Chamber and committees

I will restrict my comments mainly to amendments in my name.

I start with amendment 30. I discussed various issues with Community Land Scotland, and I agreed with it that there could be greater structure and certainty as to how land management plans can be effectively and meaningfully monitored. That is important for the landowner, who needs a clear, fair and proportionate approach to monitoring, as well as for the land and communities commissioner—and, potentially, others.

Amendment 30 seeks to provide greater clarity for landowners on how plans will be delivered and monitored. I am confident that landowners will wish to ensure that land management plans deliver on the intended outcomes, but that must always be able to be demonstrated in a proportionate way. Therefore, amendment 30 would require details to be provided on

“how the plan will be implemented ... who is responsible for the implementation of the plan ... how the implementation of the plan will be monitored”

and

“how the actions and outcomes of the plan will be reported on.”

Amendment 30 is linked to amendment 33, which we discussed in group 2 last week and which would have allowed the commissioner to publish guidance on how owners are to comply with the requirements that are mentioned in proposed new section 44B(3) of the 2016 act, which sets out the information that the land management plan must contain.

I said that I would not move amendment 33 and that I would work with the Scottish Government on the policy intent, if not the detail, of that amendment, so I would like to hear the Government’s views on the policy intent behind amendment 30.

Amendment 31 would allow for regulations made under proposed new section 44A of the 2016 act to make further provisions about the publication of plans by a public body, as mentioned in proposed new subsection (1)(aa). That is linked to amendment 17, which we discussed last week and would have required land management plans to be accessible and published online. Again, I agreed not to move amendment 17 to see whether we could deliver jointly on the policy intent ahead of stage 3. I would be inclined to take a similar view on amendment 31.

On amendment 31, I am genuinely interested in Mr Eagle’s comments. I think that he made the same comments last week about it being inappropriate for the publication of land management plans to reveal commercial information. I could be wrong, but it was my understanding that land management plans had to be available to interested parties. How could an interested party report a potential breach to the land and communities commissioner unless the plans were published and accessible? That being the case, I do not understand why publishing the plans and making them accessible in an online format would be commercially inappropriate compared with publishing them and making them accessible in other ways. I am happy to take an intervention on that point, if Mr Eagle wants to elaborate. I think that there has been some muddled thinking on that, so he might want to think about that more and come back on that.

Amendment 32 would allow the Scottish Government to set out in regulations the detailed requirements with regard to how landowners must comply with their obligations in relation to land management plans. For example, when the ownership of land is transferred, one of the matters that the committee discussed during its stage 1 scrutiny was what the status of any land management plan should be if the land is subsequently sold. For instance, would the new owner simply inherit the obligations in the original plan? These regulations would set out the requirements for new owners and could cover other scenarios, such as when a landowner who owns an amount of land that is under the threshold purchases an adjacent holding, bringing them into the scope of the bill’s provisions.

Future regulations could provide the owner with a grace period of, for instance, a year, within which the landowner would have the option of either keeping the existing land management plan or consulting on a new one. That would appear to be a reasonable approach. I recognise that it would be best to set out a great deal of the detail in that regard in future regulations, which could be developed with the benefit of consultation. It is appropriate that the bill does not prescribe the detail of the manner in which the obligations in proposed new section 44B(1) on land management plans must be complied with.

Accordingly, I ask the committee to support amendment 32 and to give consideration to the other amendments in the group that are in my name.

My apologies, convener—I did not want to interrupt your train of thought. I am glad that you arrived at your destination.

I will just take this opportunity to highlight my amendment 31 in group 7, which is associated with amendments 16 and 17, and seeks to give the Scottish Government the power though regulations to knit all of this together and make it work in a proportionate way. I should have mentioned that in the debate on group 2, but I did not.

I will also say to the convener that there is a policy intent here, and I will listen with interest to what the Scottish Government says in relation to this. There are many ways to skin a cat. The policy intent is that the plans must be publicly accessible, not simply available. Finding a plan should not be burdensome, just as it should not be burdensome for the landowner to produce it.

I am listening with interest. I am an urban MSP, and we can all think of sites that would benefit from additional provisions. Do local place plans have a role here? Local place plans are developed by the planning authority at a local level in consultation with the community. If a community has identified areas of particular community significance that require action, could that, in theory, be a trigger for additional requirements in relation to land management plans? I am just thinking about that as I hear more of what you say, deputy convener.

I will restrict myself to speaking about amendment 22 and you will be pleased to hear that I will speak briefly.

