Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2025
That is not entirely true. Some of the people who opposed part 1 were people who manage land holdings across Scotland, whether in the private or public sector.
Whether stakeholders were supportive of further land reform or not, there was consensus that the bill as drafted risks not delivering on its aims. There was a clear fear that the proposed changes would be burdensome and bureaucratic without delivering any real benefit.
On the detail of the bill, the committee is supportive of the provision to allow Scottish ministers to create community engagement obligations. However, only a majority of the committee think that the land size threshold for community engagement obligations—which is 3,000 hectares for mainland estates—is too high. The committee is not agreed on the appropriate thresholds for landholdings to allow the bill’s obligations to kick in. However, we agree that, when they are adopted, those thresholds must be kept under review by the Government.
One community engagement obligation that is set out in the bill is for large estates to produce land management plans. The committee is supportive of such plans, as they could create an accessible one-stop shop for information about large parcels of land, which would improve transparency about estate ownership and use. That provision in part 1 gained clear support, but we heard pleas not to allow it to become a box-ticking exercise with a long list of things to say in those plans, which could remove the local and distinct tailored elements that are required to make the plans truly useful documents.
We also heard concerns about the potential cost to estates of producing plans. However, it is difficult to assess those concerns fully when the details of the obligations for what will be set out in the plans will not be set out until later, in regulations. The committee was not in a position to assess the unknown. That is why our report recommends that there should be additional parliamentary scrutiny of regulations that set out community obligations.
The committee supports the principle of extending communities’ right to buy land. However, the changes in section 2 are unlikely to accomplish much on their own. A wider review of the community right to buy is under way, and we are disappointed that it was not completed before the bill was introduced. It would have been much more useful to consider the matter in the round.
We support giving Scottish ministers the ability to determine that large landholdings should be sold in lots. However, the basis on which such decisions would be made is unclear. We recommend that the transfer test in the bill be reconsidered to make it clear that the public interest will at least be at the heart of lotting decisions. We also recommend that guidance be produced to provide more clarity about the circumstances in which Scottish ministers would or would not expect to make lotting decisions. We are broadly supportive of the new role of land and communities commissioner.
Turning to part 2 of the bill, I note that the most significant changes in that part relate to agricultural tenancies. The starting point for those changes is a consensus that the tenanted sector is in long-term decline and that things need to change. Taken together, the changes in the bill could be said to rebalance the landlord and tenant relationship by giving more rights to tenant farmers. However, some stakeholders thought that those changes would make owners even more loth to offer tenancies in the first place. We are deeply concerned about the risk of a further decrease in agricultural tenancies, so we have recommended broader consideration of how to actively encourage the leasing of land for agriculture.
Although we support most of the individual provisions in part 2, we recommend that the Scottish Government considers how best to proceed with the provisions on resumption. Resumption is when the landlord takes back part of the tenancy. The methodology for compensating that, as proposed in the bill, has faced significant criticism. The view is that it perhaps rebalances compensation too far in favour of the tenant.
We need to clarify the meaning of “sustainable and regenerative agriculture”. That is a central feature of many of the changes in part 2, but it is as yet undefined. This is a familiar discussion for those who have been involved with the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024. That act requires a code of practice to be created, which would provide meaning to the term.