Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2026 [Draft]
I will speak to amendments 38 to 42. I thank the minister for his assistance with the amendments.
Amendments 38 to 41 seek to deal with the issue that often arises when crofts change hands on the open market. People see that croft assignations or crofts themselves are for sale and fall into the trap of believing that they are simply buying a house or a piece of land without any additional obligations. That is why crofts are often left unworked, which falls foul of crofting law. The purpose of my amendments is simply to ensure that anyone who purchases a croft or buys a lease of a croft knows what their obligations are.
New section 19BC of the 1993 act, which is entitled “Regulations on requirement for proposed owner to be aware of owner-occupier duties”, requires Scottish ministers to make, by regulations,
“provision requiring that before any person may … acquire title to a croft as a nominee of a crofter, or … purchase a croft from a constituting landlord, … the Commission must be satisfied that the person is aware of the duties of an owner-occupier crofter under section 19C.”
Amendment 38 would reword the title of the new section—section 11B—introduced by an amendment in my name at stage 2 and would make a consequential change to the title of new section 19BC, to reflect the changes that would be made by amendment 40.
Amendment 39 would modify new section 19BC by substituting “may” for “must”, meaning that the power to make regulations would be discretionary rather than there being a duty to do so. That would resolve a technical issue, because making regulations under the affirmative procedure is not necessarily within the minister’s gift, as, strictly speaking, such regulations are subject to the approval of Parliament before they can be made by ministers.
Amendment 40 would modify new section 19BC to reframe the duty so that regulations would need to make provision
“about how a person is to satisfy the Commission that the person is aware of the duties of an owner-occupier crofter under section 19C before the person”
acquires or purchases the croft. That would mean that the imposition would be on the person who is acquiring or purchasing the croft to satisfy the commission that they were aware, rather than the commission having a duty to satisfy itself of that person’s awareness. Indeed, that could be difficult, given that no existing mechanism would make the commission aware of such a transfer.
Amendment 41 would insert a new subsection (1A), which sets out a non-exhaustive list of things that regulations under section 19C(1) “may” make provision about. Those include:
“the steps which must or may be taken by a person to satisfy the Commission of the person’s awareness of the duties, and … the effect of a failure to take such steps.”
Amendment 42 deals with a crofter’s application to be absent from a croft. Gaining consent to be absent should not be used by crofters as a way of avoiding their duties under crofting law. Crofters often apply to be absent, and the agreements on absence are quite often open ended. Of course there are times when a crofter would need to be absent—for example, to attend to training, or for healthcare and the like—but an agreement on absence should not allow people simply to hold crofts with no intention of returning to them. Amendment 42 would require the Crofting Commission to publish guidance on how it exercises its functions under sections 21B to 21D of the 1993 act, which are on consent for absence from crofts. That guidance will set out for crofters the commission’s policy on how it will assess an application for consent to be absent. It will also provide direction and support to help crofters prepare such an application.
Labour also supports the other amendments in the group.