How to recapture public land

We need to reverse the subtle incremental transfer of land from the commons to the private sector. A way to do that is through a system of land default

To encourage the transfer of land from private ownership to the commons, we could use a system of land default. But what is land default

Land default is the default of land ownership from private ownership to ownership by the people of Scotland under certain circumstances. Examples could include where the land has been left derelict for a long time or where the land has been used so as to cause a hazard to public safety (for example buildings left to become unsafe)

Why do we need it? Under our current system land tends to accrue to the private sector. Very large estates get bigger, land ownership gets more concentrated. It means over time land gets transferred to the private sector and rarely comes back into public ownership.

Land is important and powerful and allows the people who live here to shape our futures when we have access to it. It is a key strategic resource and should be managed by communities for the betterment of the country and their locality. In rural areas especially large land estates contribute to depopulation and collapse.

So how could we do it?

Suggestion 1: Positive prescription

Positive prescription allows private individuals to acquire land simply by using it for ten years. In other jurisdictions this may be referred to as adverse possession. Broadly this is a slow and rather random transfer of land to the private sector, sometimes from other private owners, often common or public land. This is a crazy giveaway scheme that is costing the Scottish people land that should belong to us all.

Let’s reverse it. If land isn’t being used or worse is being allowed to become dangerously derelict then after ten years let’s allow communities to claim this unused land.

Suggestion 2: Intestate estates

Currently there’s a long list of relatives who will inherit an intestate estate (an estate where the person who died didn’t make a will). The thinking on this perhaps dates to a feudal sense that the owner of the estate was the local lord and it’s really important to find someone to run the area even if a remote relative of the previous lord. I suggest intestate estates go to 1) spouse, 2) children, 3) Commons.

Suggestion 3: land tax

A proper land tax is long overdue in Scotland but when I was originally thinking about this I imagined a penny tax. Each year you have to pay a penny in tax for your land. Where not paid after ten years the land becomes subject to a Scottish law concept called diligence which means the land can be taken to pay the debt.

“While the prospect of a two hours meeting arguing about litter and potholes may leave many uninterested, a meeting on what the community wants to do with the derelict village church would be packed”

There’s significant amounts of land in Scotland where no one knows who owns it. This system would mean that land that no one has title to gets recirculated through the Commons rather than simply left alone. We could even require the penny to be hand delivered to a local post office, trivial for locals but enough perhaps to end the practice of giving away Scottish land in Oscars goodie bags.

A proper land tax would have all the above benefits as well as providing real and inflation-proof income to the public sector. It could also be significantly redistributive.

Who gets the land?

But in this instance, who gets the land? It should be first, Community Councils, second regional councils if Community Councils don’t want it or can’t manage it. And then third, the Scottish Government in the last resort.

Community councils would be able to use the land to build housing, sell for cash to run community projects, build parks and green spaces, set up community energy operations or any other reasonable purpose. The prospect of these windfalls is likely to energise and improve our community councils increasing local democracy and accountability while building up our communities.

But could Community Councils manage this? Really? Community Councils vary enormously from highly effective ones to pockets of unproductive squabbling or neighbourhoods where no one bothers and the Council is inactive.

I believe that income would actually galvanise community councils into becoming active. While the prospect of a two hours meeting arguing about litter and potholes may leave many uninterested, a meeting on what the community wants to do with the derelict village church would be packed.

And that in turn would be of great benefit to our communities across Scotland because community councils are a great source of local initiative and free voluntary labour. Community action and volunteering are in themselves a form of wellbeing improvement.

There would of course have to be a “kick it upstairs” option for communities that don’t want to manage land windfalls and so pass it to the regional council’s Common Good portfolio.

What might this look like?

• A community council gets a field and turns it into a football pitch.

• A community council gets a field and sells it, using the revenue to fund community projects.

• A community council gets a forest and uses it as the basis for a rewilding/ecotourism project. (The Langholm Initiative created the Tarras Valley nature reserve by crowdsourcing about £12 million to buy land, mainly from the Duke of Buccleuch. What would that project look like had they got the land for free and were left with an extra £12 million to develop it?)

• A community council gets a field and decides to create extra housing for the place. They make a Local Place Plan recommending planning approval for the site, apply for planning permission, get a kit house and slap the pre-fabricated building together with local volunteer labour. The volunteers get one “raffle ticket” per hour worked, the building is raffled off to a lucky local who can then rent the place.
  The raffle tickets of everyone else carry over. That gives income to the community council who is the owner of the house and helps them fund the next kit house project when more land becomes available. This leads into a cycle of land windfalls and place plan influence over local planning leads to the construction of more and more housing which gets rented out providing income to the community.

• A community council gets land and decides to create a community energy project.