Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2025 [Draft]
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
It would have been very few—more than 97 per cent of family farms are below that acreage.
Neither does the bill take into scope cumulative holdings, so the landlords of huge swathes of Scottish land will not be brought within the scope of the bill. That is increasingly a problem when organisations are buying up parcels of land to offset carbon. Those organisations seek to greenwash polluting activity elsewhere. Any landowner that does not have the wellbeing of the communities that live and work at the heart of what they do will cause damage to those communities by pursuing their own interests over those of the people who live and work on the land.
We are also disappointed that the bill does not extend the community right to buy to urban areas. Empowering communities in those areas would have been a game changer—it would have tackled poverty and ensured that developers could not hold those communities to ransom.
What the bill does do—and the reason that we will support it—is stop off-market sales. Currently, land is changing hands without the knowledge of the people who live and work on it. The bill will change that by informing communities of sales and allowing them to consider how they deal with them.
The bill also introduces lotting to Scotland. We have not had that before, so we will watch with interest how it might impact on land ownership patterns in Scotland.
Land management plans will give communities an insight into the plans of their landowner and an input to how those plans impact on them. Again, it will be interesting to see whether that gives communities a greater say in land use.
We will support the bill, but we know that it is unfinished business and that the next Parliament will have to pick things up again. However, one thing that the Government can do here and now to empower communities and encourage community ownership is to ensure the future of the Scottish land fund, which is an essential means of funding community ownership and land reform. The Scottish Government had previously committed to having a £20 million fund by the end of the parliamentary session. That commitment has not been met. As the Parliament goes into purdah, it is estimated that 150 projects, with an estimated value of £23 million, are waiting.