, waiting for something else to happen. They have a history and a legitimate expectation of working in good, well-paid jobs, and they will take their skills elsewhere.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the importance of housing, which is probably the single biggest constraint on economic growth in the Northern Isles. I had an interesting conversation recently with the chief executive of Hjaltland housing association in Shetland. He was talking about a proposal he had put to a significant contractor, which was going to employ a significant number of people for a good number of years. He said, essentially, “If they pay the rent for us in advance”—this was a big corporate so it was rich enough to do it—“we will build the houses. Then, at the end of the time, the housing stock will revert to us and be available for other use in our community.” That was a brilliant idea—absolutely fantastic, not least in its simplicity. I think that the corporate would be up for that, but it was not seen with favour by the Government in Edinburgh and has subsequently been discouraged. That sort of creativity—coming up with solutions to problems that are appropriate to the community—is critical if we are to halt the reverse in numbers.

The infrastructure available for people in island communities is also essential, including digital infrastructure such as modern broadband and the availability of mobile phone coverage, given the problems that could be faced by communities such as mine when the copper wire switch-off happens for landline technologies. Other infrastructure is essential as well, such as the physical infrastructure of a ferry service. The hon. Gentleman does not need me to tell him about the problems that come from the lack of a reliable ferry service, because his constituents have endured that. But even within Shetland, and increasingly in Orkney as well, the internal ferry services have been problematic, as fleets get older and need to be replaced. Again, we need to listen to the communities. Those in Unst, Yell, Whalsay and Bressay are all keen to say, “Actually, for the next generation, we don’t want to rely on ferries. We want the construction of fixed links and tunnels, which would offer us opportunities to build and grow businesses.”

I spoke to one woman in Yell recently who told me that she would love to go back and have her home in Yell—she was born and brought up in Unst originally—but she has two children with medical conditions, which means that she does not want to take the risk of having to rely on a ferry journey, possibly in the middle of the night, should her children need medical attention at the hospital. Therefore, somebody who would like to live in Yell or Unst is forced to live on the Shetland mainland.

The problems of population decline for Shetland as a whole—if we look at the headline figures—may not be as acute, but the smaller island communities in Shetland continue to see that decline. This is about giving every community the empowerment to come up with solutions that are appropriate to them in their communities. I know that others want to speak, but I could say a lot more about this, and I hope that we will return to it at some point in the future.