Land Matters

Image: Commander Chris Hadfield

With kind permission of the West Highland Free Press, this Guest Blog reproduces Brian Wilson’s column in today’s paper.

The back of the envelope duly arrived in Sleat last weekend

Brian Wilson, 14 June 2013

The back of the envelope duly arrived in Sleat last weekend, borne by Alex Salmond.  What was written on it amounted to no more than a headline. But since headlines are his raison d’etre, that will count as a good result.

As pointed out in last week’s Free Press editorial, Mr Salmond’s sociable wee trip to Skye had taken on a different perspective due to the hostile response accorded to the interim report of the Land Reform Review Group and particularly the scathing comments from Jim Hunter, erstwhile member of that group.

It was not only the vacuous nature of that document which attracted comment but the inherent redefinition of land reform which it contained.   In effect, this had been reduced to a discussion of “community ownership” which, in turn, had been reduced to the level of Third Sector jargon, rather a part of any broad, reforming strategy.

Mr Salmond’s speech, and his subsequent comments, need to be measured against that unpromising backdrop.  Did he reassert the need for Scottish land reform – to address what he once declaimed against as “a problem, a question and a scandal in every part of Scotland” –  and recognise that a whole range of weapons will be required to address it?  No he did not.  Quite the contrary, actually.

The headline sought and obtained was about “a target” of one million acres under community ownership by 2020.  Targets are useful devices for politicians, especially when set at such a safe distance.  But to have any credibility, they need to be accompanied by a route-map which gives at least some clues as to how they might be reached.

Sadly, there was no room on Mr Salmond’s hastily scribbled envelope for such detail – leaving no more than an empty assertion which duly became the headline in the Scottish media which, in general, neither knows nor cares enough about these matters to explore beyond the press release handed to it.

At present, there are roughly half a million acres under community ownership, the vast majority of them in crofting areas and particularly the Western Isles. Much of the low hanging fruit has already been picked, thank goodness. And of course, there were the Stornoway Trust’s 63,000 acres already in the bag before the modern wave of buy-outs began.

So where are the next 500,000 acres of buy-outs to come from?  If Mr Salmond had the slightest clue about the answer then he declined to share it.  Take a number, double it and you have your headline. No need for anything more, First Minister.

The only other announcement was an extension of the Scottish Land Fund until 2016 with another £3 million in the pot which will now mean £9 million over five years instead of £6 million over three.  Anyone who thinks they are going to change Scotland’s land ownership structure with that budget is seriously deluded.  It is far less than the previous Scottish Land Fund operated with a decade ago.

Also, I can’t say that I am terribly impressed by how the new Scottish Land Fund has interpreted its role so far.  As I pointed out at the time, there was a danger in the remit of supporting the purchase of “land and land assets” – the latter term being capable of covering just about anything.  And so it has started to prove.

The early subjects of grants made by the Scottish Land Fund include a lighthouse in Moray, a village hall in the Borders and a smokehouse in Assynt.  I do not for a moment question the worthiness of these projects – but the idea they have anything do with land reform is a joke.  There has so far been no significant award which shifts the ownership balance by one acre, far less 500,000.

I also notice that the maximum grant which can be applied for to the Scottish Land Fund (Mark Two) is £750,000. This makes it unlikely that there will be any more buy-outs on a South Uist or North Harris scale within that constraint.  So once again I ask, what is the substance behind the “one million acres by 2020” target – and the answer is absolutely none.

But community buy-outs can only occur, even hypothetically, where there are viable rural communities. That generally means in crofting areas where a specific legal framework creates a rationale for collective acquisition. But most of rural Scotland is not under crofting tenure and much of it has been reduced to minimal populations under the existing system of land management.

From both Mr Salmond’s remarks and the Land Reform Review Group report, it would appear that these vast acreages have already been written out of any land reform agenda. Indeed, Mr Salmond and his colleagues have been going out of their way to offer that reassurance to the Scottish Landowners Federation as I will continue to call it.

In a BBC Alba interview last Friday, Salmond ruled out compulsory purchase on the grounds that “if we tried to compulsorily purchase land, we would end up for generations in the European Court of Human Rights”.  This is patently untrue and “blaming Brussels” for one’s own lack of action is a well-established refuge for political scoundrels.

If the option of compulsory purchase is ruled out in this cavalier way, then we will stay exactly where we are now – with no effective sanction against even the most extreme abuse of land ownership and control.

