Hansard

Today marks an important new chapter in Scotland’s land reform story. Scottish Labour has worked hard and, I hope, in a co-operative manner to secure stronger, more effective legislation. I am very proud of the changes that we have made and, for us, the issues on which we have not secured progress become unfinished business for the next session of Parliament.

I was proud when we passed the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, and it is clear that the appetite for land reform has stretched across the whole country. We have inspiring examples of community ownership in some of our most fragile rural areas, but there are key lessons that need to be learned. There is a need for consistent political and financial support from the Scottish Government to enable communities to use the legislation that the Parliament passes and, crucially, we need guidance that is fit for purpose.

From the start, Scottish Labour has supported the ambitions behind the bill. Our main issue was whether the rhetoric was matched by the words in the bill. Enshrining in legislation the principle of community land purchases to deliver sustainable development represents progress, but far too many of the details will be left to members in the next session of Parliament to deal with. The cabinet secretary referred to the comments of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee; one of its most trenchant comments was that too much has been left to secondary legislation that will be dealt with in the next session, and we need to reflect on that point.

I am disappointed that key amendments that Scottish Labour lodged have not been agreed to. It will take a significant amount of time for the new register to be completed. The proposals on financial transparency and the important question of those with significant control have yet to be addressed, and I hope that the Parliament will come back to look at those issues in the future.

The new land commission and the tenant farming commissioner will be important new players in giving support for and a new impetus to land reform in urban and rural areas, but we will need coherent Government policy on the land rights and responsibilities statement, the land use strategy, our climate change strategy and the national planning framework, all of which need to work in tandem. The land reform process needs to add to and be informed by them.

We in Scottish Labour were particularly keen to add our weight to the strengthening of our tenanted farming sector to deliver greater security and fairness. I hope that the new tenant farming commissioner will help to promote best practice, to resolve and avoid conflicts, and to support more constructive relationships right across the sector. As the cabinet secretary suggested, good land owners and land managers have nothing to fear from the bill’s provisions. We want the best practice that exists in some parts of the country to be spread across the whole country.

We would have liked the bill to have made more progress on rural housing, particularly for farm workers and tenants, and we will continue to press for more action on the matter. Frankly, I cannot accept that housing standards that would be unacceptable in urban areas are acceptable in some of our rural areas; indeed, on the consultation visits that we made during stage 1, we found conditions that are genuinely unacceptable in the 21st century.

The challenge now moves from debating the principle behind these powers to looking for new opportunities across Scotland. As a member of the Scottish Co-operative Party, I have been very keen to highlight the benefits of community and co-operative structures as ways of securing democratic participation and community benefit. The points that Johann Lamont made at stage 2 and today are important, but we will need stronger action from the Scottish land commission and co-operative development Scotland if we are to deliver on what is an exciting agenda. Tremendous strides have been made in some of our most fragile rural communities on community energy schemes, and we now need a raft of new community businesses that will take the new opportunities for developing sustainable and environmentally responsible tourism opportunities, new opportunities for land management and food growing and, crucially, new jobs in our communities. I hope that all of us in urban and rural areas can agree on that.

I have been very keen to raise the issue of allotments, given that community gardens and allotments need to be part of our land reform story and our approach to food security. We need them in order to maximise access to affordable local food and the health benefits that come from that. I will return to the issue because, although I was reassured by some of the minister’s comments, we still need to bottom out some sharp questions about local authority powers.

I believe that there is much to celebrate today, even though we will need to do a lot more work in the next session of the Scottish Parliament to deliver on our aspirations for land reform. However, I want to comment on the process with regard to the bill’s passage through Parliament. I do not think that it has been good enough. The process matters to the quality of the legislation that we will pass, and I feel that it was extremely rushed at the end and that it was not as transparent as it might have been. If the Government had responded to our committee’s report, the work of the land reform review group, which reported in July 2014, and the work of the agricultural holdings legislation review group, certain issues in the bill that were brought to us pretty late on in the day could have been raised much earlier. Those issues are not, as the Scottish Government has portrayed them, new ones; they have been on the table for a long time. It would be more accurate to say that the Scottish Government decided not to pursue them in the bill until it was put under pressure by a range of organisations.

The point is that the next Parliament needs to look at some of the issues in the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee’s legacy paper. As the committee’s newest member, I was struck by the committee’s sheer work rate, the complexity and challenging nature of the issues that it was dealing with and the extent to which we were dealing with hotly disputed matters. The parliamentary authorities need to give some thought to how committees work; indeed, I know that the Presiding Officer, who has just joined us in the chamber, has been raising some pertinent questions with regard to committees. One particular question that will need to be dealt with is how we review the effectiveness of land reform. We could have done more on that in this session as we moved towards the bill, and some issues need to be looked at in much more depth.

I thank the clerks, the Scottish Parliament information centre and the parliamentary team who supported the committee for their fantastic work. They gave the committee huge support across the range of its work and, without their support on this bill, we would not have got to the stage that we have reached today. We had a radical consultation process that went right across the country, and I hope that we were able to seize that opportunity to speak to those with an interest in our discussions, no matter whether they were enthusiastic about what we were going to come up with or dreaded it.

The bill is complex and controversial, and the fact that we had to pull two pieces of legislation into one bill made the challenge facing us more complex and tougher. The Salvesen v Riddell decision hung over us all and concentrated our minds, and I hope that in his summing up the cabinet secretary will tell us whether he has managed to find space in his diary to meet my colleague Claudia Beamish and eight tenants who are very keen to speak to the Scottish Government.

Notwithstanding the difficulties, it has been a privilege to work with those who gave evidence and the other members of the committee. We have done our best to make the bill fit for purpose. I also thank the minister, Aileen McLeod, for being prepared to talk to us, as committee members, on the other side of the fence and sometimes being prepared to negotiate with us. Sometimes, although it was late in the day, I felt that she was attempting to get us to a different place on some significant issues.

Although there were lots of disagreements in the process, we found a way forward on many issues, and that was really because of the work that the stakeholders did. I particularly thank Peter Peacock from Community Land Scotland, Global Witness and the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I thank the farmers and their representative organisations, NFU Scotland and the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association, and also the raft of players who have been in touch with us, from Scottish Land & Estates on land management and ownership issues to Scottish Environment LINK.

We have had huge disagreements. The challenge for the next Parliament will be to continue the level of scrutiny that we have had on the bill and to try to ensure that the legislation, as it is implemented, is fit for purpose. A lot of aspirations are hanging on it.

I thank the campaigners from across the interested parties who have written to us and contacted us on social media. We will be able to read Twitter later, but there has been a running commentary today. Those people have helped to make the bill stronger.

We have debated a lot of difficult issues and I hope that we have got to a better place. In the end, what we all want is stronger, fairer and more resilient communities and social, economic and environmental justice for our urban and rural communities. That has been the aspiration behind the legislation. Now, we have to make it work. The next set of MSPs will have their work cut out, because the work has only started. They will have to do the detailed work in the next session.