Who owns Scotland's land?

Land ownership in Scotland

Stephen Richard — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 22:14:54 +0000

Land ownership in Scotland Stephen Richard Fri, 10/15/2021 - 23:14

Author or Creator

Common Weal

Half of Scotland is owned by just 500 people, few of whom are actually Scots. As Britain's great land-owning aristocratic families decline, a new breed of foreign laird is exploiting Scotland's arcane land laws to buy up tracts of the Highlands and islands - Europe's last great wilderness. In 2018/2019 it was reported that the largest landowner owns 221,000 acres (890 km2; 345 sq mi) of land in Scotland. The government believes 57% of rural land is in private hands, about 12.5% owned by public bodies, 3% under community ownership and about 2.5% is owned by charities etc.

There is no country in the western world which has fewer people owning so much of its land as in Scotland and so there have been calls for land reform for hundreds of years. It is a social justice issue – but it is about so much more than that. It is about our environment, our wildlife, our communities, employment and homes for the next generation, the nation’s economy and the life of our towns and cities. If our land is controlled by a tiny number of rural landowners and a smaller number of big property developers, how can we make democratic decisions about the kind of country we want to build for the future?

So first Common Weal has set out a vision for what is possible. The Common Home Plan has an entire chapter about how Scotland’s land can help us capture carbon, restore wildlife, restore our soil, end our reliance on environmentally harmful materials in construction and manufacturing and feed us healthily and responsibly. And this then creates enormous economic opportunities. We have published two reports on what this could look like, the first (Back to Life, both a vision and an economic assessment) examining the economic impact of making much better use of our grouse moors, the second (Work the Land) looking at the potential for creating jobs by using our land in a better way. Another landmark report paints a picture of what Scotland’s uplands could look like if we converted them into being a Mosaic of Life.

And Common Weal also published our equally groundbreaking Atlas of Opportunity, a beautiful atlas of Scotland with lots of information about our natural, cultural and human resources overlaid to see at a glance just how rich Scotland’s land makes us. All of this paints a picture of a rural Scotland reforested, teeming with wildlife and creating new industries from advanced bioplastic manufacture to ecotourism.

And it’s not just rural Scotland where land reform matters, the lack of community and democratic control of available land in our cities causes just as many problems, as we showed with a case study of the economic potential of land in North East Glasgow. We have shown how we can make the poor use of land in both rural and urban settings unattractive to owners with a land tax (we propose a Property Tax that taxes both land and buildings on the land to replace the Council Tax) and a way for land to be bought much less expensively when it is being used for the public good (called Land Value Capture).

Of course, none of this would matter if there weren’t real, available and legal ways to reform land ownership, something existing landowners often claim there isn’t. But in a groundbreaking report Common Weal has shown that there very much is an effective toolkit of policies which can deliver land reform now, that they are legal and that they are all within the power of the existing Scottish Parliament. That report is Our Land. We hope that the combination of this vision of what ‘better’ looks like and the evidence that the only thing stopping us making progress towards that vision is our willingness to do it will finally break the deadlock which has led to those hundreds of years of calls for reform which just haven’t been met.

Keywords

Land ownership

Land reform

Community-based land reform: Lessons from Scotland

Stephen Richard — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 09:41:07 +0000

Community-based land reform: Lessons from Scotland

Primary Author or Creator

John Bryden CharlesGeisle

Stephen Richard Fri, 09/24/2021 - 10:41

Additional Author(s) / Creators

CharlesGeisler

Alternative Published Date

2007

Category

Land

Type of Resource

Academic Paper

Length (Pages, words, minutes etc...)

Land Use Policy Volume 24, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 24-34

Fast Facts

Drawing on insights from community-based natural resource management and local development, qualified evidence is offered suggesting that, as in the current Scottish case, community-centric land reform has a promising future.

More details

In recent years, the Scottish Highlands have become the epicentre of a land reform significant for its strong embrace of culture and community. Close inspection of the Scottish land reform—wherein communities are granted the right to purchase lands to which they historically enjoyed only conditional access—leads to a series of questions about the relationship between land reform and community. We argue that most land reforms have paid insufficient attention to community strengthening as an end in itself and are the weaker for it. Drawing on insights from community-based natural resource management and local development, we offer qualified evidence suggesting that, as in the current Scottish case, community-centric land reform has a promising future. We trace the pre-reform history of community buy-outs in Scotland and pose various issues that must be addressed if Scotland's land reform legislation is to succeed.

Report is behind a paywall.

Resource Address (URL)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837705000554

Keywords

Community ownership

Community buyout

Land reform

Language English

The effects associated with concentrated and large-scale land ownership in Scotland: a research review

Stephen Richard — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 09:31:46 +0000

The effects associated with concentrated and large-scale land ownership in Scotland: a research review

Primary Author or Creator

Jayne Glass

Stephen Richard Fri, 09/24/2021 - 10:31

Additional Author(s) / Creators

Rob Mc Morran, Steven Thomson, Scotland’s Rural College

Alternative Published Date

March 2019

Category

Land

Type of Resource

Research review

Length (Pages, words, minutes etc...)

39 pages

Fast Facts

Central is the power that a landowner holds over local land use decisions and the extent to which local communities and other stakeholders can influence/inform those decisions.

