The new land reform bill introduced by the Scottish Government today is a ‘destructive and disproportionate’ attack on land-based businesses that risks derailing the pursuit of net zero, Scottish Land & Estates said today.
The rural business organisation was reacting following publication of a third land reform bill in little over 20 years. SLE described the Bill as a cocktail of bureaucratic and interventionist measures that will once again land the Scottish taxpayers with a multi-million-pound bill.
OUTDATED
Sarah-Jane Laing, Scottish Land & EstatesSarah-Jane Laing, Chief Executive of Scottish Land & Estates, says: “The Scottish Government is using outdated ideology to punish those rural businesses making a huge contribution to Scotland.
“Rather than taking a common-sense approach to reflect the challenges that people living and working in rural Scotland face, Scottish Ministers are pursuing a destructive and disproportionate agenda against land-based businesses. Some of the measures signal a huge U-turn by Ministers from utilising land to pursue net zero towards a full-on attack on the property rights of large farms and estates.”
And she adds: “Ministers would not countenance taking the same approach to any other business sector.
“They claim it is about addressing large-scale landownership, but the Scottish Government is the biggest landowner in Scotland and Ministers know full well that scale is needed to deliver many of the government’s own aspirations on forestry, peatland restoration and food production.”
IMPACT
“The impact on people, jobs and nature will be significant.
“SLE supports increased transparency as well as continuing to ensure that land delivers benefits for us all. We see merit in land management plans but some of the other measures contained within the Bill are not required and are frankly unworkable.
“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.
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
“The notion that a landowner or farmer with more than 1000 hectares must consider a request from a community to lease the land is a recipe for disaster and disappointment that will likely end up in legal challenges, costly delays, and a mountain of red tape.
“Well-established mechanisms already exist for communities to influence how land is used, such as local place plans, and sales of land to communities are already taking place on a willing seller basis each and every year, with myriad statutory routes to ownership for communities where negotiated sales don’t take place.
AGRICULTURAL LANDLORDS
“The Bill also includes new measures that affect agricultural landlords, who will face further hurdles on resuming land, and we are disappointed that retrospective changes are being introduced to previous legislation on tenancies.
“The proposals in the Bill to hand new powers to a Land and Communities Commissioner, which include fining landowners, goes way beyond the power of other commissioners of this kind.
“The reality is that large-scale farms and estates deliver day in, day out, for the Scottish economy and local communities, and this has been shown in the Scottish Government’s own research as well as our research on the contribution of estates to Scotland’s Wellbeing Economy – research that was accepted and embraced by government at the time of publication.”