What is urgently needed is a clear setting-out of both options and constraints in terms of substantial land reform, open for comment and discussion –  not an ex cathedra assertion from the First Minister which has no obvious basis in fact and which, if accepted, would close down a crucial option for driving change.

The other issue on which there is now nothing but silence is the right of tenant farmers to buy their land – one of the most important means of changing the pattern of vast landholdings and feudal power structures in many parts of rural Scotland.  Is Mr Salmond saying that this too is forbidden by the European Court of Human Rights – or simply by his own anxiety to keep sweet with the landowners?

One observer present at the Community Land Scotland conference in Sleat described his speech as “going through the motions but without any indication of his heart being in it”.  That sounds about right.  But if that is the case, then the certainty is that nothing much is going to happen because in order to drive a land reform agenda there has to be belief and sustained commitment to overcome the powerful forces both externally and within Government.

It is both a tragedy and a warning that no such belief or commitment exists among those who currently hold power in Scotland.  The empty rhetoric of the past has been replaced with the conservative inertia of the present and, if we allow it, the future.

Librarians are important people. They provide order to what would otherwise be chaos in the world’s store of knowledge. The most common way this is done is by the Dewey Decimal Classification system which ensures that you can find information on any topic in a standardised manner in libraries across the world. Land Reform is classified under

3. Social Sciences
33. Economics
333 Economics of land and energy
333.3 Private ownership of land
333.31 Land Reform

There is no sub-classification of 333.31 Land Reform.

Definitions matter. Otherwise, we live in Wonderland with Alice, the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

I was forcefully reminded of this at the Community Land Scotland conference on Skye this weekend. It convened in the wake of the publication of an Interim Report by the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) that has had a less than enthusiastic welcome from land reformers (see for example, here, here and here).

Alex Salmond gave the first speech ever by a First Minister on the topic of land reform and set a target of one million acres of land in “community ownership” by 2016. He promised legislation this parliamentary session to sort out the mind-numbing complexities of the 2003 Land Reform Act and announced a further £3 million for the Scottish Land Fund. Listen to the speech in full here and a brief media interview here. I will blog separately on this ambition (he provided no target for how he would like to see the pattern of private ownership by 2020). (1)

The important thing about his speech was that it belatedly re-vitalised the land reform debate. In May 2007, after forming a Scottish Government for the first time, Scottish Ministers instructed civil servants that “enough has been done on land reform“. On 1 June 2007, the Land Reform Branch within the government was wound up and replaced with the Community Assets Branch.

In their 2011 Manifesto, the SNP made the following promise

“We believe it is time for a review of Scotland’s land reform legislation. For example, we believe the current period for three months for communities to take advantage of their right of first purchase is too short, and we would wish to see it extended to six months. We will establish a Land Reform Review Group to advise on this and other improvements which we will legislate on over the course of the next five years.”

In July 2012, Alex Salmond announced the formation of the LRRG which was given its remit in August. What became clear when the Group published its Interim Report was that a wide-ranging remit that sought radical proposals had evolved into a Group considering solely matters to do with community ownership (and a selective definition of that term). See my original critique here for further background.

And this is where definitions and meanings come into play. Alex Salmond’s speech was, of course a highlight of the conference but much of the interest was also focussed on the speech by Dr Alison Elliot, the Chair (and sole surviving original member) of the LRRG. The most significant revelation was that her definition of land reform is, in best Humpty Dumpty tradition, just what she chooses it to mean.

The classic dictionary definition of land reform is the redistribution of agricultural land to (usually) landless people. Most development agencies and non-governmental organisations, however, deploy a wider definition. The United Nations, for example, describes it as “an integrated programme of measures designed to eliminate obstacles to economic and social development arising out of defects in the agrarian structure.”

Peter Dale, former President of the International Federation of Surveyors, described land reform recently in the following terms.

“Land is a diverse concept that depends on whether you are looking at it from a legal, financial, land use or social perspective i.e. its ownership, value or use. Reform may concern the changing of land rights (land tenure reform), the redistribution of ownership or use rights (including land consolidation and land reallocation, i.e. reforms to the pattern of ownership), alterations to land use (e.g. physical changes in agricultural practice or through inner city development), changes to land tax (that bring about changes in land ownership, value or use), or changes in how land is managed, etc.

