Who Owns Scotland | Land Matters

Planting forests is a sure way to grow rich

13. May 2013 · 9 comments · Categories: Environment, Forestry, Land Reform, Land Rights, Land Use, Who Owns Scotland

I studied forestry at Aberdeen University at the time of the rapidly expanding afforestation of the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland. One day, the Chief Executive of Fountain Forestry, the company that was the leading player in this misadventure, gave a lecture to us. Afterwards, he invited questions. “Why, I asked, was the Government giving huge tax breaks to folk like Terry Wogan and Shirley Porter – the vulgarians of the metropolis in London – to plant trees in the far north of Scotland? Why did it not simply award the money in the form of grant aid to the crofters and farmers of the region to plan the trees instead?” It was a naive question but I quickly learnt that asking such questions was not welcome, even in a University where asking questions is meant to be what one does.

Ever since then I have been curious as to why a land use with so much potential to revitalise rural economies, support communities and provide a home and workplace for families like it does in the rest of Europe should instead be an elite formation designed to enrich a landed class drawn from anywhere but the locale. Some of the facts behind this are explored in a recent report I wrote – Forest Ownership in Scotland.

The topic is brought to mind today by the advertisement of a 403 hectare forest for sale in Kincardine-shire. Burn of Sheeoch (pictured above & sales brochure here) is offered for sale by Bidwells at a guide price of £2,500,000. It was bought in 1982 for £441,000 by the Post Office Staff Superannuation Fund from Baron Craigmyle and planted in 1983-84 with substantial public grants. In 1995 the Fund sold it for £200,000 to Spero Nominees Ltd., a nominee company with a fully paid-up share capital and total assets of £4 and wholly owned by Deloitte & Touche Holdings Ltd. (see below).

In other words this forest was acquired by a global accountancy firm on behalf of someone – we know not whom. In 2007 the land was transferred for free to a company called Walbrook Trustees (UK) Ltd. which is wholly owned by Barclays Wealth Advisory Holdings (Guernsey) Ltd. The 2012 accounts of Walbrook describe the company’s principal activity as the “provision of trust services“. It made no profit or loss in 2012, has total assets of £7,650 and “it is anticipated that the Company will be put into Member’s Voluntary Liquidation during 2013“.

But not before Roderick Leslie Melville has earned a nice commission on a sale of £2.5 million which will be paid to a ghost company in Guernsey about to go into liquidation. The forest “benefits” from a Long Term Forest Plan approved by Forestry Commission Scotland in April 2013 providing access to a “range of forest management grants“.

The seller (Wallbrook, Guernsey, soon to be liquidated) will also be “entitled to share in the benefit of any renewable development at the property and receive 50% of all payments by or on behalf of the landowner within the 10 years following sale and shall be entitled to these payments for a period of 25 years from the date the first payments are received.”

So my naive question of 30 years ago remains unanswered. Vast sums of public money have subsidised the creation and ongoing management of this forest and future revenue streams of public money for renewable energy contracts will also flow to some anonymous offshore nominee company following receipt of a capital tax free payment of £2,500,000.

I don’t understand why the Scottish Government and Parliament continue to preside over such a scam.

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Land reform. Are you on the south or the north bank?

10. May 2013 · 12 comments · Categories: Land Reform, Land Reform Review Group, Politics, Poor had no Lawyers, Who Owns Scotland

The Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) is due to publish its first report in the next few weeks. The Group, set up as an independent policy review group by the Scottish Government in October 2012 has been given the task of proposing innovative and radical proposals for land reform. Over 500 individuals and organisations have submitted evidence to the group.

What can we expect?

Think of the land reform debate as like opposite banks of a river. On the south side people are working together to try and make this system work better. There is co-operation and understanding and though nothing fundamentally changes, some modest progress is made. Folk are polite to each other and nothing much happens to rock any boats.

On the north bank stand those who see the entire system by which land is held and governed in Scotland as fundamentally flawed. These people are working to undermine landed hegemony and reform the way in which landed power defined, derived, distributed and exercised. Some of these people may, on occasions, cross the bridge to the south bank to participate in a bit of consensual reform but most of the time they are on the north bank because that is where they need to be. Time spent on the other side of the river is ultimately futile and a waste of energy and resources if the desired outcome is radical land reform.

So where do the Land Reform Review Group stand? Well, for a start there is no group. There is a Chair and two vice-chairs and no members. A group of three is a weak formation because it is hugely dependent on personal relationships. It is difficult to conduct robust debate within a group of three. A group of eight, on the other hand, allows for frank exchanges of views and a stronger critical approach. The current personnel are Dr Alison Elliot (Chair) and Vice-Chairs Dr Sarah Skerrat from the Scottish Agricultural College and Ian Cooke, Director of the Development Trusts Association Scotland. Recently, the only one of the three with a background and understanding of land reform, Professor James Hunter, resigned for personal reasons. The group is advised by 13 advisers.

The LRRG looks distinctly like a group of south-bankers.

Meanwhile another group is getting organised.

Scottish Land and Estates (SLE) is the representative body of 2500 landowners in Scotland and is making strenuous efforts to ensure that land reform goes nowhere. It has invited Dr Elliot to give the keynote address to its AGM on 21 May 2013. Last year, the keynote speaker was the First Minister, Alex Salmond. Rather like Mr Salmond, whose speech was one of a committed south-banker and which gave Scottish Land & Estates a public relations coup, Dr Elliot’s speech will be closely observed by a growing number of people in Scotland who are beginning to worry about the direction in which the LRRG is heading. Mr Salmond, it should be noted, will be giving the keynote speech to the AGM of Community Land Scotland on 7-8 June on Skye. Like his speech last year, this is also keenly anticipated. By the 8th of June, therefore, we will have a fair idea of how the contours of the land reform debate are laid out and what side of the river folk are on.

