The Highlands does not need more words. It needs to get a move on. Drew Hendry writes from the Inverness Pipeline and Places event on Highland community benefit, the energy transition, and what genuine progress looks like on the ground.
There is a particular kind of determination that does not announce itself. It does not raise its voice or reach for drama. It simply refuses, quietly and completely, to accept that the gap between what is possible and what is actually happening is acceptable.
That is what I heard from Yvonne Crook this week.
Crook is Chair of Highland Community Interest Company, the organisation at the centre of the Highland community benefit and energy transition conversation, built to connect developers, communities and businesses around the scale of opportunity emerging across the Highlands. She was speaking at this week’s Pipeline and Places event in Inverness, a gathering of the people who are, in various ways, trying to make something lasting out of the energy transition coming to this region.
She spoke about legacy. About readiness. About the responsibility that comes with living in a place that is, as she put it, becoming one of the most strategically important regions in Scotland’s energy future.
But underneath the measured language and the collaborative framing, something sharper was present. Crook grew up in the Highlands. She lives here. She referenced an article in the Press and Journal the previous day about the levels of poverty in the area, and she was direct: a community interest company that does not have the wellbeing of its community at its heart is not doing its job. She talked about peatland restoration not happening nearly fast enough. About the need for huge investment into environmental projects. About the gap between a region that generates extraordinary natural and economic assets and the daily reality of the people who live in it.
What Highland community benefit from the energy transition actually looks like
She has seen what is possible. The community she lives in, in Strathdearn, has an asset base of around five million pounds built through renewable investment. She knows firsthand what community participation in development can produce. That knowledge is not abstract for her. It is the reason she will not settle for the version of the energy transition that looks good in a prospectus but does not change energy bills, does not bring families back, does not reduce child poverty, does not restore the land.
What struck me most was the way she framed the moment. The Highlands has been part of Scotland’s energy story for generations, she said. What feels different now is the scale of the opportunity and the chance to ensure that the energy transition benefits the Highlands itself, not just the national grid.
That framing matters because it shifts the argument from grievance to opportunity, and Crook knows the difference. It is not a complaint. It is not a demand. It is a statement of what is available to us if we choose to take it seriously, and a quiet but unmistakable signal that the time for pledges and charters and well-meaning words is over.
Yvonne Crook wants us to get a move on. She wants the conversations in rooms like this week’s to mean something. To connect to real jobs, real lives, real reductions in the cost of keeping a home warm in a region that generates electricity for Scotland and exports the surplus to power the rest of the UK.
She is not frustrated with the ambition. She is frustrated with the pace. And given everything she knows about what is at stake here, that frustration is not a weakness in her argument. It is the strongest part of it. The Highland community benefit from the energy transition is not a future promise. It is a present obligation.
Drew Hendry is a strategic advisor, podcast host and former MP based in Inverness.
