Land Reform Review Group
The next agenda item is the committee’s hearing the land reform review group’s initial ideas. When the committee agreed its work programme for the term, we agreed to look into the work and progress of the land reform review group, along with the group’s finalised remit, as agreed by ministers.
I have great pleasure in welcoming the group’s chair and vice-chair—Dr Alison Elliot and Professor James Hunter. Good morning. If you would like to make some initial remarks, they might help us to focus our discussion.
Dr Alison Elliot (Land Reform Review Group)
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to meet everyone round the table. I am hopeful that we will keep channels open with members of the committee and with other MSPs. I imagine that, as MSPs, you are one of the first ports of call for people who have concerns about the land system and I think that, as well as having a policy interest in the subject, you may well have particular views on land reform and land-related issues that are not necessarily just a repetition of the standard party lines of the various lobby groups in this area.
Jim and I are both highly committed to the whole area of land reform, and we welcome the opportunity to get a grip of it again. Where do we start, Jim?
That is what vice-chairs are for.
Professor James Hunter (Land Reform Review Group)
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I echo Alison’s comments about keeping in touch with the committee and other MSPs over the next few months.
Up to this stage, we have been working out how we will do the job. We have had some initial discussions with ministers and others about our remit, which has been finalised. Members have, no doubt, had a chance to have a look at it. We plan to finalise imminently our work plan for the year and a bit ahead, in respect of getting to the publication of a final report.
It would be fair to say that we have, until now, focused on how we will do the job—the process—rather than on the content of what we will do.
As far as processes are concerned, we have identified 4 October as a key date. We hope to be able by then to issue a call for evidence, to publish the list of advisers whom we have signed up and to publish a work plan for the rest of the year. We also plan to have the first meeting with our advisers on 4 October. We have put a time limit on things in that way.
As far as the topic is concerned, our approach will be to cast the net as widely as possible to begin with and to narrow down to what is manageable later in the process.
When we first discussed the subject last year, we referred back to the words of Donald Dewar in his 1998 McEwan lecture on land tenure. The summary at the end of that lecture states that we should aim
“at the future, not the past”,
that we should try to “remove barriers to opportunity”, that we need to “increase diversity”, and that it is essential that we
“increase local involvement in decision-making.”
I presume that those aims are in line with the kind of things that you are thinking about just now.
Yes, I think so. I am looking forward to the debate being very different, in a sense, from that which took place in the 1990s, when we were focused on getting rid of feudal tenure and a few well-known case studies dominated the debate. Various things have happened since then that lead us to a different kind of debate.
First, community empowerment is a key issue for the wider public debate. People have always wanted to include urban areas in the debate about land reform, and our now having a common language with which we can speak across the different communities makes that easier. Secondly, the fact that we are in a recession means that questions can perhaps be asked more readily about such things as tax relief and subsidies, which would be asked in a different way in times of plenty. Thirdly, we now have 10 to 15 years’ experience of what happens when communities own their land, so we are starting from a very different base. I hope that we will have a different kind of discussion.
Indeed.
In that context, it is particularly welcome that the remit that we have been given and which has been agreed is extremely wide ranging. It is more wide ranging than many people, including me, would have anticipated some months ago, and that is very much to be welcomed. It touches on some of the points that Donald Dewar made the better part of 15 years ago. In particular, although it will be one of our key concerns to look at the operation of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, we will be expected to cast our net beyond that and into a range of other issues. As our remit says, we will have to have regard to urban as well as rural Scotland. Even in the rural context, we will not focus—as the whole movement towards community ownership has, so far, tended to focus—on the north-western corner of Scotland.
Indeed.
I should add that the north-western corner of Scotland is extremely important: let me not appear to disparage it in any way.
As a representative from that area, I agree.
Professor Hunter touched on the question that I was going to ask. In July 2012, the Scottish Government announced that it was setting up your review group. It stated that the group
“will oversee a wide ranging review of land reform in Scotland.”
How wide ranging will your review be? Are you going to be radical or just touching the edges?
It is a bit premature to outline what we will eventually say; we do not know that, at this stage. However, our aim is to be wide ranging, and when we issue the call for evidence that Alison Elliott mentioned—and which will happen fairly shortly—we expect to hear from groups and individuals from throughout Scotland who are involved in a wide range of issues relating to land. As I said, we will not confine our attention to issues of community ownership and the like, but will range way beyond that. The Scottish Government clearly expects us to do as our remit states, and the First Minister has said that the Government is looking for innovative and radical proposals across a wide swathe of the territory.
