This is my first Annual Report as Registrar General – and it follows the format of my predecessor’s last two Reports by highlighting, for a wide audience, the trends and issues affecting Scotland’s population.
The subject is of great public interest, judging from the amount of comment in the media. Its importance is underlined by the First Minister’s statement to the Scottish Parliament on 25 February 2004:–
‘Population decline is really serious. . . . Our first target must be to avoid our population falling below 5 million. To do that we need an additional 8,000 people living in Scotland each year between now and 2009. We want to meet that target in 3 ways:-
Chapter 1 of this Report looks generally at Scotland’s demography. Chapter 2 focuses on migration, describing and interpreting the information which is available from some key sources – and explaining what we are doing to improve the data.
I have chosen migration as the ‘special subject’ of the Report partly because the topic has been highlighted by the First Minister and partly because migration is the most difficult element of the population equation. We have excellent statistics on births and deaths. But we have no direct measure of migration, particularly of Scots residents who leave the UK. The topic is complex, and in this Report we do not have space to do it full justice. So we have given a taster, showing some of what can be done with the available data. We plan an Occasional Paper later in the year, looking in more detail at the characteristics of migrants. Meantime, I hope that Chapter 2 will stimulate others to do work in this important field, using our Census data along with other sources.
To keep this Annual Report to a manageable size, I could not include every statistic about Scotland’s population. Results from the 2001 Census can be accessed via our Scottish Census Results OnLine website (www.scrol.gov.uk) and there is a wealth of other demographic statistics in the Online Data Library on our main website (www.nrscotland.gov.uk). Our Customer Services team are always happy to help: their contact details are given here.
I hope you enjoy reading the Report.
Duncan Macniven
Registrar General for Scotland
July 2004