All talk and no action: Why land ownership is more concentrated now than 25 years ago

An analysis published last year highlighted how, since the 2014 independence referendum, a total of 529 strategies and plans had been published – more than one every week. Nine days after being sworn in as Scotland’s latest first minister, John Swinney acknowledged this problem, admitting to an audience at Barclays’ campus in Glasgow that he would demand “more concrete action and fewer strategy documents”.

Alongside a fondness for strategies and plans, ministers have been very keen to farm out tricky policy questions to external reviews rather than engaging in the heavy lifting of policy development themselves. 

Too often the recommendations of such reviews are never implemented. There may be good reasons for this, but it does beg the question why such reviews were commissioned in the first place.

The infamous Burt Review into the future of local government finance in 2006 recommended a replacement of the council tax – but its key recommendation of a one per cent charge on the value of homes was rejected by Jack McConnell the day before the report was even published.

Two years of expert analysis and £270,000 of public money were wasted. Other reviews have at least been published before their findings were quietly abandoned.

In light of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill currently being scrutinised by parliament, I took a look at another review published 10 years ago to see what had happened to its recommendations. The Land Reform Review Group was established in 2012 to identify proposals for future land reform. Its report was published in May 2014 and contained 62 recommendations, from housing to wildlife management and taxation.

Of these recommendations, 26 were implemented and 36 were never implemented (with 10 being explicitly rejected and four committed to but later abandoned). Twenty-two recommendations were to be subject to further consideration with “a full response made in due course”. No such response was ever published. 

Review groups are not a replacement for government policy-making but they deserve to be taken seriously and to have their recommendations properly engaged with.

The latest legislative attempt to advance land reform offers yet more tactical and bureaucratic interventions in the land market instead of structural reform. Grand claims have been made about the impact of the proposed measures. The cabinet secretary, Mairi Gougeon, claimed that the Land Reform Bill contains “ambitious proposals to allow the benefits and opportunities of Scotland’s land to be more widely shared”.

The government’s pre-legislative consultation received 537 responses but the committee’s stage one call for views only managed to solicit 130. What happened to the other 400 respondents? Is this a symptom of disillusionment with the bill’s contents? Is this a typical pattern with other bills? Do respondents place greater emphasis on trying to influence the government on what to include or exclude from a bill than they do on providing evidence to the parliament?

The bill, however, is the least ambitious land reform bill ever introduced to the Scottish Parliament. It does not include any provisions on many of the issues the government consulted on in 2022 and it contains excessively bureaucratic, legalistic mechanisms to intervene in a vanishingly small number of instances with no prospect that much will change as a result.

Nor is there much evidence that ministers have engaged seriously with the research of their own statutory advisers, the Scottish Land Commission. Back in March 2019 the Commission recommended three substantive policy changes, of which only one is being taken forward. Ignoring the advice of ad hoc review groups is one thing, but ignoring the recommendations of the government’s own statutory adviser is quite another. To add insult to injury, the Commission was only given sight of the bill the evening before publication.

We have been here before. Back in 1999, it was claimed that the community right-to-buy “would effect a rapid change in the pattern of landownership”. Twenty years later, it has resulted in 18,700ha of land changing hands – or 0.0125 per cent of rural Scotland each year. I don’t regard that as rapid change.

Land reform involves hard work to deliver structural change over a sustained period of time. The objective should be to modernise and democratise how land is governed. It’s a big project which at its heart should, as Mairi Gougeon claimed, “allow the benefits and opportunities of Scotland’s land to be more widely shared”.

However, the opposite has happened. Evidence suggests that landownership is becoming more concentrated than it was at the beginning of the Scottish Parliament and remains one of the most concentrated anywhere in Europe and much of the world. Nothing in the current bill will change this.

Meanwhile, over the past five years the Duke of Buccleuch has been downsizing and selling off around 40 per cent of his sizeable landholdings to a wide variety of community and environmental organisations as well as businesses and local individuals and tenants.

For all the rhetoric and grand claims made by Scottish politicians about the division of land in Scotland, it is instructive to note that in fact the Duke of Buccleuch has been responsible for redistributing more land in five years than Scottish ministers and parliament have managed in 25. Maybe we need another review to consider why.