We are well aware that there is a lot of complexity. It is unlikely that we will provide draft legislative proposals on every single aspect that might be covered by our remit, but we certainly intend to look widely across the subject areas that fall within land reform in a general sense, and to look widely across Scotland territorially.
I know that you are drawing up your work programme and that you will call for evidence, but I would like to tease out what initial reforms you think are required.
Before the meeting, the convener pointed out that the process has been going on for 1,000 years, so it is not as though we are at the start of the process. We will wait and see where the concerns are. I do not want to close down the debate at the beginning by saying what we are going to do.
Our remit tries to unpack what “land reform” means. From listening to much of the debate, it sounds as though people have it in their minds that land reform is about community ownership in the north-west. Land reform tends to be thought of as a package, which diminishes the potential of the subject. The first three bullet points in our remit identify the different issues on which land reform touches. Fundamentally, it touches on the relationship between land and people. One way of being radical is to go back to the roots of what, in the past, we have thought land reform should be and what we think it should be in the present and the future. Land reform also touches on how land is owned and how it is used. We have been trying to unpack the issues, rather than talk about land reform as a package, and as if we knew exactly where the pinch points will be.
We recognise that the old agenda of community ownership is not finished and that we must keep it to the fore. However, I hope that we will extend that into the urban situation. I am fascinated by what is going on in the Borders. There is all the stuff about land reform up in the north, but things are happening in agricultural and rural areas in the south of Scotland, too. It will also be important to consider international comparisons.
It is fairly clear from our remit—and it is a self-evident fact—that Scotland has one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the world and—certainly—in Europe. Given the call for innovative and radical proposals and the fact that our remit says that one of our aims is to identify how land reform will
“Enable more people in rural and urban Scotland to have a stake in ... ownership”
and “governance”, one key area that we want to explore is how that pattern can be changed in the way that is indicated in our remit. In other words, we will want to explore ways in which the land ownership pattern can become less concentrated and, perhaps, more equitable.
I agree entirely with the convener and Jim Hunter that the north-west of Scotland is extremely important—it is almost as important, I suggest, as the south-west of Scotland, part of which I represent.
I was pleased to hear Jim Hunter say that current land reform, particularly in relation to community ownership, has tended to concentrate in the north-west. The response to land reform in the south of Scotland has been patchy and there has almost been a feeling that “This isn’t for us.” I would be grateful for your comments on the following question. You have already mentioned this in relation to urban areas, but is it part of your remit to positively and proactively find ways of encouraging greater community ownership in parts of Scotland other than the north-west, and to see how community ownership can be expanded elsewhere?
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I have read the stories of the impact of community ownership on communities, particularly in the Western Isles, and have seen communities being released from particular attitudes and from their feeling of being held back, so I think that we should, where possible, develop means of allowing communities to flourish in that way. Whether it happens through ownership of the land or through other ways of engaging and empowering communities is a much more interesting and detailed debate that we will need to have in the future. We should not go down the line of saying that there is only one answer to this question, because the question itself is actually many questions.
Given that we live in a time of limited financial resources, we have to examine all our resources, not only those that are tied up in the land, but those that are tied up in people. If we have not been able to release and use those resources to the best of our ability up to now, that is simply bad stewardship of people’s assets as well as of the land.
I understand entirely what you are saying and have a great deal of sympathy with most of your comments. I take it, however, that you are going into this exercise with the view that there are different ways of making changes, that you will look at all sorts of models and that you will be making it clear that this is not just about land ownership and that there are many other ways of empowering people to realise the potential of their communities and so on. Will you confirm that you are going into this with the attitude that not everything that exists is necessarily bad and that instead of just changing things, there are perfectly good examples around the country on which you might hope to build?
Absolutely. We are looking for positive ways forward, and if any exist we should certainly build on them. I come to this from being a member of the Christie commission, which was able to complete its work in six months only because good examples already existed. I imagine that the same will happen here, and that as we go around Scotland we will see examples of ways in which these things can be satisfied and try to build on them.
Finally, I recommend that you explore the south of Scotland. You might well see some things down there.
I very much look forward to that.
