Lowering the Expectations on Land Reform

In its 2021 manifesto, the SNP promised a new Land Reform Bill which would address issues of fairness, equality, and social justice in land ownership, use, and access.  The Bill would ensure that the public interest is considered in any particularly large-scale land ownership. A committee of the Scottish Parliament is currently considering Stage 2 amendments to the Sottish Government’s Land Reform (Scotland) Bill and the Bill as amended in committee will be debated by MSPs 3rd June 2025.

It is fair to say that the provisions of the Bill have not been greeted with acclamation by land reform campaigners.  Community Land Scotland has highlighted significant areas of weakness in the draft legislation and several important ways in which it would fail to meet the Government’s stated policy objectives.  It considers that the Bill as drafted does not seriously address the question of diversifying land ownership and offers limited influence on land use and management.

Analysis by Andy Wightman has identified examples of landowners who own many thousands of hectares of land in Scotland but whose landholdings in whole or in part will not be covered by the provisions in the Bill.  In addition, while Sections 3 and 4 require anyone selling landholdings of over 1,000 ha. to notify Ministers so that they have the option of requiring that the sale be lotted, analysis of recent sales of large landholdings has led Wightman to conclude that opportunities for Ministers to exercise their powers of lotting under the proposed provisions are likely to be as rare as hen’s teeth.  The Bill is unlikely to make any appreciable difference to Scotland’s highly concentrated pattern of land ownership.

A significant retreat from tackling issues of fairness, equality and social justice was signalled by the Scottish Government in February when Mairi Gougeon, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Land Reform, stated in her evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee that the ambition tackle concentrated ownership is now restricted to circumstances where its impact is felt locally and where there is evidence to that effect.  This seems to reflect advice from the Scottish Land Commission which has never been subject to critical scrutiny or challenge. The weakening of the stance of Scottish Ministers on concentrated ownership would appear to rely on the claim that ‘an expert did it and ran away’.

Another of the SNP’s declared objectives is to increase transparency in land ownership. Recently, using the Craiganour estate in Highland Perthshire as a case study, Alan Brown has shown that the regulations put in place under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 to ensure transparency of ownership can be circumvented by the simple expedient of failing to tell people who you are. No thought appears to have been given to how the regulations might be enforced.  Will this oversight be addressed during the Scottish Parliament’s consideration of the current Bill?

Fergus Ewing and the Gamekeepers

Given that the SNP, a political party with an avowed commitment to land reform, has after 17 years in government delivered disappointingly little and that its current Bill falls far short of what would be required to achieve its manifesto commitment and the aspirations set out for it as recently as 2022, it is rather surprising to find Michael Russell, the current Chair of the Scottish Land Commission, launching a further consultation on land reform, entitled Scotland Futures, with the proposition that “we need to step back a little”.

In the video clip launching the consultation, Russell asks:

“What is the future of Scotland’s land?  What do we want Scotland to look like in terms of its land and the use of its land?  Everybody in Scotland has a stake in the land of Scotland.  We want people to tell us what their stake should be.  How should people relate to land in Scotland?   Who should own land in Scotland?”

After the many decades of thought that have been given to the land reforms needed in Scotland, this set of questions verges on the disingenuous.  Since its establishment of the Scottish Land Commission in 2017 has sponsored high quality research on many aspects of land reform and its staff have wide-ranging expertise in land rights, ownership and use, and land markets. They already have a very good understanding of the issues that need to be tackled.

There are indications that the Commission’s new consultation has been cobbled to together in some haste.  On the Scotland Futures webpage we are encouraged to ‘attend an event’, but if we click on the link we are told that ‘there are currently no events’!  However, it may be unfair to conclude that‬‬ it has plunged into this without any preparation. In a blog published on its web-site on 21 May, the Commission’s Chief Executive Hamish Trench informs us that: “Before opening up the public conversation, we held a roundtable in Perth with people already working across different parts of the land system including community leaders, landowners, NGOs and public bodies.”

The Scottish Land Commission assures us that Scotland Futures is to be an ‘open’ consultation, but its framing suggests that it is anything but.  Absent are any references to fairness, equality, social justice and the public interest.  The consultation questions appear to have been contrived to limit the scope of responses.  The Commission steers respondents towards proposing changes which would affect them, their community or their work, and to a focus on issues which are important specifically to their area. That is manipulative and bad practice. The questions privilege the viewpoints of landowners and managers and there is a suggestion that people are to be schooled in how to engage with them.

What we see in the Scottish Land Commission’s Scotland Futures consultation is an attempt to shut down discourses on land and its use, which are uncongenial to powerful vested interests. At its launch, Michael Russell held out the prospect of building a consensus and shared vision, skating lightly over the fact that land in Scotland remains contested territory, socially, culturally, economically and environmentally.  He also hinted that one of the objectives of the exercise was to marginalise land reformers and suggested that, for some unexplained reason, the land reform agenda should be working towards an endpoint.  Perhaps it is time to question whether the Land Commission can any longer be taken seriously as an agent of progressive change?‬