Regarding land management plans, section 44A gives ministers the power to impose obligations on large landholdings and section 44D specifies the land in relation to which those obligations will be imposed. Amendment 22 would ensure that, if the Scottish ministers decided, for any reason, to exclude certain types of land that would otherwise have obligations placed on them, they

“must, when laying the regulations, publish a statement setting out their reasons for not imposing the obligations on the land”.

I met representatives of Community Land Scotland who thought that that would be an important addition. The amendment would simply put the need for clarity and transparency into the legislation.

Having spoken to the cabinet secretary ahead of lodging amendment 22, I was reassured that the Scottish Government would provide a rationale as a matter of course, without statutory compulsion to do so. That said, amendment 22 looks to future proof the matter, should other Governments take a different approach.

I ask members to support amendment 22.

The costs for landowners will be in the development and publication of land management plans, and the requirements for that are already in the bill. As has been outlined, there are regulations in the bill that specify the format that the land management plans must use. An obligation to then pass the plans, in the prescribed format, to the relevant public body should add no costs at all. I will listen carefully to the Scottish Government’s position on any associated costs for the public body, how those costs could be absorbed into that body’s budget and whether those costs could be covered elsewhere. However, I do not see my amendments’ proposals leading to any substantial costs at all.

My amendment 20 ensures that, in the development of land management plans, not only will communities be consulted, but that

“there is engagement with any tenants, crofters or small landholders with rights associated with the land on the development of, and significant changes to, the plan”.

I have worked on a number of my amendments with Community Land Scotland, which has noted to me that one example of where engagement would be essential is where tenant farmers are required to produce whole-farm plans as a condition of receiving support payments, because, in theory, those plans could conflict with a landlord’s land management plan. Clearly, if land management plans are to be strategic—and, of course, they should be—it can be anticipated that landowners would engage meaningfully with all who have rights associated with the land. Amendment 20 ensures that that must happen.

My amendment 33 would allow the land and communities commissioner to

“publish guidance on how owners are to comply with requirements mentioned in section 44B(3)”,

which sets out the information that a land management plan must contain. Such guidance would give landowners more clarity or certainty—which they deserve—on how the requirements are to be met. I have lodged amendment 33 because it complements my amendment 30 on the monitoring of land management plans; that will be considered later, in group 7.

I ask all members and the Government to give consideration to all my amendments in this group.

I will limit myself to speaking to the amendments in my name.

Amendments 16 and 17 together ensure that land management plans are not only available, as is already specified in the bill, but accessible. To that end, amendment 17 would require the plans to be published

“online by a public body to be specified in the regulations by the Scottish Ministers”,

that is, the regulations that ministers could make under new section 44A of the 2016 act, as inserted by section 1 of the bill.

My view is that all land management plans should be accessible—that is very different from them simply being available—and hosted by a public body in one place online, irrespective of which land management plan, from anywhere in the country, an individual wishes to find. A plan should not be like a needle in a haystack but should be signposted clearly and be searchable online.

I have not specified which public body should be given responsibility for publishing the plans online, because I assume that the Scottish Government would wish to discuss that responsibility with a public body that it considers could offer an appropriate online host site for all land management plans. It might make sense for that public body to be the Scottish Land Commission; however, although the amendment is clear on the need for land management plans to be accessible on an online platform, it does not prescribe the host.

I note that there is an associated amendment to section 31 in group 7, which we will come on to later today or another day.

I have listened carefully to what Rhoda Grant has said about 10 years being a good period for land management plans. Does the member believe that land management plans should be monitored on an on-going basis? Should the way that that monitoring is to take place be specified in the plan itself? If we get five years into a land management plan and the landowner has not sought to work out whether they are achieving the aims and objectives set out in their plan, that would be an issue, whether it comes after three, five, seven or 10 years. Would Rhoda Grant agree that, however long land management plans last for, there must be built-in monitoring as a matter of course?

Will the member take an intervention?

I am sure that you know this already, convener, but I want to draw attention to my amendment 32 in group 7, which looks specifically at the transfer of land from one owner to another and appropriate transitional arrangements. I hope that I will get your support for it when we reach group 7.

I wonder whether there is a definition of “local community” and whether there is a scale. Would a cluster of five or six houses near a proposed development count as a local community or would it need to be a wider area? We could have a situation in which a relatively small number of people with a theoretical population density in a remote area could block quite a large development. Is that the intention of the amendment?