Hansard

No. If Mr MacKenzie listens to the points that I will make, he might understand where I am coming from.

The land reform legislation was based on the need to know who owns land. The right to buy was introduced to allow communities to take economic drivers into their own hands. If a community cannot speak to a landowner, it can at least take back the drivers for itself. However, not every community is able or wishes to do that, so it is important to know who owns the land on which people live and work.

Registration of the beneficial owner would cut the opportunity for people to use land ownership to cover illegal or fraudulent dealings, such as money laundering and tax evasion. Andy Wightman suggested that, in order to own land in Scotland, a company should need to be registered in the European Union and therefore subject to EU legislation. Large global organisations normally register a local subsidiary when starting a business, so that would be no barrier to them. However, the committee heard that the owner of an EU-registered company could easily be a company that was registered somewhere else in the world. The proposed approach would give a signal, but it would not in itself close the loophole.

On the other side of the argument, beneficial ownership needs to be registered in a way that does not unreasonably delay registration or, indeed, restrict registration and ownership to those who are in Scotland. The minister had and still has the opportunity to examine that further before stage 2, so I urge him to consider how we can register beneficial ownership to make land ownership in Scotland much more transparent, so that people who live and work on the land know who owns it.

Probably one of the most contentious areas of the bill is the amendment of legislation on prescriptive claims. Currently, when land has no clear owner and has been abandoned, it can be prescriptively acquired—basically, people can take ownership and register the land to themselves after a period. A process for bringing apparently unowned land back into economic use without the owner’s permission is required. If that cannot be done, development will stall.

However, the system that is currently in place allows unscrupulous people to land grab. If such people see that land is unused, they can go through the process to acquire it for themselves and sell it on when they have a clear title. The bill will tighten the process and make it longer—the land will need to have been registered for 10 years before ownership is conferred—which is an improvement. As the minister said, the bill provides that such land must have been vacant for seven years prior to registration. I welcome his intention to amend that provision, because clarifying the position for that length of time is seen as being extremely difficult.

We need a mechanism to deal with land that has no owner, but the current system is open to abuse. We need to go back to first principles to develop a way forward. The current system is used when there are mistakes in the register; when, for example, a strip of land has not been registered properly and when land is ownerless. We should have different systems to deal with those issues. When there are mistakes, the keeper has the power to amend the land register and to rectify them, but we also need a dispute resolution system. If the owner of land cannot be traced, however, we need another process that will allow the land to be brought back into use but will also ensure that it cannot be abused. That process must also ensure that the land is put to the best use for the public interest. The process must have checks and balances, and every effort must be made to trace the true owners and to ensure that, if an owner does come forward, their property will be reinstated to them or that they will, at least, be compensated.

We also need to consider mechanisms to register common land. No organisation has a duty to do so, which leaves such land open to prescriptive acquisition. The committee has suggested that public bodies, such as local authorities, should have a duty to register common land to protect those areas for their communities.

There are several types of common land, such as commonties, land that is bequeathed to the community, and land that has been purchased by the community. I am sure that there are many other variations on that theme. Land being purchased by the community is a relatively new concept and I am sure that most such land will already be properly registered. Commonties are an ancient form of community land ownership and there are very few left because of acquisition of land, so we need to move to protect those that are left.

Land that has been bequeathed in the past is also difficult to identify, but it needs to be registered for protection, so the Government needs to give that issue more consideration before stage 2.

In order to identify the owners of land, the register needs to be accessible to the general public. We need the register to be available electronically and for that access to be affordable for the general public so that people can scrutinise the register to ensure that they know who owns their land.

The bill is required and it has been widely welcomed, but the Government is missing an opportunity to do something radical that would make a difference to land ownership in Scotland. It is not too late and I hope that the Government will take up the challenge before stage 2.

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