More details

This review has examined research related to land ownership concentration in Scotland and in other countries. It has highlighted a number of key themes that have attracted the attention of academics and other commentators, both recently and in previous decades. The benefits and impacts of land ownership concentration on socio-economic development, local governance, and control of resources/assets have been considered in some depth. Central to the examination of each of these themes is the power that a landowner holds over local land use decisions and the extent to which local communities and other stakeholders can influence/inform those decisions. While the research reviewed in this report considers empirical evidence from number of regional and local case studies, there remains potential to explore the links between land ownership concentration (and scale of landholdings) in more depth, across the whole of Scotland. It is this gap in the research that the Scottish Land Commission call for evidence seeks to address.

Resource Address (URL)

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jayne-Glass/publication/333132774_The_effe…

Keywords

Land ownership

Land concentration

Language English

Back to Life: Mapping Scotland’s Alternative to Grouse Moors

Stephen Richard — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 20:37:47 +0000

Back to Life: Mapping Scotland’s Alternative to Grouse Moors

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Sun, 09/12/2021 - 21:37

Additional Author(s) / Creators

Lateral North

Alternative Published Date

December 2018

Category

Land

Type of Resource

Policy Paper

Fast Facts

An illustrative map – based on real Scottish geographic data – showing what a reformed former grouse moor could look like.

More details

Between 12% and 18% of Scotland’s total land area is currently reserved for grouse moors. Despite this, the economics of such activity has been shown to be significantly worse than any other reasonably conceivable economic activity.

This map – produced with Lateral North and the Revive Coalition – graphically illustrates the economic case for grouse shooting alongside examples of other more productive uses of Scotland’s land.

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Grouse-Moor-Map.pdf

Keywords

Language English

Back to Life: Visions for Alternative Futures for Scotland’s Grouse Moors

Stephen Richard — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 20:22:34 +0000

Back to Life: Visions for Alternative Futures for Scotland’s Grouse Moors

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Sun, 09/12/2021 - 21:22

Additional Author(s) / Creators

Lateral North

Date Published

Mon, 12/10/2018 - 12:00

Category

Land

Type of Resource

Policy Paper

Fast Facts

An assessment of the economic potential of alternative uses for Scottish land currently used for grouse shooting.

More details

Almost one fifth of Scotland’s land is kept barren and dead for the sole purpose of maximising the number of red grouse – so they can be killed for sport. Many people object to the killing of animals for sport as a matter of principle; others believe that Scotland’s land is concentrated in too few hands and used inefficiently and unproductively.

Both have faced the same argument from the owners of the giant grouse moors – there is no alternative use for this land. Bloodsports is the only economic activity that can be sustained. The lack of visions of alternative uses have enabled those lobbying on behalf of grouse moors to claim that the 2,640 jobs created is the best Scotland can hope for as an economic output from a fifth of Scotland’s land.

But is that true? The Revive Coalition is a group of organisations which have come together to call for the reform of Scotland’s grouse moors.

Revive has commissioned Common Weal and Lateral North to assess the potential alternative uses for this land and to find out if shooting grouse is really the best we can hope for.

The conclusion is simple – of all the possible uses of this land, grouse shooting is not only the least moral, it is by far the least economically effective. In fact, almost any other use will create more value and more jobs per hectare.

Alternative uses for grouse moor land plotted in terms of GVA per hectare and hectares per job created.

The Revive coalition believes that this is strong evidence that Scotland’s debate on grouse moors should move forward not on the basis of arguing that no alternative is possible and instead on the question of why Scotland would choose grouse shooting out of all the possible options. The simple answer is that we shouldn’t; we should grow Scotland’s rural economy by making the most of our amazing natural resources, not squandering it on incredibly expensive hobbies that pollute the countryside and survive only because of generous public subsidies.

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Back-to-Life.pdf

Keywords

Language English

Public Land Value Capture: A new model for housing development in Scotland

Stephen Richard — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 17:39:39 +0000

Public Land Value Capture: A new model for housing development in Scotland

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Wed, 08/18/2021 - 18:39

Alternative Published Date

Feburary 2018

Category

Land

Type of Resource

Policy Paper

Fast Facts

This report outlines the case for public land value capture – the process by which councils, not those selling land, can benefit from the increase in land value due to changing use (such as planning permission for housing) or can reduce house prices by not passing that uplifted cost on to renters and buyers of the houses built on such land. This briefing is based on Common Weal’s submission to the Planning Bill consultation in response to question, on alternative ways to finance infrastructure provision. It is part of a series of briefings by Common Weal on housing, communities and places.

More details

― Public authorities should have the legal means to purchase land at existing use value, so that the uplift in land value from planning permission for development of the land is captured for the public good. The financial consequence of this public land value capture policy will be increased funding for housing development without any upfront cost, as the public authority could borrow against the future uplift in land value to finance the development of the site. Plots of land can then either be developed directly by the local authority, or sold to developers at cost price plus infrastructure costs. This approach would be significantly cheaper than what developers would pay for development if their costs involve purchasing land at market value.

― Public land value capture is not new. The UK Government’s 1947 Town & Country Planning Act introduced planning permission and with it the provision for public authorities to compulsory purchase land at existing use value. Public land value capture simply seeks to return Scotland to a situation where the public gains the increase in value from public investment in the development of the land. This public investment would also create better market conditions, as instead of the private sector competing over control of the land market it would compete over the quality of housebuilding developments, creating a more diversified market for housing supply and tenure type.

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Public-Land-Value-Capture.pdf

Keywords

Local Planning powers

Public land value

public investment

House building

Language English