Scottish Land and Estates has also been raising cash. During 2012, as revealed in the accounts to be presented to its forthcoming AGM, it raised over £55,000 for a land reform fighting fund and plans to raise more during 2013. A reception is being held in the RAF Club in Piccadilly on 29 May (see invite above) during which no doubt the large number of London-based landowners will be pressed to contribute funds to protect their vested interests north of the border.

Scottish Land and Estates also has wider connections to the work of the LRRG. Luke Borwick, its Chairman is a Board member of SRUC, the Scottish Government funded College that employs one of the Vice Chairs of the LRRG. The Chair of SRUC is one-time Conservative Scottish Office Minister and SLE member, Jamie Lindsay. Meanwhile one of the member of the SLE’s own Land Reform Working Group (Andrew Bruce Wooton) is also an adviser to the LRRG. Details of the SLE’s working group can be found in the introduction to its full submission to the LRRG available here.

The instincts and direction of the LRRG will be judged by its interim report and the extent to which it stakes out territory on the south or the north bank of the river. At the moment it seems like a lot of activity is taking place on the south-bank and those who should be working on the north lack the resources and determination of groups such as SLE who are busy wooing and embracing the south-bankers.

We await further developments with interest.

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the many problems facing our fragile, remote community ..

19. February 2013 · 29 comments · Categories: Land Reform, Land Rights, Land Use, Who Owns Scotland

Image: The Coigach Flag

I am delighted to host a guest blog by Julia Campbell from Coigach. Julia works for the Coigach Community Development Company but the views she expresses here are her personal views. They were submitted as evidence to the Land Reform Review Group. Further details and other evidence can be found here.

I work for Coigach Community Development Company which was set up in 2010 to tackle some the many problems facing our fragile, remote community on the Coigach Peninsula in the North West highlands. Most of our difficulties stem from the continuing fall in the population. In the 19th century and until the beginning of the 20th the area supported five schools – now there is one with a current roll of 19 (it was nearly 40 in the 1990′s), which will fall to 13 next year, and to 8 by 2017 – unless we can find a way for more families to move here.

The land is currently owned by two main landowners: Ben Mor Estate by Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT), and Badentarbet Estate is in private ownership. Most of the cultivated land is under crofting tenure and development is sparse in traditional crofting style.

I carried out an informal census recently (I just drove round and made notes from what I know about each house and its inhabitants) and counted 246 habitable houses – of which 126 are lived in. The rest are second or holiday homes. There are 19 local authority homes, built over 30 years ago since when they have been more or less fully occupied and there are three households living in caravans. These council houses were built cheek by jowl, with tiny gardens, minimal parking and no room for sheds or workshops – difficult as many people here have practical jobs and businesses that need all these things. And strange in a landscape of traditional crofting township format.

When houses do come on the market, they go for high prices and increasingly more and more are snapped up by more affluent people from elsewhere as holiday homes. For people on modest income who want to live here it is very difficult to find a home: it’s widely acknowledged that chances of getting a council house are so slim many people don’t even bother putting themselves on the seemingly never-ending waiting list, and there seems to be no mechanism for getting a croft unless you are lucky enough to know someone who is willing to assign one. We have seen various young people and families who would like to live here simply give up and move away and as a result the population shrinks and so the services available to those of us still here.

It became apparent some years ago that the local authority was not going to do anything to resolve the housing situation so the Development Company has set about it. We are planning to put up a community wind turbine to generate an income so we can (amongst other things) build some community housing to attract families to the area. My feeling is that people moving to areas like Coigach also want a bit of land – especially when there appears to be so much of it around here! One of the many attractions about living in this part of the world is the degree of self-sufficiency that is possible with access to land. People want to grow vegetables, keep hens, build sheds: anyone moving to this area more or less has to bring their own job with them and they need space to do that.

Places like Coigach attract enterprising people that somehow make a living and are fairly open-minded about how they do it. Most people have several little jobs and are self-employed, and practical skills are greatly valued. With modern communications and access to the internet, theoretically all sorts of remote working is possible though broadband speed and access remains an issue. Whatever you choose to do you need somewhere to live and somewhere to work.

Once we have our turbine income we’ll have more options, however, we are a small organisation with a board of voluntary directors (who are already stretched trying to make their own livings and most are involved in other local services run by volunteers) with two part-time employees so our capacity is limited. We hope to have the support of SWT for access to land (as we often point out, school age children are one of the area’s most endangered species), but doing anything on Badentarbet Estate has proved to be impossible to others who have tried in the past.

The owners do not want development of any sort and have objected and therefore prevented previous initiatives which included modest plans for workshop units for local use in the past. It remains their land of course, and to so with as they please – and we remain at their mercy.

We got very close to a community buy-out of some land last year: enough to build some community houses and workshop units. We jumped through all the hoops of the Community Right to Buy process and raised the necessary funding. The community ballot was strongly in favour and then the owners pulled out at the last minute as they did not like the valuation given – which was all we would be able to raise in funding. So six months work ended with nothing – but some useful experience.

I’d like to see more crofts available to new (or returning people) and the availability of land at affordable prices so ordinary people can build and make life for themselves here. Most of the world, including the south of Britain seems to be struggling with over-population: we are having the opposite problem but I feel sure given the chance, there are many people who would like to live in the Highlands.

They would enjoy the many benefits that life here has to offer, and in turn help us sustain our lives here. Unless something happens to reverse the decline in population here, it looks like many remote, Highland communities could disappear and all that remains are exclusive holiday retreats.

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