I simply confirm that we definitely want to look at how some of the very beneficial consequences of community ownership in the Highlands and Islands, particularly the Hebrides, can be extended to other parts of rural Scotland. The interesting thing is that, whether we are talking about Gigha, Knoydart, South Uist or whatever locality, the issue has not simply been about transferring ownership from an individual, consortium or some such to those communities. In every case—and in some cases more dramatically than in others—the move has served to unleash enterprise and initiative in sometimes remarkable ways. We have seen businesses flourish, populations rise and houses provided in areas where previous owners would not have built them. Clearly, there is scope for such initiative to emerge in other parts of the country.
However, I agree entirely with Alison Elliot. This is not to say that in the debate there are two poles—outright private ownership and community ownership. There will be—indeed, there must be—scope for variations between the two poles. There is no reason—in principle, anyway—why under private ownership there cannot be more community engagement and even blends of ownership of assets within a particular locality. There is quite a lot to be explored, and it is still early days.
Certainly, it would be a great pity—I know that the committee expressed this view when it looked at the subject not so long ago—if community ownership of land came to be regarded as being a bit like crofting: something exotic and different that exists only in a corner of Scotland and which has no relevance to other parts of Scotland. We must move away from that and look at how we get community ownership up and running in the south and south-west and, indeed, the north-east and other parts of the country.
Just for clarity, are you suggesting that this could be as much about empowerment as about ownership?
Yes. That said, there is an issue with regard to ownership, too. The ultimate form of empowerment is ownership of an asset. I am certainly not ruling it out, but there can be advances without advancing all the way to outright ownership.
Thank you.
Good morning. I wish to bring to everyone’s awareness the successful community buy-out in Comrie, the village in which I live in Perthshire. We bought out what was originally a prisoner of war camp and latterly an army training camp at Cultybraggan. I invite our witnesses to Comrie, too, to discuss the outcome thus far of that 2007 buy-out with the people who were most involved. They have a lot to say about not only the wider issues of empowerment but the process issues. When the committee looked at the issue last year, we identified some important process issues in the community buy-out procedure that require attention in order to facilitate better outcomes.
Professor Hunter said a moment ago that in his view the ultimate form of empowerment is likely to involve ownership of an asset. I was struck by that remark, because when Comrie voted to buy out the land at Cultybraggan, many people who were of a certain generation were thrilled because they had never owned any heritable property in their lives. They were proud to have reached that point in their lives and to see that huge societal change happen in their village.
The work that the witnesses have ahead of them will keep them busy. How will you collect evidence? Will you target certain organisations or groups? Will you issue a general call for evidence? I suspect that many people who would love to have discussions with your group may not, for whatever reason, make direct submissions to a call for evidence.
We are very conscious of that, and that if we visit one part of the country, people 50 miles along the road might say “Why didn’t you come to see us?” However, we cannot go everywhere.
On identifying and targeting people, we have spent the month of September with four of what we reckon to be the key players, just to introduce ourselves and to get a quick heads-up on what they expect from the review. We met Andy Wightman, Scottish Land & Estates Ltd and Community Land Scotland and we are meeting the Development Trusts Association Scotland next week. We reckon that we will, for various reasons, bump into those people throughout the year.
We made a general call for evidence because interesting ideas often come from people who are not in the mainstream, so we hope that we will be able to identify good things from that. We hope that our advisers will point us to specific areas, good examples and particular people whom we should see. I have a list of key people with whom I want to have conversation, including the Scottish Law Commission, which works in a specialised area. Those people not only know what the law is, but know how it might be changed.
When I was appointed to this position, over the summer, I was telling people about it and everybody had a story about land reform. The issue is pervasive, so we are getting a lot of people requesting that we visit them. I do not know how we will do that, but it will have to be in conjunction with, and under advice from, our advisers, secretariat and support team. We certainly mean to be active and visible, and to cover as much of the country as we can. It is a great opportunity and we are looking forward to seeing what is happening. You can read reports until you are blue in the face but, as you all know, it is crucial that we see from different perspectives what Scotland is like.
It will certainly help the tourism industry if you take all your advisers during the shoulder season to visit different parts of Scotland.
Good morning to you both. From my perspective, is it heartening to hear the points that you have made about the questions that were previously asked by the committee.
I do not want to be critical, but I have a particular concern about the focus on the north-west. As one of the members who went on the committee’s visit to Gigha, I was completely inspired but, in representing South Scotland, I am concerned about the lack of understanding about the possibilities. How might you engage with communities in the Borders, Clydesdale and the south-west that do not necessarily know what the possibilities are?
