Scotland's community land buy-outs have ground to a halt – and SNP's Land Reform Bill won't do a thing

This “historically iniquitous” state of affairs was thwarting the potential of rural communities, but change was at hand. “We do not think it is right that ownership and control of so much of Scotland’s land is still in the hands of relatively few people.”

While none of this was exactly new, it at least sounded encouraging as a starting-point for legislation. Alas, any such hopes have proved ill-founded.

‘No meaningful difference’

As the Bill completed its course through Holyrood this week, one leading property lawyer, Don Macleod of Turcan Connell, branded it “junk legislation” which will create confusion for no good purpose. The land reform campaigner, Andy Wightman, confirmed it “will make no meaningful difference to the ownership and distribution of land ownership in Scotland”.

The two even joined forces to make the point that if the “complex and bureaucratic procedures” which the Bill creates “would deliver meaningful change”, then from Mr Wightman’s perspective, there might be a case for them. Instead, given “the vanishingly small likelihood of any change at all”, they are a waste of everyone’s time and money.

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Behind the rhetoric about diversifying ownership, it is actually becoming even more concentrated, driven by the Scottish Government’s strange desire to make us the “world leader in attracting investment in natural capital”. Roughly translated, this has meant begging the City of London to speculate in Scottish land, in order to secure carbon credits to offset other people’s continuing pollution.

If you think that is an unlikely route to beneficial Scottish land reform, then you are entirely correct. It is hard to get one’s head around why a government which claims to legislate to correct “one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world” should, simultaneously, pursue an objective which incentivises even greater concentration.

READ MORE: Why SNP's land reform Bill is shaping up to be a disaster

The reality of land reform

The main beneficiary is now Scotland’s second biggest landowner, Gresham House, a subsidiary of Searchlight Capital, a private equity outfit headquartered in Fifth Avenue, New York. That is the reality of land reform as it is evolving in Scotland. Far from challenging historic iniquity, it further embeds it without rural communities or wider Scottish society having the slightest say or benefit.

What does the Bill offer in response? In future, there will be a public right to know if an entity owning more than 1,000 hectares of land is selling all or part of it. Setting the threshold high means that only a small number of significant land transfers will be notified – around 140 a year, according to the Scottish Government.

It is welcome that big land sales will be subject to this degree of transparency rather than being conducted entirely in privacy. In the part of Lewis I live in, for example, an acquisitive private landowner has put together three former estates so that his sporting empire now extends to 65,000 acres. Nobody knew anything about these sales before the deals were done.

But what could be achieved in future, even with such knowledge? The indefatigable Wightman has analysed estate sales in recent years and found that almost none of them would have been touched by the terms of the new legislation. For example, if the “sale” involves a transfer of share capital within the company that already owns it, that puts it outside the terms of the Bill. I’m sure the lawyers are working on other devices to avoid any inconvenience.

A noble concept

Community buy-outs are touted as the end destination of land sales under the Bill but there is very little to support this. At present, less than three per cent of Scottish land is under community ownership and any attempted buy-out would still, as at present, face the eye-watering challenge of raising the necessary capital to compete in the inflated land market.

Community land ownership is a noble concept but it is almost axiomatic that most of the big landholdings in Scotland are sparsely populated – that’s how they became private empires in the first place! Without any mechanism to intervene in the market, acquisition will always be a formidable task which is part of the reason why community buy-outs have ground to a halt.

The key to most community buy-outs which exist is that they have been on land under crofting tenure which, historically, greatly constrained the rights of the landlord and hence reduced value of the land. It is for this reason that three-quarters of all community-owned land in Scotland is in the Western Isles while the vast majority of rural Scotland is untouched by the concept. The idea that mere knowledge of sales will change that is a fantasy.

A mouse of a Bill

This is reflected in the fate of the Scottish Land Fund which I had a hand in initiating 20-odd years ago when there were community buy-outs to support. It has been quietly transformed into a “community assets” fund which has very little to do with its original purpose.

I am greatly in favour of helping communities to buy pubs and village halls or, as the fund did earlier this year, save a community cinema in Helensburgh – just so long as there is no pretence of these good works having anything to do with land reform.

Land reform in Scotland will never be addressed by bureaucratic tinkering which is all this Bill amounts to. What Holyrood delivered this week is a mouse of a Bill surrounded by mountains of empty rhetoric. The landlords, old and new, blue-blooded or green-washed, can sleep easy.