The Scottish Government is deliberately concentrating land ownership

Reported widely today, Scotland's concentrated land ownership is becoming more and more concentrated – and government policy is playing a large part in this. It is based on the latest analysis by land reform campaigner Andy Wightman.

The statistics are fairly straightforward. In 2012 half of Scotland's land was owned by 440 people. Sixty per cent of all land was owner by 989 people, and 3,161 owned 70 per cent. Thirteen years later we see further concentration of ownership at every level.

We now have only 408 landowners owing 50 per cent of the privately-owned rural land, 877 owning 60 per cent and 2,413 owing 70 per cent. These are substantial degrees of concentration. A lot of attention is paid to the very largest landholdings because those statistics are so stark, and they have seen a greater than seven per cent consolidation in a little more than a decade.

But the level of concentration in the next two tiers of land ownership is even worse – there has been a 23 per cent concentration of who owns 70 per cent of Scotland in that time period. Effectively we lost a quarter of Scotland's larger landowners since the independence referendum.

What is particularly concerning is this rate of change. Prior to this there had been long-term progress – glacial, but progress nonetheless. In 1874 the were 118 land owners who owned and controlled half of Scotland. That has now reversed.

But when? Wightman estimates that it was between 2005 and 2010. Given that the SNP came to power in 2007 there is more than a degree of irony that it has taken a nationalist government to reverse a century and a half of progress. This is especially perplexing given that the SNP was in part founded by land reformers and it remains engrained among the priorities of party members.

So why is this happening? It is very simple; consolidation and speculation. Smaller and medium-sized landowners are purchasing surrounding land when it comes on the market, consolidating those landholdings in fewer hands. And at the same time the Scottish Government has sought to maximise what it calls 'inward investment', which has often meant asset sales.

It is no coincidence that this reversal on land reform coincides with the financial crisis of the late 2000s. That date marks an inflection point in a range of statistics, and it is because of the impact of public policy and market behaviours after the banking crisis. Enormous amounts of liquidity (free money) were pumped into markets via Quantitative Easing.

This was meant to supposed lending to business but instead was used by financial investors to cover losses they made from their speculative banking investments by investing in and inflating other assets. Scotland's land has become one of those assets.

Scotland's financial elites are hard-wired into government in Scotland via the use of financial consultancies writing public policy and because of the constantly revolving door between the wealth management world and the civil service. They created schemes specifically designed to reward speculative investments in Scotland.

One of those was about releasing the value of land, either through the unplanned and unmanaged dash for energy through the unnecessary industrialisation of rural Scotland or via tax break harvesting schemes like the Scottish Government's subsidies for tree planting.

The Scottish Government has created ways to syphon public funding and consumer energy bills income to landowner pockets as a way of providing maximum returns to the wealthy for speculative investment. These are open, active means of using the public sector to transfer wealth upwards in society.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the Scottish National Investment Bank giving a loan of £50 million to a London-based wealth management firm that advises investors on how to maximise returns on Scotland's land for the the financial elite. It is now the second largest landowner in Scotland (though it argues it does not ultimately own land, its investors do – a moot point).

The Scottish Government passes land reform legislation over and over but it is always toothless. Meanwhile it has actively been producing policies and subsidies to help the very rich profit ever-more from Scotland's land at the expense of Scotland's population.

The result is that since the SNP took office they have intentionally created the conditions for an almost 25 per cent concentration in already pitifully low land ownership rates. Unless a comprehensive package of land reform measures is enacted (see here), this situation will continue to deteriorate – as public policy.