26. Tourism Revival 🟢

In 2024, visitors spent £11.4 billion in Scotland. Sustainable tourism employs 239,000 people. Highland STEAM counted 9.40 million visitors and £2.13 billion of direct spend. The Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund has granted £24.5 million since 2018. The toilets, car parks and paths that fail on a busy Saturday sit in Scottish competence. The constraint is scale, maintenance and remote delivery, not Westminster.

Current reality

Legal and institutional position

Tourism policy, most local roads, planning, economic-development grants and the relevant capital lines are devolved. VisitScotland administers the Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund for the Scottish Government. Local authorities and the two National Park Authorities bid, usually against a Strategic Tourism Infrastructure Development plan.

RTIF is capital only: parking, toilets (including Changing Places), motorhome waste and water, multi-use paths, low-carbon links and signage. It does not pay rangers, marketing or upkeep.

Aviation regulation, some major ports and certain trunk-road functions sit outside that toolkit. The visitor facilities that dominate the pressure points do not.

Scotland Outlook 2030 is the national strategy. The March 2026 tracker recorded progress on spend and some seasonality indicators, and continued weakness on regional balance and community perceptions of management.

The latest official numbers

National (VisitScotland / Growth Sector Statistics).
2024: 92.0 million visits (15.2 million overnight, 76.8 million day); £11.445 billion spend. International overnight: 4.37 million visits, £3.98 billion. 2025 GB overnight: 10.4 million trips, £3.82 billion. Employment 2024: 239,000 (9.1 per cent of jobs). Registered enterprises March 2025: 16,325.

Highland.
VisitScotland overnight 2024: 1.79 million visits, £756 million. STEAM 2024: 9.40 million visitors, £2.129 billion direct spend, £2.616 billion economic impact, 33,284 total FTEs. Tourism is 16.2 per cent of Highland employment (19,000 jobs on the official local-authority series).

Islands.
Outer Hebrides 2024: 333,500 visitors, including 57,000 cruise passengers at Stornoway; £81.5 million direct spend (about 16 per cent of the local economy; higher on Harris). Orkney 2024 visitor survey: 173,037 visitors, £78 million. Shetland: 89,000 visitors, £50.3 million.

RTIF.
Seven rounds: £24.5 million to 86 projects, more than £20.6 million leveraged. 2026–27 Budget: an additional £4 million for VisitScotland to manage the fund. The 2026–27 application window is open until 2 September 2026. 2026–27 capital investment across the Budget is £7.6 billion.

How it is experienced in daily life

A single-track road that works in March fails in August. Car parks fill before noon. Informal camping and chemical-waste dumping continue where disposal points are scarce. Cruise days concentrate thousands of people on streets and toilets sized for residents. Staff cannot live near the work if short-term lets already take housing. Residents live with the peak; visitors remember the queue.

How it got here

Post-2010 growth, social media and the North Coast 500 concentrated demand on a few corridors. RTIF was created in 2018 as a pinch-point fund. From late 2021, bids were steered through strategic pipelines rather than one-off reactions. Visitor volume outran the annual grant.

What has already been tried, and what that showed

Staffa jetty and stairs, Glencoe Greenway, Achmelvich and Stac Pollaidh parking, Storr path works, Portree hardstanding, Eigg pier toilets and Silver Sands upgrades show that capital at a named site reduces a named problem. Design grants help weaker bidders. The fund still cannot pay to empty the tank or staff the toilet. Eight years of grants remain a small fraction of one year’s Highland direct spend.

What needs to happen

The improvement in measurable terms

Fewer days on which key sites have no usable toilet or overflow parking. Fewer ranger-recorded informal camps and waste incidents on the same corridors. More motorhome services in the right places. Paths and jetties that keep people off the habitat. Maintenance funded for the assets already built. Those are observable, not slogans.

Sequence

Protect and complete the 2026–27 RTIF round. Publish a multi-year pipeline from existing Strategic Tourism Infrastructure Development plans. Pair every new capital award with a named operator and a revenue source. Sequence construction outside the peak. Do not invent a parallel brand for the same car park.

Workforce, capital and standards

Island and west-coast construction costs more and takes longer. Materials, plant and trades compete with housing and ferries. Weather windows are short. Changing Places and accessibility standards are already known; applying them at volume is the work.

What would count as success in twelve months

2026–27 awards announced and on site. A published pipeline with costs, not a new strategy. A maintenance arrangement attached to new toilets and waste points. No increase in unresolved informal-camping complaints on the same Highland corridors.

A £200 million multi-year envelope, as discussed in the brief for this item, would be several times historic RTIF. It is a scale choice inside the capital budget, not a new legal power.

What can be done under current powers?

Who holds the lever

Scottish Ministers (Budget and direction), VisitScotland (administration), local authorities and National Parks (bids and most delivery), HIE and community trusts (co-funding and some sites).

The statute, Budget or direction

Tourism and planning competence; annual Budget (including the extra £4 million); RTIF rules; Islands Programme and related rural capital; Scotland Outlook 2030.

What is already possible and unused

A longer RTIF settlement instead of annual rounds. Consolidate overlapping rural and island capital so a jetty isn't three applications. User charges or community-trust models for upkeep—dispersal investment in places that have capacity rather than only in the photograph sites.

What would still be true if management improved tomorrow

Ferries, staff housing and last-mile broadband would still constrain the season. A well-run toilet does not create a house. Trunk-road and large-port limits would still sit partly elsewhere.

Where the limits are

Law and reserved powers

Aviation and some harbour and trunk-road functions. Not the car park at the Fairy Pools.

Money

£24.5 million over eight years against £11.4 billion of national spend and a £7.6 billion capital programme. A larger tourism-infrastructure line displaces housing, vessels or health capital, or requires a different Budget choice.

Workforce and capital

Remote contractor markets, higher unit costs, limited local authority project teams.

Time, geography, UK-wide systems

Seasonal closures, weather, inter-island logistics. Cruise schedules are commercial.

Political difficulty, kept separate from legal impossibility

Residents who want fewer visitors will not thank a bigger car park. Businesses who want more visitors will not thank a cap. Those are distributional fights, not competence gaps.

What is not yet known

The 2026–27 RTIF award list. A single official Skye visitor total on a consistent definition. The maintenance deficit on assets already built. Whether the visitor levy, where adopted, will be hypothecated to the same sites.

Honest summary

Achievable now. Expanding and consolidating capital for rural and island visitor infrastructure through RTIF and related devolved funds.

Only partly achievable. A destination that is both high-volume and frictionless, without housing and ferry capacity.—revenue for every new toilet.

Would require reserved change. Redesigning aviation rules or the largest reserved harbour functions. Not the core of this item.

Colour mark: green. The facilities that fail on a peak day are within Scottish Power. Green is not a claim that £24.5 million was enough, or that £200 million is easy to find.

What this item does not settle. It does not set a visitor cap. It does not treat tourism as a substitute for year-round work. It does not fund rangers from a capital line.

The test is whether the next busy Saturday at a named site has a working toilet, a legal place to park, and a path that is not being destroyed — and whether someone is paid to keep it that way.

Connection

Item 16 is rural housing, broadband and transport without which staff and visitors cannot stay. Item 20 is affordable homes and short-term-let pressure. Item 22 is residual connectivity. Item 14 is path and habitat damage. Ferries sit with rural transport, not with RTIF.

People’s Future Scotland