Islands - views from the feedback session

We held the fourth of our regional engagement events with community representatives from Scottish Islands. These are some of the key points raised by attendees. Do you have any views on the points shared?

Technologies in Scope, Fund Levels

• The proposed updated fund levels are too low, especially for wind. They should also be linked to % of revenue or profit rather than generating capacity of a development.
• The fund levels should be index linked themselves, rather than just each fund, otherwise any new funds starting in the future are automatically disadvantaged compared to a fund starting today.
• The guidance needs to specify when a development should start paying community benefit and cover repowering.
• The voluntary nature of community benefit arrangements means that some developers continue to offer contributions well below the benchmark.
• Clearer expectations for developers and stronger mechanisms for tracking what’s delivered are needed to improve transparency.

Running community benefit funds

• Any definitions of communities need to be carefully thought out to apply to island context.
• Governance arrangements can become very complex in island settings, particularly where multiple developments overlap across several community bodies, placing significant pressure on volunteers. Where there are multiple community groups involved, guidance on how communities engage with each other would be appreciated.
• Stronger expectations around coordination between developers are needed to avoid duplication, and improve transparency and engagement with communities.
• Multi‑community or island‑wide governance models can work well to support fair distribution and reduce local pressures but rely heavily on developer cooperation.
• The guidance for governance should be mindful of the burden onvolunteers, and should make clear that communities don’t need to do separate reporting to developers as well as OSCR etc.
• It's important that the guidance support longer term investment thinking by communities for strategic planning (including repowering opportunities), and ways to do that.

Support for communities

• There’s a substantial gap in development officer capacity, with the reduction of previous regional support structures leaving volunteers to manage complex projects without sufficient resource.
• Practical, step‑by‑step tools and opportunities for peer learning, such as guides, templates and shared experience from other communities, are important.
• Community investment and strategic planning needs support from specific SG funding like the Scottish Rural and Islands Housing Fund.
• There needs to be access to independent legal advice for communities to level the playing field in negotiations with developers, this should be paid for by the developer separate to the community benefit fund.
• Any advice and support service funded by government needs to be consistently available throughout the year, and not time bound.
• Expert help to guide community groups through every step of the way would be welcome since many community groups are learning from scratch.

Views from Scottish islands are an important part of feedback, and we want other people in island communities to be able to see and feed back on issues raised at the session.