Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2025
I think that today is a good day. Spring is upon us, and it is a time of renewed hope and optimism. It is on that note that I am proud to open today’s debate on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, which marks the next step on our land reform journey.
I thank the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, the Finance and Public Administration Committee and the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee for their detailed scrutiny of the bill, and I thank everyone who gave evidence during stage 1. Hearing from a wide range of grass-roots voices from right across Scotland has been invaluable, and it is a mark of the strength of our Parliament. I look forward to working constructively across the chamber as we progress this important bill, and I hope that we can all agree to support its general principles, as the majority of members of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee recommended in its stage 1 report.
Land reform has been a long-standing priority of the Parliament; indeed, it was one of the driving forces that led to the Parliament’s reconvening in 1999. The bill marks the next staging post on the land reform journey, as it builds on the land reform acts that have been passed by successive Scottish Governments.
I am sure that members across the chamber will join me in paying tribute to past and present members of our Parliament, stakeholders and individual campaigners who have worked tirelessly to shape and implement positive and progressive land reforms that have helped create opportunities for communities and individuals across our nation. They include pioneers of community ownership in places such as Eigg and Assynt, who demonstrated a positive alternative to the status quo—that is, that communities, crofters and tenants did not have to accept being frozen out of decisions that affected their lives.
In Scotland, we have one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world, with 421 landowners owning 50 per cent of privately owned rural land. We are an outlier in comparison with Europe, where more diverse land ownership is the norm. That long-standing unfairness and the negative impacts on our rural communities have previously been raised by the Scottish Land Commission and others. Scotland’s land must be an asset that benefits the many, not the few, and it must play a leading role in sustaining thriving rural communities, tackling the climate change and environmental crises and continuing sustainable food production.