Can Scotland achieve a more balanced population distribution? Relocation preferences between service accessibility and place attractiveness

Rural depopulation is a long-term phenomenon that threatens the viability of rural communities while increasing pressure on urban centres. Scotland is noteworthy for its high population concentration, counterbalanced by sparsely populated rural, remote, and island areas. Promoting a more evenly distributed population has been thus identified as a key objective of the Scottish Government’s 2021 National Population Strategy (NPS). Using discrete choice experiments, we investigated Scottish residents’ willingness to relocate (or not) to places characterised by different attributes. A first survey, conducted in 2023, involved a sample of 250 rural dwellers; a second one, in 2025, included 1,007 respondents representative of the national population by age and gender. Half of the respondents in the latter survey, randomly selected, were shown excerpts from the NPS explaining its objective and rationale. The quality of the natural environment and of digital connectivity had strong positive impacts on preferences. Distances from family, workplaces, schools, hospitals, and grocery shops yielded negative effects, but these were not statistically significant among the rural sample, suggesting habituation to longer distances. Ceteris paribus, a place’s population size and remoteness mattered only for the rural sample. Although an overwhelming majority of respondents stated that they agreed with the NPS objective, informing them about it had no significant impact on preferences. Therefore, an intention–behaviour gap persists, and substantial improvements in service accessibility are needed to enable its realisation.