The Scottish Government voted for unlimited land ownership for the rich

As you read this, the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill is still making its way through the final stages of the debate process in the Parliament with several hundred amendments to the legislation being debated and voted on. Few are expected to make a substantial difference to the scope and scale of the legislation and many of those are not designed to, being mostly issues of clarification and legislative precision.

It’s clear though that even if the legislation is passed then it is not expected to make the substantial reforms to land in Scotland that we deserve. The Scottish Government has admitted as such, describing the Bill as “only the first step”. If that step is as substantial as the one taken in the last round of “land reform” in 2016, then we can expect not much more than a continuation of the concentration of land ownership that we’ve seen since then with communities left to scrabble at the edges to try to claim something resembling the land under their own feet.

Two amendments were voted down yesterday that could have changed that, both designed to place a cap on the amount of land that a single person could own in Scotland unless they could meet strict limits.

The first, promoted by Labour MSP Mercedes Vilalba would have placed a public interest test on land ownership above 500 hectares (or other limits such as a percentage of an entire island that is smaller than 500ha), meaning that communities would have the power to say that someone owned too much land already and so could not buy more (Vilalba discussed her proposal on Episode #182 of the Common Weal Policy Podcast).

The second, promoted by Green MSP Arianne Burgess placed a similar 500 hectare limit on individuals but gave Scottish Government Ministers the power of veto over any purchase.

Both amendments were voted down with the Parliament voting 89 against to 23 for each of the amendments. The Scottish Government in particular voted against the amendments stating their reason, in part, being that a maximum cap on ownership would somehow be “a gift to those who want to maintain the status quo”. You can watch the relevant segment of the debate from 15:41 here.

In effect, the Scottish Government has decided that it is perfectly fine if just a few people own all of Scotland. Not even just the 421 who own half of Scotland at the moment, it’d apparently be fine if that number was 21 or possibly even just 1, so long as they promise to manage the land properly (a weakness of the Bill as it currently stands was identified by Andy Wightman in that the Land Management Plans included in the Bill do not compel Lairds to actually implement the plans they’ve submitted, it merely compels them to be submitted).

It’s clear that when it is passed, Scotland will still be in need of substantial reform in the way we manage land and how we allow it to be owned. We will never break up the large estates if we do not start accepting that large scale ownership of land is detrimental to the Common Good no matter how nice the individual Lairds are. The Scottish Government seems intent on knocking back every reasonable policy that would have started to actually reverse the trend of concentrated land ownership such as caps and limits to ownership as in these amendments or policies like a Land Tax which wasn’t even allowed to make it this far into the legislative process.

If the Government accepts, as they have done, that this is merely one step in the land reform journey then we need to ask them when we’ll see them take the rest of the steps in the journey and what they expect Scotland to look like when we get there.

For a vision of Scotland seen through the eyes of what it could be, have a look at our Atlas of Opportunity here.