Southern Scotland’s Rights Fail as Ministers Rewire the State

Scotland’s human rights watchdog has found clear failures on food, health and housing across eight southern council areas that are home to 1.1 million people. The Scottish Human Rights Commission said services often exist on paper and cannot be reached in practice. Two days after ministers sold a £31.8 billion project list in Dumfries, the same sweep of the country was told that in several areas rights are getting worse.

The Commission Says Rights Are Getting Worse

The commission’s spotlight on economic and cultural rights covered a belt from the English border to the outskirts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Teams visited in February and March, including Stranraer, Ayr, Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Hamilton, Irvine, Arran, Galashiels, Kelso, Dalkeith, Haddington, Melrose, Ardrossan and Tranent.

Public authorities, it said, are not fully delivering the economic, social and cultural rights of people who live there. Health and social care are being lost in places. Some people are living in hidden homelessness. Chair Professor Angela O’Hagan called the paper a call to action for everyone who runs services, and said people feel distant from decision making.

“Overall, the south of Scotland is a region where many communities and duty bearers are working hard to protect dignity and their human rights, often in difficult circumstances,” the report said. “But we have also found clear human rights failures. In many areas, rights are not improving. In several areas, they are getting worse.”

THE SURVEY IN BRIEF

• Population covered: Some 1.1 million people in eight local authority areas.
• Food worry: 55% of survey respondents said they were worried about affording food.
• Food banks: 46% rely on a food bank or know someone who does.
• Biggest practical block: Accessibility, even where a service is listed as available.

Those shares describe the people who answered the commission’s survey, not the whole 1.1 million. The watchdog still treated them as evidence that cost and reach are failing together, and it told the Scottish Government, councils and NHS boards to act with urgency, including by strengthening human rights law.

THREE BARRIERS NAMED IN THE REPORT

O’Hagan said the work was about taking that evidence straight to the Scottish Parliament, using the commission’s power to lay reports under the Scottish Commission for Human Rights Act 2006.

A Stroke Patient Stopped at a Board Line

The case studies are about borders that a patient cannot cross. Donald, a former landscape gardener, had a stroke and later caught Lyme disease after a tick bite. A locum neurologist sent him to a specialist clinic in another south of Scotland health board. The clinic refused him because he did not live in the right area.

We don’t have a national health service, we’ve got a regional health service. I’m just left in limbo, unable to work and unable to get better, even though I know there’s a solution out there.

Donald, former landscape gardener, to the Scottish Human Rights Commission

Another woman told the commission that finding care for her husband, a former soldier, was impossible. “He was trapped in the health care system here, and he became suicidal,” she said. “He stood on the front line to protect everybody else’s rights, and nobody would help him.”

A charity service manager put the same pattern in plainer geography. Villages dotted around do not get the support they should, the manager said, and the gap between town and rural areas needs to be closed. “It shouldn’t matter where you are.”

Wheelchair user Janice Johnstone has described the same last-mile failure in Dumfries and Galloway, where only three wheelchair-accessible taxis were available. Expectant mothers in Wigtownshire still face a 70-mile trip to maternity services in Dumfries. In 2025 Dumfries and Galloway Council had to step in after Stagecoach effectively quit the region. Newcastleton, on the Borders, is still waiting on a feasibility study into a railway stop that residents have called life-changing.

Why Food and Housing Rights Fail on the Ground

Survey respondents in the south of Scotland work said food prices were too high, 55% worried about paying for food, and 46% used a food bank or knew someone who did, while islanders on Arran described a single supermarket whose stock waits on unreliable ferries. Housing sits in the same squeeze: hidden homelessness on one side, heating and rent on the other.

WHAT PEOPLE TOLD THE COMMISSION ABOUT FOOD

• The weekly shop: One respondent said food is generally far too expensive, and that families spend a large share of earnings on it.
• Charity as the safety net: Another said there are some good voluntary services, but people should not have to rely on volunteers for basics like food.
• Arran’s ferry link: A respondent said ferries are chronically unreliable, there is only one supermarket, and stock depends on the boat from the mainland.
• Winter kit: Organisations were described as doing an awful lot around winter clothing depots and school clothing depots.

That is the fragility the report named. Rights are being patched by vans, depots and goodwill. Food Train, a charity founded to help older people eat at home, still runs weekly shopping delivery for over-65s in Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders, with volunteers collecting lists, packing supermarket orders and carrying bags inside.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said ministers’ priority is a fairer, more prosperous Scotland, and that in 2026 to 2027 the government is committing around £3.5 billion to policies that tackle poverty and the cost of living. That includes keeping the Scottish Welfare Fund at £41 million and funding free bus travel for over 2.4 million people, the pass scheme that covers under-22s, over-60s and disabled passengers. The government is also consulting on ways to make essential food items more affordable for households on lower incomes, and said it will consider the commission’s recommendations carefully.

After the Highlands, the Same Gaps Again

This is the second regional spotlight. The first, in the Highlands and Islands, was published in November 2024 after a six-week trip to more than 20 towns across six local authorities, with 146 people interviewed. That report said not a single human right examined met all the tests of adequacy under international law, with housing, heat, food and the miles to a clinic at the centre of the evidence.

