Chamber and committees

Our second item of business is our final evidence-taking session on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. I am pleased to welcome Mairi Gougeon, the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands, and her supporting officials from the Scottish Government: Andy—Andrew, I mean; sorry—Proudfoot, bill team leader, and Keith White, solicitor. Thank you for attending. I also welcome Rhoda Grant to the meeting.

Before we go into the main part of the meeting, I will, as I have done at every meeting on the bill, declare an interest in a family farming partnership in Moray, as set out in my entry in the register of members’ interests. Specifically, I declare an interest as the owner of approximately 500 acres of farmland, of which approximately 50 acres is woodland; I also declare that I am a tenant of approximately 500 acres in Moray under a non-agricultural tenancy, and that I have another farming tenancy under the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991. I also declare that I sometimes take on annual grass lets.

Before we move to questions, the cabinet secretary will make a brief opening statement.

The process has been long and we have heard a lot of evidence from a wide variety of people. Your wish is for the bill to achieve four things: to improve the transparency around land ownership and management; to strengthen communities’ rights; to improve the sustainable development of communities by increasing opportunities; and to ensure the sufficient and adequate supply of land—I think that that encapsulates your views. Bearing that in mind, the majority of people who have come to the committee to give evidence say that the bill will achieve no such thing. What is your response to them?

It would, especially as carbon credits are usually based on a long period of 50 to 100 years. The applicant would be entering a lease of up to 100 years, which would then, in your word, hamstring someone for the next 100 years. The lease would set out what can and cannot be done. In my mind, that makes it a bit of a questionable activity, and I do not understand it. It would have been helpful for me to have seen a lease in the bill so that I could understand it. Once you start fiddling around with legislation after it has been passed, you distort the land rental market, do you not?

I am not convinced, but I hear your arguments. The next question is from Kevin Stewart.

I have a couple of further questions. Rent reviews are very difficult; sometimes it is just a case of sitting down to agree them. You have proposed a change in the wording, and I know that the committee is going to write to you, cabinet secretary, about section 13 of the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991, which, I am sure, you will be delighted about. The bill uses the phrase “similar holdings”, rather than the current “comparable holdings”. Why have you proposed that change, and what is the difference?

That is quite tortuous at the moment, is it not? My experience makes me ask whether the bill provides a chance to level the playing field for both parties.

I have never seen that working to any extent, but there you go.

Douglas Lumsden has a question.

I am glad that you clarified that, because it could have ended up with lots of correspondence coming to the committee. When the Government introduces its crofting reform bill, perhaps it will clarify which of the three acts on crofting we are supposed to be working under, and will resolve all the sump issues that were brought up years ago. It will all be easier, and small landholders will then be able to decide whether they want to become crofters.

We have come to the end of our evidence session. Much to my annoyance, we have skipped over some questions. Cabinet secretary, we will send you those in writing, and I ask that you respond to them fairly quickly. Fiona—if you respond to Rhoda Grant, I ask that you do so through the committee, and we will ensure that she receives the answers to her questions.

We will now have a short break from land reform matters before we start considering our stage 1 report, which I am sure will be a lengthy but interesting process. We will make a start on that in roughly two weeks’ time.

I thank our witnesses very much for their evidence. I suspend the meeting for five minutes.

That was done by the Scottish Land Commission, which has come up with a whole heap of recommendations post the bill’s publication. You listened to the commission before, but you have not listened to it on the bill.

Anyway, there are lots of follow-up questions. Kevin Stewart will be first.

One of the things that I have found difficult is that the Scottish Land Commission, which I assume you spoke to before you introduced the bill—you certainly pay it £1.5 million to give the Government advice—disagreed with the proposals and has come up with a whole list of additional evidence. Surely that is not helpful. Surely that evidence should have come in before the bill was introduced. Why do you ignore the concerns that the Scottish Land Commission says that it has had for some time?