Land reform bill polarises views as measures are unveiled

The legislation aims to change how land is owned and managed in rural and island communities and includes measures that will apply to large landholdings of more than 1000 hectares, prohibiting sales in certain cases until ministers can consider the impact on the local community.

The Bill also places legal responsibilities on the owners of the very largest landholdings to show how they use their land and how that use contributes to key public policy priorities, such as addressing climate change and protecting and restoring nature.

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These owners will also have to engage with local communities about how they use the land.

It also includes a number of measures to reform tenant farming and small landholding legislation, providing more opportunities to improve land, to become more sustainable and productive, and to ensure that tenants are fairly rewarded for their investment of time and resources in compensation at end of tenancy.

Rural Affairs Secretary Mairi Gougeon said: “We do not think it is right that ownership and control of much of Scotland’s land is still in the hands of relatively few people. We want Scotland to have a strong and dynamic relationship between its land and people.

“This Bill sets out ambitious proposals to allow the benefits and opportunities of Scotland’s land to be more widely shared.

“We will introduce measures so that more communities are being given information and the opportunity to take on ownership before sales from landholdings over 1000 hectares.

“Crucially, when one of these landholdings is being sold, we want government to have the power to step in and require that it be sold in smaller parcels to different people if that will help to make local populations and communities more sustainable.”

Leading rural organisation Scottish Land and Estates (SLE) slammed the proposals as a ‘destructive and disproportionate’ attack on land-based businesses from a Scottish Government that is ‘using outdated ideology to punish those rural businesses making a huge contribution to Scotland’.

Sarah-Jane Laing, chief executive of SLE said: “The government is taking an irrational approach to farms and estates over 1000 hectares, which seems to be driven purely by a desire to break these up regardless of the outcome.

“The suggestion that a property going on the market should be lotted by government before being listed is absurd. The blizzard of regulations they are proposing around the transfer of landholdings will create conflict, cause market uncertainty and deter much needed investment.”

However, the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association (STFA) has welcomed the measures, describing the Bill as ‘a significant step in Scotland’s journey of land and tenancy reform’.

STFA chair Christopher Nicholson added: “This Bill has arrived just in time to allow tenant farmers to prosper in the face of a rapidly changing agricultural landscape.

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“These measures are all necessary to allow tenant farmers fair access to future support schemes and markets which seek to reward biodiversity and climate change mitigation in addition to food production.”

The Scottish Land Commission (SLC) also backed the Bill. Chief executive Hamish Trench said: “Scotland’s land is a resource that people need to be able to use to support jobs, housing, climate action and economic opportunities across the country.

“The proposed measures in the Bill, including a new power for Ministers to require the lotting of large land holdings prior to sale, are significant steps towards a fairer and more dynamic approach to land ownership in Scotland.”

Rural affairs spokesperson for the Scottish Tories, Rachael Hamilton warned the ‘devil will be in the detail’ of the Bill and said the Scottish Government seems ‘hellbent on intervening in the rural way of life, rather than properly engaging with them and ensuring that proportionate measures are taken’.