Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office, Edinburgh - Briefing Document Eighteen

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Parliamentary Officer:Rev Graham Blount
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Briefing Document No 18 - Page 1 of 4

For All of Scotland?

"The objective of land reform is to remove the land-based barriers to the sustainable development of rural communities. To achieve this, we need increased diversity in the way land is owned and used. This will result in less concentration of ownership and management in a limited number of hands, particularly at local level."

With these words Jim Wallace launched the Scottish Executive's "historic" draft Land Reform Bill, along with a draft Scottish Outdoor Access Code; both emerge from previous consultations, and are themselves open for consultation with a deadline of 18 May. Some have seen this as a process of delay and dilution of earlier, more radical proposals under pressure of lobbying from landowners and of concerns about compensation claims under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Executive feel they have taken time to develop proposals because they see this as important, and want solutions that are "fair, workable and effective"; some of the delay also resulted from the commitment to include a specific crofting "right to buy". This paper will look at how the proposals fit with these Executive objectives, focussing mainly on issues regarding communities' right to buy and how the proposals on this have changed in response to previous consultation. The earlier SCPO Briefing (2.1) "Whose Land Is It Anyway?" gives some of the background to the current debate. The basic proposal is that a community body which has registered an interest in a piece of land should have the right to buy the land if and when it comes on to the market, at the "market price" fixed by an independent valuer. There is also introduced a new compulsory purchase power in the public interest. 1. Which Land?
The previous proposals were to apply to "the whole of rural Scotland", and this has now been defined as all Scottish land outwith settlements of 3,000 or more people. Suggestions either of restricting the effect to remote, fragile communities, or of extending it to all land, have been rejected, as have suggestions that some special types of landowner or of land should be exempt. Significantly, it is now proposed that salmon, mineral and sporting rights are included. The restriction to rural land will not only create anomalies around communities of slightly different sizes, but also reinforces the impression that this is a purely rural matter. While land is more obviously crucial to the sustainable development of rural communities, there are urban land issues too, especially where land for housing may be in short supply. Recent research recommended an annual "housing land audit", reflecting concerns about this, but it is felt that the planning system is adequate to deal with these problems. Only the land "as lotted" can be bought, ie community bodies cannot "cherry-pick" part of a piece of land, even if they have registered interest only in that part. This means that, if a whole estate is offered for sale, the community body must buy all or nothing (unless the landowner agrees), and cannot subsequently sell part of the land it has bought.