FROM ONE RURAL SPOTLIGHT TO THE NEXT

1. November 2024: The commission publishes its Highlands and Islands economic, social and cultural rights report.
2. January 2025: The Scottish Parliament holds a debate on that report.
3. May 2025: The Scottish Government writes back, welcoming the work and setting out plans against the recommendations.
4. February and March 2026: Teams take the same model south, with public sessions in Dumfries on 25 February and Galashiels on 17 March.
5. 1 September 2026: The Programme for Government promises a Human Rights Bill in year two of the session, and O’Hagan says any public service rewrite should be reform focused on realising human rights.
6. 21 September 2026: Ministers publish an opening paper on replacing 32 councils with regional and community authorities.
7. 1 October 2026: BMA Scotland’s council votes to oppose cutting 14 health boards to two.
8. 5 October 2026: Jenny Gilruth chairs the Convention of the South of Scotland in Dumfries and discusses 202 projects with £31.8 billion of potential investment.
9. 7 October 2026: The south of Scotland rights report lands, with the finding that in several areas rights are getting worse.

The Highlands paper produced a debate and a government letter. The south paper arrives while those same ministers are already rewriting the bodies that run buses, clinics and housing, which is why the next two fights sit on top of the testimony rather than after it.

Two Health Boards and the Travel Problem

On 1 September First Minister John Swinney confirmed plans to cut Scotland’s 14 territorial health boards to two strategic boards, one west and one east, with separate thinking still to come for Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles. He called it the most significant structural reform of the NHS in the devolution era, and ministers say it would strip out duplication and the geographic barriers between 14 boards.

That last claim is the one Donald’s case puts under a light. A clinic that rejects a patient for living in the wrong board is exactly the kind of border a two-board map might erase. Doctors who would have to run the new map do not buy the travel argument.

Services being organised on a much larger scale may mean patients have to travel further for the care they need. This could negatively impact patients in rural and remote areas, older people, those on lower incomes and those without access to private transport or wider support.

Nóra Murray-Cavanagh, chair of BMA Scottish council

Murray-Cavanagh, in the BMA’s travel further for the care warning, also said two boards covering vast swathes of the country would weaken local accountability. BMA Scotland’s council voted on 1 October to oppose the plan and asked ministers to withdraw it. Swinney has said there are different opinions and that the government will talk to unions and NHS boards. Final decisions, ministers say, come only after consultation.

For a stroke patient already turned away at a board line, fewer lines could be the point. For a mother in Wigtownshire already driving 70 miles, a bigger west-of-Scotland board does not by itself move a ward closer to Stranraer. The commission’s test is whether the service can be reached, not whether the logo on the letterhead has changed.

Will Reform Push Power Out of Edinburgh?

Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth said public service reform was a chance to push power out of Edinburgh, while the government’s September paper proposes replacing 32 councils with 6 to 10 regional authorities and 120 to 160 community bodies, and she has said ministers are not handing over their own powers. Geography, she told people in Dumfries, is a matter of fact. Reform, she said, is how you give communities more say anyway.

“We’ve got a new prime minister coming into power with a devolution agenda, so we expect further powers to flow back to Scotland and with that commensurate funding,” she said. “But we then as a parliament, as a government, have an opportunity to work on how we push that power out of Edinburgh and down into our communities.”

The 21 September paper is more specific than that speech. Regional authorities would take strategic work: economic development, housing shared with More Homes Scotland, planning beside a national hub, employability, and chunks of transport that now sit with Regional Transport Partnerships and possibly Transport Scotland. They would still run waste, cleansing, early learning and education. Community authorities, drawn around places such as Kilmarnock, would handle householder planning, licensing, town-centre regeneration, parks and local leisure. Councillors would keep current wards and sit on both tiers. Island areas would get bespoke designs.

Gilruth has been blunt on a different question. Asked whether ministers would devolve their own powers to the new councils, she said they were promising to reform local government, not to pass Holyrood’s powers down. The paper does talk about a statutory duty on regional authorities to devolve functions to the community tier. That is power moving between new local bodies, not out of the Scottish Government.

On buses she granted the gap the report describes. Transport is challenging, she said, and the government already funds free travel for under-22s, over-60s and disabled people. “There are other issues in this part of the world around about some of these bus routes simply not existing anymore.” Local government already has powers to franchise services, she added, and those options need to be looked at. A free pass on a route that has been withdrawn is the accessibility problem in one sentence.

The £31.8bn Pipeline Stops at Two Councils

On 5 October, two days before the rights report, Gilruth chaired the Convention of the South of Scotland at the Crichton campus in Dumfries. South of Scotland Enterprise, for the South of Scotland Regional Economic Partnership, had identified 202 projects with the potential to unlock £31.8 billion. The figure is possible investment if the schemes proceed, not money in the bank. The projects span clean energy, technology, tourism and related sectors, and the partnership said it would publish the full study later in October.

That pipeline is a smaller map. The enterprise agency and the convention cover Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders. The commission’s south runs across eight council areas and reaches Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire, Midlothian and East Lothian. A person in Tranent or Hamilton is inside the rights study and outside the £31.8 billion slide.

Russel Griggs, who chairs South of Scotland Enterprise, said the opportunity gets bigger with the right investment and with the housing, transport and skills to match. Gilruth said she knew the connectivity problems and how they hit education, health and housing. The commission’s evidence is that those three are already the rights that are stalling.

O’Hagan’s September warning sits over both documents. A Human Rights Bill in year two of the session would put more of these duties into Scots law. The south report asks for that work, and for a public service rewrite that people can actually reach. The paper now on the table builds bigger regions and two health boards, while the testimony from Donald, from Arran, and from villages that sit off the remaining bus map is about a clinic, a ferry and a taxi that never come.