Chamber and committees

Do you think that hare coursing is still a problem in Scotland?

Do any other witnesses wish to come in? I suggested Robbie Marsland, but others may wish to come in, too.

I thanks members for staying this late in the evening for the debate.

Since its re-establishment, this Parliament has helped empower many communities, beginning to address centuries of injustice in the way that land has so often been gifted, sold and, sometimes, neglected.

Around 57 per cent of Scotland’s rural land is in private hands. I should say that many of those landowners work hard to develop their estates and engage reasonably with the communities who live and work on them. However, that is not the case when the landlord turns out to be an absentee with no visible plans for the estate other than the extraction of money.

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 seek to ensure that landowners uphold their responsibilities and, particularly if they are not doing that, provide a legal basis for communities to negotiate a purchase of the land.

The island of Great Bernera has been connected by a short bridge to the west coast of Lewis since 1953. The construction of that bridge, incidentally, came about only after islanders threatened to create their own informal causeway by obtaining their own explosives.

The people of Bernera have a long history of having to battle for their own rights. In the 1874 Bernera riot, crofters resisted the forced evictions that their then landlord attempted as part of the wider Highland clearances. Bernera’s crofters eventually won their case against that landlord in court.

In 1972, the islands of Great and Little Bernera were bought by Count Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees, a colourful man whose wartime exploits in the Balkans were said to have partly inspired the character of James Bond in his friend Ian Fleming’s novels. His title as a count was bestowed—I understand—by the Government of San Marino. All that said, the count led a fairly simple life on the island, where I visited him a couple of times. He died in 2012, leaving the islands to his grandson—Cyran de la Lanne—in Germany, but told islanders that they should have the first option of buying the island should it ever be put up for sale.

In 2015, 85 per cent of Bernera’s residents voted in favour of a community buyout. The district valuer set a sale figure of £70,000, reflecting the island’s status under crofting tenure. However, the family of the owner considered that sum too low. Despite numerous efforts by islanders, some of whom visited the owner in Germany in 2017, negotiations did not get very far. There was an intention to purchase through a combination of grants from various sources, but the de la Lanne family stalled, not naming a price at which they would be willing to sell.

In 2020, the Great Bernera Community Development Trust began the process of pursuing a crofting community buyout. In March, I contacted Bernera’s landlord with a request to meet him to discuss the various barriers that the estate was by then reported to be putting in place, hampering local development and blocking legitimate transactions with tenants.

After an initial agreement to meet, my office has followed up three further times to be told that currently “there are no suitable dates” for Mr de la Lanne and his father but that they might get back in touch “shortly”. That tactic has, I understand, been employed repeatedly regarding the island’s buyout efforts, as well as with individual tenants.

One Bernera crofter, Mr Neil MacAulay, has been seeking to exercise his legal right to purchase his own croft for a number of years. I am told that, rather than respond to any emails about that, Bernera’s landlord has simply ignored him. Mr MacAulay’s daughters want to move to Bernera with their young families and hope to build long-term homes on their father’s croft. However, they cannot do that until their father is allowed to buy it, which generally requires the co-operation of the landlord. The family’s next step may involve the courts.

Another constituent, Mr Ian Murdo Macdonald, had been hoping to retire to his family home in Bernera but instead had to put the property on the market to pay for his late mother’s care home fees. For 18 months, Bernera estate refused to agree to its formal decrofting to allow the sale until Mr Macdonald was prepared to cough up the completely arbitrary sum of £16,000, adding significant stress to an already difficult situation. That kind of sum might not mean very much to an absentee landlord, but it is impossible for most people to magic it out of thin air. I should also say that that practice is unheard of on other estates.

My constituent stood his ground and the landlord has now, finally, agreed to allow the sale to be finalised without that completely unjustifiable fee. However, unless something changes soon, Bernera’s population will continue to decline. The island’s school and shop have both closed in recent years and although there are young families who want to move back to the area, the lack of scope for local development under the current owner means that it is impossible to reverse the island’s depopulation by building any new affordable housing.

Part 3 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 provides for a hostile bid by a community. That route has never been taken, although it has been threatened previously where landlords were seen to be particularly unco-operative. The owner of Bernera seems to be determined to paint himself into that corner.

I hope that the minister may be able to say something in summing up about the contact that the Government, its officials and the Scottish land fund are able to have with my constituents to try to resolve the situation. According to the Scottish land fund, private estates in Scotland stay in the hands of the same families for an average of 122 years. I sincerely hope that that does not prove to be the case with Bernera.

The island of Bernera should belong to the people who live there and to those whose families have worked the land there and fished from the surrounding seas for generations. Morally and culturally, the land is, of course, already theirs; we must now continue to do all that we can to support the Great Bernera Community Development Trust to successfully take legal ownership so that the island’s community can begin to develop and thrive once again.

My next question might also be a loaded one. You have pointed to history and said that, in the past, people at the UK level would not want to have been seen not to care about the view of devolved legislatures, so how do we cope with it when they do not?

Please do not take this question as unduly loaded or cynical, but it relates to some of the things that the committee has been looking at. Just on the context, is any dispute mechanism that is designed to fix the problems unduly hampered if the UK can fall back on residual powers simply to legislate in devolved areas to solve a problem that it sees? I do not expect you to solve that issue but, given that there has been a debate about the circumstances in which that can and should be done and about what constitutes normal circumstances, how does that context impinge on this whole discussion?

I have a supplementary question about innovation. When Mr Yousaf was before the committee, we talked about how to ensure that there is buy-in to social prescribing and spending to save, not just in Government—which there clearly is—but in agencies that deliver healthcare, not least the health boards. What work is being done to ensure that there is, in health boards, the cultural change that would facilitate that?

No, thank you—I am afraid that I must leave.

I do not know whether anyone else wants in on that point.

My understanding is that the bill allows for that activity. Maybe we can talk about that with the next panel, too.

So, the people who practise agriculture on your land have never felt the need to dispatch a wild mammal other than by shooting.