Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2025
It is a great privilege to close this debate for Scottish Labour and to speak alongside my comrades Rhoda Grant and Richard Leonard. I start by paying tribute to everyone who has engaged in the land reform process. Any success in the bill that will diversify land ownership in Scotland is the collective effort of everyone who responded to the consultations, everyone who provided expert advice evidence and everyone who challenged the Scottish Government to make the bill count. That work will continue, because it must.
Scotland is now prey to mega lairds, private corporations that buy up land for the benefit of portfolio shareholders and investors. Their accumulation of land, wealth and power is often dressed up as climate friendly or environmentally responsible. Let us be clear: it is not.
Take Oxygen Conservation, whose stated business is supposedly to help fight the climate and biodiversity crises. It has quickly taken ownership of numerous Scottish landholdings and estates. Most recently, it bought up BrewDog’s failed Lost Forest estate, which has taken its total holdings to nearly 20,000 hectares. However, its extractive business model and inadequate community engagement have raised alarm bells among land reform experts. A revenue model that is based on polluting carbon credit sales will not deliver what our land, climate and natural environment so desperately need. Aggressive acquisitions and the quick flipping of land as a portfolio treats one of our most priceless common goods as a cheap commodity to be traded by the wealthiest.
That is why it is right that, under the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, some large landholdings will be required to produce land management plans to show how they intend to manage and develop the land. I truly hope that those modest changes make a difference. However, because of the Government’s refusal to accept my amendments to lower the threshold and introduce a presumed limit on ownership of 500 hectares, more large landholdings will be left out of the scope of the bill than will be included in it. Instead, the Scottish Government has taken a blinkered approach to ownership and aggregation of landholdings. Concentrated land ownership is a nationwide issue, yet the Scottish Government has refused to take a nationwide approach to aggregate land holdings.
Gresham House is now the second-largest private landowner in Scotland, thanks to 244 separate landholdings across roughly 74,000 hectares. That kind of superscale land ownership will barely be impacted by the bill, however, as only a handful of those 244 fragments are over the 1,000-hectare threshold. That is why I am proud that my amendment to review whether the size of the areas of land included in the bill needs to be reduced was passed yesterday. I look forward to seeing that review take place.
The examples of Oxygen Conservation and Gresham House demonstrate the inadequacy of Scotland’s current system and how the Scottish Government’s bill—while welcome—will not go far enough. Both examples show how private corporations will always seek private profit before public good, even while claiming that they are acting in the public interest. That is why it was so important to have a forward-facing public-interest assessment of buyers of land in the bill. It is deeply disappointing that, even after months and years of scrutiny, evidence and amendment, the Scottish Government did not accept that.
Large-scale and corporate land ownership cannot contribute to action on inequality while its decisions on land ownership and land management remain focused on extracting wealth. Instead, we need land ownership that works for people, not profit. The Land Reform (Scotland) Bill was an opportunity to challenge the current pattern of land ownership and to create a fairer, more accountable and more democratic system of diversified land ownership. It remains to be seen how much of an impact its provisions will have but, given what was left out of the bill, it seems like yet another missed opportunity from the Scottish Government.
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