On Gigha, we were told that it was not until the people there had visited Eigg—I think it was Eigg; I might be wrong—that they understood the opportunities, how they could take the land into their own hands and the structures that would allow them to do that. How might that be tackled?
How, if it is appropriate to ask—I do not know whether it is—have the advisers been appointed or how will they be appointed? How widely are those positions advertised, including in terms of geography and equality? I am aware of the group’s remit, but I would like you to shed some light on the appointments process.
I will deal with the question about the advisers. We are conscious that people from all kinds of places want to give us advice, so we will not be short of that. Therefore, we had to think a bit about what the adviser’s role would be relative to the other sources of information. We took the position that we will go to particular lobby groups when we want their party line. We do not need advisers to wear particular hats, so we have said explicitly to them that they are there as individuals who have specific experience and backgrounds because we want advisers who can help to move the subject, and us, on. They must be free to change their own minds as the process goes on. We have identified a large group.
We did not advertise; we built up a set of names that had, in a sense, been provided for us by the Scottish Government’s rural affairs department. We have identified a dozen people. I have a list of the areas that they cover—most of them wear more than one hat. They are land research, agriculture, the Highlands and Islands, economics, crofting, planning, access, urban studies, legal questions, rural development, forestry and community woodlands, estate management, land ownership, and urban community development. We also have a chartered surveyor.
We are spreading the work as widely as we can among the advisers. Their job is to be at the end of the phone when we need them, to come with us—not all at once, despite the convener’s suggestion—when we make visits and need their support, and to point us in the direction of other people.
We were also hoping that the advisers might set up things like expert seminars for us, which would involve identifying people who could brief us on particular matters. We are very excited about our list of advisers—I wish that we could tell you who they are.
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I very much agree. It is hugely helpful for people on the ground to see at first hand what similar groups of people have done. In fact, I do not think that there is anything better for fostering a sense of the possibilities in this whole area.
Claudia Beamish is right that the people in Gigha, who began by being somewhat sceptical and in some cases hostile to the notion of community ownership, were convinced that it might be something that they could go for when they saw what was already happening on Eigg, which was one of the first instances of community ownership—it goes back to 1997, while it happened in Gigha in 2002. It would be helpful if there were mechanisms that enabled people in other parts of Scotland to look at some of those instances.
What has also been hugely helpful in the Highlands and Islands has been the role of what used to be called the community land unit in Highlands and Islands Enterprise—an organisation about which I am not totally unbiased since I was its chair for some years. That unit and the agency itself have been helpful in fostering that contact and in providing information, back-up and, of course, financial assistance. That was and remains important.
This is not a criticism of Scottish Enterprise or other agencies, but it is simply a fact that the rest of Scotland—particularly perhaps the southern half of Scotland, in the Borders and the south-west—shares many of the difficulties of the Highlands. In fact, the south-west exhibits rural deprivation in a much more extreme form than most of the Highlands. Those areas have lacked an organisation such as HIE. That has been disadvantageous in this context, and it is something that could be looked at.
Further reflecting on Alex Fergusson’s point, it is extremely important to note that the aim of getting communities engaged with land is not simply about transferring land in private ownership to communities. It has also been—and must be in future—about transferring land in public ownership to communities. If the Scottish Government wishes to foster such developments, it must be made easier for communities to take ownership of the vast tracts of Scotland that are in the ownership not of private landlords but of the Scottish Government or its agencies. No doubt that is something that we will be examining.
I have a broader question about your remit. It might be asking too much, but will there be an opportunity to look at models in other countries? Is that something that you are considering?
Fact-finding missions to exotic parts of the world, especially in December and January, would be extremely welcome.
We have to look at models in other countries. Land reform is an issue in which there are a lot of fault lines, and one way of dealing with a fault line is to raise the game or look outside. When two areas are at loggerheads, we have to be able to demonstrate that it does not always have to be like that. Often, the way to do that is by showing how things work in other countries.
I will be more serious about the question. Constant references are made to other countries where, it is alleged, things are done better than they are here—I made one myself by saying that we have a more concentrated pattern of ownership than other countries. It is important to try to understand a little more about ownership in other countries and how it has evolved.
It is also important to try to understand how ownership patterns in the British isles have changed at the instigation of British Governments. The most glaring example is Ireland, which has a very different pattern of ownership from Scotland because of land reforms that were instigated not by Irish Governments but, before Irish Governments existed, by British Governments at the end of the 19th century and in the early part of the 20th century. One might wonder whether the Irish model is better or worse and whether it helps with community development.