“In summary, the term ‘land reform’ embraces all those processes that alter the pattern of land ownership, land rights, land values or land use within a specified area.” (My emphasis.)

Mainstream framing of land reform is characterised by two features – it is broadly defined and it is programmatic (that is it involves a series of interventions forming part of a coherent programme).

This is precisely what the Land Reform Policy Group did between 1997 and 1999 when they published a programme of proposals which ranged from public access legislation through tenement law reform to the establishment of National Parks. The roots of the current confused stance of the LRRG can be traced back to then. One of the products of the 1999 programme was the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 which included the right of public access, a community right to buy and a crofting community right to buy. At the time I argued against using the term “land reform” as the title of the 2003 Act. I argued for two acts – a Public Access Act and a Community Right to Buy Act (in two parts). In her speech, Dr Elliot stressed how this one element of the earlier programme was the starting point for her Group’s deliberations.

If that was always the intent, then the remit given to the group compounded the confusion by appearing to provide a wide ranging remit to examine radical proposals. I and many others welcomed what appeared to be this broad programmatic approach. But it is clear now that we misunderstood matters. There are conflicting reports as to whether this fits with the original remit as envisaged by Ministers. On the one hand I hear reports that some in the Scottish Government are mystified at this turn of events. On the other hand, Alex Salmond has now endorsed the Interim report and given the group a vote of confidence. We are where we are.

The most significant practical impact of of this narrow focus on community ownership (and a restricted interpretation even of that term) is that other potential beneficiaries of land reform will gain nothing from it. In many parts of Scotland there are vast tracts of land with few or no people living in them. There is no community to even begin to consider community landownership.

The real economic potential of land reform lies in providing opportunities for individuals (who after all are what make up communities), co-ops, businesses and other collective groups to obtain rights over land and resources and to invest capital, skills and energy in developing enterprises. The other key potential relates to developing an appropriate fiscal environment in which land speculation is eliminated, levels of private debt minimised and productive investment can be made by young people in particular in urban land, housing and business assets.

In Orkney, for example, Udal law meant that land was inherited by all children. (Children under the rest of Scotland’s land tenure system do not have any legal rights to inherit land.) The fragmentation of holdings and the subsequent development of a plural pattern of owner-occupation in the early 20th century provided the basis for the islands’ future prosperity. It is this potential which appeared to be encapsulated by the first of the LRRG objectives, namely to “enable more people in rural and urban Scotland to have a stake in the ownership, governance, management and use of land …“. It remains a source of some bewilderment how “people” in this context can be taken to mean only groups of people acting through a corporate community body.

So where now?

This restricted definition is of course only that of the Chair of the LRRG. I argued back in July 2012 that the value of the LRRG depended on its definition of land reform and its remit. There remains the possibility (indeed the hope) that it is widened following discussion with other members of the expanded Group. If not, then it will be up to others (perhaps a real land reform review group) to explore and deliver the full potential of land reform for Scotland.

NOTES

(1) Alex Salmond noted that “Land ownership is currently overly concentrated” but appears to believe that more community ownership will resolve this. There is no evidence that the two are linked in any way.

UPDATE 14 June 2013

In a written answer (S4W-15291) to Rhoda Grant MSP, Paul Wheelhouse said that the remit of the LRRG has not changed.

Rhoda Grant (Highlands and Islands) (Scottish Labour): To ask the Scottish Government for what reason the interim report of Land Reform Review Group focuses on community ownership and whether this reflects a change in the group’s remit. (S4W-15291)

Paul Wheelhouse: The remit of the independent Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) has not changed. The consultation, which yielded 484 submissions, has brought forward a wide range of issues on a broad range of subjects, including farm tenancy issues and issues regarding access. In the view of the LRRG, as set out in its interim report, issues raised regarding farm tenancies represent an area already being considered by the Tenant Farming Forum and as such, the review group, as its interim report states, will now concentrate on taking forward a number of issues in respect of the implementation and geographic impact of community right to buy legislation in order to support communities throughout Scotland in achieving their social, economic and environmental potential. The work of the LRRG will also help to formulate potential approaches to extending right to buy to urban Scotland and will inform consideration of the Scottish Government’s community empowerment and renewal proposals.

As was stated during the Land Reform debate on 5 June 2013, issues regarding farm tenants will be considered as part of the review preceding the Agricultural Holdings Bill proposed for later in this parliamentary session.