Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2025
I remind members, as I constantly do, of my entry in the register of members’ interests. I am the owner of 202 hectares of land. I rent about 200 hectares of land under a non-agricultural tenancy. I also have about five hectares of land under an Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991 tenancy. I have feet in many camps when it comes to land, and I have always supported land reform.
I echo the thanks that Mr McArthur put on the record to those people who have helped members to get amendments through. In particular, I thank the legislation team for being so amenable to the few amendments that I put forward.
I started off looking at the bill bearing in mind the information that had been given to me by a land reformer who said that it would not deliver what the cabinet secretary said that it would and by a legal adviser who said that it was “junk law”. This is the Scottish Parliament’s third attempt at land reform. None of it has really delivered what the Parliament wanted, and we predict that there will be a fourth attempt. What we know is that the first attempt at land reform resulted in Andrew Stoddart’s court case, and the second resulted in the Salvesen v Riddell case—and at what cost to the Scottish Government? We will find out, because I have put in some freedom of information requests that will, no doubt, prove that cost.
My amendments did not seek to do what Dr Allan suggested, which was to kibosh the bill; rather, they sought to prevent the cabinet secretary—or probably her successor—from facing the legal challenges that I believe that the bill will result in.
There are some clear casualties of the bill, investor confidence being one and tenancies being another. Why are those important? We need investor confidence if we are going to address our net zero targets, including on planting and looking after the remote areas of Scotland. I have looked back at the details, which show that, in March 2023, Lorna Slater—sadly, she is not here—signed a groundbreaking £2 billion investment deal with private investors and the bank Hampden & Co. The aim was to get them to invest in some of the targets that we sought to achieve. This land reform bill will not help to promote that investment. We can argue about whether that is right or wrong, but the Government does not have the money available to invest in some of the targets that we need to achieve. If members do not believe that, I point to the outstanding letters from Scottish Financial Enterprise and from renewables and forestry companies on their fears about the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. The bill will make real problems for us.
As far as tenancies are concerned, let me be clear that changing the law retrospectively comes with huge problems. We know that there has been a decrease in tenancies—I have raised that for long enough.
Part of the bill that I found particularly difficult is the exclusion of large landowners from being the land and community commissioner. It seems to be fine for ex-ministers and ex-special advisers to take that role, but not large landowners. I think that that is wrong. Fundamentally, it goes against the grain of everything that I believe about the Scottish Parliament in relation to equality.
We have debated amendments, including a lot of my amendments. I am very glad that, in most cases, they were debated in the spirit in which they were lodged. However, at one stage, one of them was not, and that was sad. My mother, who is long since deceased, would have said that that was probably because the person was overtired and that they should not have done it in that way. My mother often had wise things to say. I will leave it at that, but I am afraid that I cannot support the bill in the way in which it is drafted.
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