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No other European country has such a narrow base of proprietorship as Scotland. Half of all privately owned rural land is held by 421 people or entities. The roots of such disparities lie in the past. The 18th- and 19th-century Highland clearances emptied the glens and readied them for private takeover. On the continent, and eventually in England, the great estates were broken up by inheritance and land taxes. By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.
The passing of a land reform bill, its supporters say, will change that. But doubts remain. Its proponents say the legislation could allow the Scottish government to intervene in private land sales and require large estates to be broken up. At its heart is the so-called transfer test. This would see Scottish ministers notified before any land sale over 1,000 hectares. However, they lack an explicit veto. If they wanted a more democratic constraint, they could have adopted the Scottish Land Commission’s 2019 proposal for a public interest test – forcing big buyers to openly justify their purchases.
Scottish ministers point out that by getting landowners to tell the government before any large-scale sale, they can give community groups a chance to put together a rival bid. But many big estates lie in sparsely populated upland areas where communities lack purchasing power. In theory, new “lotting” rules in the bill could diversify ownership by potentially splitting large sales into smaller plots. Yet the land reform expert Andy Wightman argues that such powers will rarely be used – and even then, existing landowners can simply buy the lots back. Mr Wightman, a former Green MSP, argues persuasively that the pattern of ownership results from a free market in land which privileges those with the deepest pockets. His reasoning is that Scotland’s land should be regulated as a shared resource in the public interest.
Devolution has made this debate possible. Before 1999, Scottish land reform would have stalled in the Lords, where rich landlords literally sat in judgment. Despite more than a quarter of a century of argument, Scottish ministers are reluctant to adopt a more radical shake up.
Craig Dalzell at the Common Weal thinktank suggests that a local land levy would make hoarding costly and fund community investment. The same council powers were used for Scotland’s tourist tax. Common Weal argues that Scotland should emulate Nordic nations, where smart taxes ensure smaller rural holdings. Significantly, they also encourage more sustainable patterns of forestry, farming and recreational use rather than absentee rents or speculation.
Scottish land reform became a flashpoint in the 2014 independence campaign, because it raised questions of power and sovereignty that drove the wider debate. Yet it was the ruling Scottish National party that last month voted down attempts by opposition MSPs to place a cap on the amount of land that a single entity could own unless they could meet strict limits. No doubt SNP ministers feared scaring off investment, particularly in forest land brought for carbon offsetting, or being accused of confiscatory nationalism.
The Scottish government’s reasoning – that ownership caps would be “a gift to those who want to maintain the status quo” – got it backwards. By refusing caps, Holyrood preserved the status quo itself. How tightly Scotland retains old structures of land and power depends on whether its democracy has the courage to break the bond.
