Meeting of the Parliament 28 October 2025 [Draft]
My amendments in the group are to do with lifting the prohibition order. Amendment 43, if enacted, would add a general public interest ground. That would mean that ministers would have to lift the prohibition on the transfer of a large landholding if they deemed that it would not be in the public interest to continue to apply the prohibition.
In the bill as drafted, there is a fundamental flaw: the Government might want to buy landholdings and so would prohibit their sale on the basis that it is in its self-interest to do so. In my mind, frankly, that is not good practice.
Amendments 44 and 45 are consequential to amendment 43.
Amendments 129 and 261, in the name of Rhoda Grant, would place huge obligations on landowners, including breaking up farms, transferring their energy resources to communities, giving up land for housing and creating new crofts, which may be outside crofting areas. All those obligations would make it virtually impossible for landowners to function and run their businesses. That would have an adverse effect on their ability to gain finance to carry out the projects that they wish to action. The fact that those powers would then be devolved to the Scottish Government—to identify how they would be enforced in each management plan—would add an unhelpful and bureaucratic level of administration and complexity.
I find Ariane Burgess’s amendment 15—which would, apparently, mean that land could be sold only to someone who lives in Scotland—strange. I am sure that Ms Burgess knows that the large foreign investment in Scottish landholdings has been hugely beneficial to Scotland. For example, we could argue that Anders Povlsen of Wildland and Danish companies in the Highlands have contributed to building up sustainable communities and, in the case of the latter, ensuring that the local community’s school is kept open, despite the fact that the local council wanted to close it. Limiting the future sale of that land will limit the desirability of that investment, and Ariane Burgess probably knows that running large estates costs a huge amount of money—something that the Government does not have.