Of course, there have been many changes in Scotland that are not well understood. If we go back 100 years, we find that almost all the agricultural land in Scotland was tenanted, but today a considerable proportion of it is owner occupied. Has that change, which usually happened without state intervention, been for the better? Is Orkney a more prosperous place because it has an entirely owner-occupied farming structure, as some would suggest? Is that one reason why it is a relatively prosperous and successful rural community in comparison with other communities where that structure does not prevail?
Those questions have perhaps not been as fully explored as they might be, and they could be looked into.
How do you articulate your work with industry bodies such as the tenant farming forum and the rent review group?
I see our work as being complementary to theirs and to the proposed community empowerment bill, which will go through the Parliament at the same time as we do our work. I hope that there will be positive feedback from one to the other. We will have to take advice from civil servants and other people who understand how to get the information.
Is the plan to produce the final draft report and send it to ministers by December 2013?
Yes.
Given your wide-ranging remit, the importance of the subject and the workload it sounds as if you are taking on, are you operating to an achievable timetable?
Part of the task is to make it achievable. We will have to whittle down the task.
One of the dangers of making the remit wide to begin with is that people will be disappointed if we do not pick up everything that comes along. We hope that we will be able to recast and focus the work by Easter next year and then go into a second phase of testing out the detail and specific proposals in the areas that we will consider. We hope that we will be able to pick up on issues that it seems feasible to address and in which there are already some proposals for how to develop land reform or on which we have our own proposals.
Can you do justice to the subject in the 14 months that you have?
Not when the issue has been around for a thousand years. We will just have to cut the cloth to suit the timescale. We are not pretending that our work will be comprehensive, because it cannot possibly be comprehensive, but I hope that it will be wide ranging in the sense that it will not simply be focused on closing down the conversation at the beginning. It is all ahead, I am afraid.
We should clarify that we have been asked to provide a draft report by the end of next calendar year and a final report by April 2014, so there is a little longer than you indicate, Mr Dey.
We are under no illusions that it is a very big task and, as Alison Elliot said, we certainly do not expect to produce something that is utterly definitive on all aspects of the issue. We envisage that we will produce something that is fairly wide ranging, or at least as wide ranging and comprehensive as we can make it. It will be up to Government—and yourselves, no doubt—to take the process on from there.
Part of the report will highlight the areas that need to be looked at and how those issues should be taken forward.
Thank you.
Much of this morning’s discussion has focused on communities, empowerment and ownership. How will you go about examining the current legislation? Have you already looked at it? You mentioned that the Law Society of Scotland will be one of your contacts.
Can you also give us more information on how you will look at the issue of attracting new entrants into farming?
With regard to the present legislation, the overview of the 2003 act’s impact has been a helpful starting point for us. We are already picking up a lot of issues from our informal preliminary conversations, and there seems to be a wide consensus on where the difficulties are and where pressure needs to be applied in order to move forward. That includes the report that the previous Rural Affairs and Environment Committee produced, which indicated the areas that needed to be examined.
If you are asking whether we should draft the legislation, I suspect that we should not. I am conscious that we need advice from people who understand how to do that in relation to the proposals that we make. Part of our remit says that we have to come up with proposals that are sustainable and testable, so we will be putting them through the mill.
You asked about another issue—
It was about how we attract new entrants into the farming industry.
Perhaps Jim Hunter has some ideas on that.
I will first go back to the current legislation. The review that the Scottish Government published at the same time as we were appointed, and the previous committee’s investigations as well as other investigations, have highlighted some areas of concern in relation to the 2003 act in particular. Those do not relate so much to the access provisions in section 1, as—although improvements can be made to anything—there seems generally to be a fair degree of satisfaction with those provisions.
There are particular issues with section 3 of the 2003 act, which gives crofting communities the right to purchase crofting land on a community basis. There is no doubt that the act created a climate of opinion that facilitated the transfer of some crofting—or essentially crofting—estates such as South Uist and Galson on Lewis to community ownership. Ultimately, however, that took place through a process of negotiation and with a willing seller. Some of the sellers have initially been less willing than others. There is no doubt that, as experience has shown in the case of the Park estate in Lewis, section 3 of the 2003 act does not seem to be capable of delivering—and is certainly not delivering in any reasonable timescale—what the Parliament intended when it passed the act.
