Hansard

There is strong support across the chamber for extending land reform to urban communities. Part of the process has to be about learning from the lessons of the implementation of our historic land reform legislation in the early years of the Parliament. It is important to bear that in mind as we look at the details and the principles of the bill. We have to make sure that the legislation that Parliament passes is capable of working as intended and that communities will be able to use it, and there are key concerns about that.

I thank the committees for their work. I have recently joined the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee. I particularly thank the many stakeholders for the detailed work that they have done on their comments to enable us to process their concerns at stage 1.

I put on the record the fact that Labour wants to work with those who want to be radical on land reform. A couple of years ago, we made it clear that we want to see new community rights to purchase land even when there is no willing seller. We are very pleased to see those ambitions in the bill and we strongly support them in principle.

For us, the key challenge is to make sure that the proposals are workable. We need more than the rhetoric of land reform and of being radical; the detail has to match the rhetoric. That remains a key challenge as we move towards stage 2 of the bill process. The stakeholders who have given us evidence and are listening to the debate today do not believe that the bill’s proposals are sufficiently clear or workable.

The proposals appear to give new rights with one hand but, on the other hand, they might make it impossible to exercise those rights in practice because of the specific wording used in the bill. The committee report makes that clear.

That takes me to the central purpose of the bill and the question of land that is to be eligible for potential purchase even when there is not a willing seller. The policy memorandums for the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and for this part of the bill make it clear that the policy purpose of the provisions is to further sustainable development and to remove barriers to it. As currently drafted, the bill refers to such impediments to sustainable development on land that is

“wholly or mainly abandoned or neglected”.

That seems to be too narrow a definition that implies that what is under consideration is solely the physical characteristics of the land. To us, sustainable development is about both physical and environmental matters and social and economic matters. The social and economic development of communities can be neglected as well as their land being environmentally or physically neglected. The bill must be absolutely clear about that.

The Scottish Government appears to be reluctant to do what the committee wants to do by defining abandoned or neglected land in the bill. When the committee debated the issue, it emerged that the Scottish Government was having further consultation on the issue on the very same day. We have not seen the outcome of those discussions. Claudia Beamish and I dissented from that one part of what is an extensive and very strong report to signal how important it is to us that the matter is resolved. We reserve the right to have abandoned or neglected land defined in the bill, even if the committee is tempted to follow the Government’s preferred route.

Paragraph 219 of the bill concludes:

“The Committee reserves the right to take evidence on this issue at stage 2.”

That is the part we strongly support.

I do not know whether the environment minister is speaking today, although I am glad that she is in the chamber to hear the evidence. Our report shows that the Law Society, Scottish Land & Estates, Community Land Scotland, the Church of Scotland and other respected organisations have looked at the bill and strongly criticised how it might be implemented.

We think that there must be a clear definition. If that is not there, stakeholders have given us fair warning that in any court challenge there will be a real danger that the court may decide, when considering the prescribed matters

, that

“the linkage between those concepts was not sufficiently warranted or reasonably envisaged by the statutory provisions, or was stretching the normal interpretation of the primary tests”

—which would be the dictionary meaning of the words “abandoned” or “neglected”. We have been clearly warned about the dangers of the current approach and we are in danger of giving a new and powerful right with one hand but removing it in practice with the other because the detailed words in the bill are wrong.

There is another trap in the bill, which is the clause that requires ministers to be satisfied that it would be inconsistent with sustainable development if the current owner of the land was to remain the owner. We have had evidence that that would be impossible to demonstrate and could automatically mean that any community application would be bound to be refused. That is why the committee wants that provision to be deleted.

The bill is hugely important and we share communities’ ambitions for the sustainable use of their land, but we need to ensure that communities can exercise that power. The bill as drafted will not let them do that. As our convener Rob Gibson said, the devil is in the detail.

We do not yet know when ministers will respond to the committee; that will be absolutely crucial. We have a very short timescale. In just a couple of weeks we will take extra evidence on the community right to buy and in a month we are scheduled to look at the bill in detail for stage 2. We very much need detailed information from the Scottish ministers. When the minister sums up, I would like to know when we will get that information, because we will want to look at it in detail with stakeholders as we decide on which amendments—including those that the Scottish Government might lodge—we think are appropriate.

The bill is hugely important and I am concerned about the timescales. If we do not get the detail right, the bill will not do what we all want it to do. That cannot be allowed to happen.