The detailed provisions of the act on mapping and other requirements are such that some lawyers have said that they are arguably impossible to achieve. There are areas of concern, and we would seek to make some comment on them.
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The issue of attracting new entrants into agriculture—whether as tenants or as owners—is a difficult one and it would be ludicrous to suggest that we are going to solve a problem that exists not only in Scotland but throughout the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond. We have an ageing farming population, very high land prices and a reducing number of tenancies. It is a difficult and intractable issue, although it is an important one to which we need to give some thought and on which we need to hear what people have to say.
We will look at the issue of new entrants and try to establish how land reform in the widest sense can contribute positively to making the situation a bit easier than it currently is. There are all sorts of difficulties because of the nature of agricultural support from Europe, the capitalisation of that in land values, and the high cost of entry to agriculture, all of which make it a difficult issue. It would be rash to say that we are going to solve it between now and the end of next year, but we will give it consideration.
Good morning. The review group is at an early stage, and we look forward to having sight of your work plan and list of advisers as soon as you can release them.
Some prime examples of good practice have been mentioned, not the least of which is the North Harris estate, where an agreement has resulted in the estate being community run while Amhuinnsuidhe castle continues as a stand-alone private enterprise. The two seem to be working quite harmoniously together. Other examples, such as Gigha, have been mentioned.
I was previously a member of the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, which recently oversaw the passage of the Land Registration etc (Scotland) Bill. As part of your remit, will you look at ways to encourage increased land registration? That is the purpose of the legislation.
I have one other question, on reporting back to the committee. How often do you expect to update the committee, and when can we expect further details?
We have not discussed land registration. There are other aspects of legislation, which are either current or have happened since the 2003 act, that we need to get our minds round. I have not done that so far, but it is on the agenda for us to dig into that.
We expect to come up with an interim report around Easter, in which we hope to make some proposals that could be implemented immediately instead of waiting until the end of the review. That will be an interim report. We also expect to come up with some thought pieces and writing at various points, and we can share those with the committee.
As it is an area in which everyone is anxious to hear what is going on, we do not want to set any hares running by suggesting that we are going to solve or address a particular problem. We want to allow our thinking to develop over the whole piece, given that it is such a large subject. We are a bit cautious of saying that our thinking is developing in any particular way but, in so far as we can say that and it is a reasonably honest way of proceeding, we are happy to be open with the committee about that.
I have a general question on a subject that Professor Hunter has been involved in for a long while. I refer to the European convention on human rights, which is pertinent today given not only the article relating to the enjoyment of private property but the view that the state can
“enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest”.
It seems that, in some cases, the question of the general interest is in the courts—as we know from a tenancy case. I wonder whether you and your legal advisers have had thoughts about how that general interest might be expressed in a more specific fashion in your overall workings.
The short answer is that we have not investigated that, but obviously we are well aware that we need to give consideration to the issue.
I tend to take the view that the ECHR is not as insuperable a barrier to change in this area as is sometimes suggested, although I will hesitate and not say anything categorical until we have thought about it further. However, it is clearly the case that Government can limit the enjoyment of property in the public interest and that it does so all the time in all sorts of ways through planning constraint, environmental legislation and much else. The days when the owner of a piece of land could do whatever he or she liked with it are, for better or worse, long gone.
There is a lot of precedent in Scotland—admittedly, some of it antedates the ECHR, but not all of it does—that facilitates and seeks to bring about changes of ownership, and the rest, in the public interest. The ECHR should not be regarded as an insuperable obstacle, but the issue requires some detailed consideration, as you are well aware.
Thank you. It is important to put on the record that we are dealing with fundamental issues relating to the legal status of ownership, tenancy and so on, and that they are some of the most important things that you will deal with in the whole process.
Like other members who expressed concerns about the tenancy, I am reassured to hear that the land reform review group will have some focus on that very complex issue.
Following on from Margaret McDougall’s question about new entrants to farming, I am interested more broadly in whether you have looked at how you will reach out to young people across Scotland in, for example, urban and the ex-mining areas. Those areas are quite deprived and there are a lot of isolated young people in them who are cut off from services and may not know how they might become more empowered. I have been a teacher and a youth worker, and I suspect that those young people would want to grasp opportunities if they knew that they were there for them. Will you comment on that, and do you have any young advisers in your midst?
I have had a conversation with people from Young Scot who are keen to get involved and find a way of engaging people across Scotland.
How young is “young” when it comes to advisers? We will have to wait and see.
One really encouraging thing that has happened in some of the localities that have gone into community ownership is that opportunities have opened up for younger people. For example, when Gigha went into community ownership, there was nobody in their 20s, 30s or possibly even early 40s living on the island. Now, there are quite a few people in those age groups. The same is true of Knoydart.
That has happened largely because under the new ownership arrangements it has been possible for those folk to get business premises and, indeed, living accommodation, in a way that was not possible under the previous dispensation. That is positive in this context because I am well aware that, whether we are talking about rural development or any other kind of development, the key demographic is people in their 20s and 30s.
Of course, we have seen a lot of population movement. The population structure in rural Scotland today is entirely different from what it was in the past—and by the past I mean as recently as 40 or 50 years ago. The change has happened for all sorts of reasons, and it is a general phenomenon across the developed world. Social scientists refer to it as counterurbanisation, and it involves people moving out of towns and cities to live as commuters or second home owners, or to retire to the countryside.
That process is fine except that, particularly in the remoter parts of rural Scotland, such people tend to be older. Speaking as one who is well into his 60s, I do not mean that those people should be written off, but one of the absolutely fundamental issues with the development of rural communities is that we have to make it easier for younger people to find opportunities and somewhere to live, whether or not they have their roots in the communities.
There is a very basic problem in this context; no doubt we will consider it, and the committee has also looked at it. There is an undoubted lack of so-called affordable housing or indeed housing of any kind in many localities. At the back of that is an even more fundamental question of what society in Scotland, including the Scottish Government and Parliament, thinks about rural Scotland. What is it for? Is it ultimately somewhere nice where people from urban Scotland can go for a day out or have a holiday home or retirement home, or is it somewhere that can be dynamic and provide opportunities for people economically and otherwise? Needless to say, I tend towards the latter view rather than the former, but it is a very basic issue that underlies a lot of what we will consider during the next 18 months or so.
It is a paradox. A lot of people want to live in the countryside but they do not want to do the dirty jobs, which can be very rewarding but require physical work.
I have a two-part question but, if I may, I will start by saying that I sympathise with Jim Hunter about people in their 60s. There is nothing wrong with us and we still have a lot to offer.
I am slightly concerned by what you said about new entrants, not because of what you said but because, as I am sure you know, a lot of other people are working on the problem, as is the case in some of the other areas that you will be looking at. What steps can you take to avoid duplication of effort in those areas? You obviously do not want to waste time, so how will you go about working with others who are already working is this field?
Secondly, the subject of Gigha has quite understandably come up a lot this morning. Jim Hunter referred to the fact that it required quite an input of public funding to get the project off the ground. Has any constriction been put on the amount of public funding that might be required as a result of the recommendations that you might make? Is that something that you will have to think about when you consider the recommendations you might make, or is the public purse an open book at this stage?
I do not think that the public purse is an open book. We are being asked to do some indicative economic analysis of the impact of our recommendations, and we will work to that.
What was the first question?
It was on how we avoid duplication.
We will just keep trying to have 360° vision on that, but we would welcome comments from members of the committee. If you see an issue or process coming up in the Parliament that is relevant to our work, please alert us to it and introduce us to who is doing it, and we will work as closely as we can with them to avoid duplication.
11:00
I want to touch on the question of cost. You were right to say that money was invested in Gigha to bring about the change of ownership, but it is important not to exaggerate the cost.
Something like half a million acres have gone into community ownership in the Highlands and Islands since the Assynt buyout of 1992. The cost of bringing about that ownership change to the public purse and to the lottery—quite a lot has been lottery money instead of taxpayers’ money—is the same as the cost of 600yd of the Edinburgh tramway. I am not suggesting for a moment that the money that has been spent on the tramway has been misspent, but it indicates that the cost of community ownership is sometimes exaggerated.
The cost of that 500,000 acres is also equivalent to the amount that goes to landowners and farmers in the UK by way of agricultural subsidy every two or three days, so one should not exaggerate the amount of public money that has been invested in the process so far. One should consider that amount, which in the greater scheme of things is not very substantial, against the tremendous benefits that have been secured because of the development of communities and the opportunities that have been opened up for them.
I thank the witnesses for their evidence. We have had a useful scoping session that has opened up all sorts of possibilities for our co-operation with you and for us getting updates as we go along. I thank you for your contribution this morning.
11:02
Meeting suspended.
11:07
On resuming—