Half of Scotland will remain a playground for super-rich landowners to add to their empires under weak land reform plans, an MSP had warned.
Labour’s Mercedes Villalba, who tabled her own far tougher proposals to crack down on land monopolies, hit out at the “watered down” SNP legislation. Branding the Scottish Government’s flagship Land Reform Bill a disappointment, she said it will do nothing to prevent continued “land-grabs” by billionaires, particularly in areas like the Highlands.
Scotland has some of the most concentrated land ownership in the western world with half of all private Scots land owned – astonishingly – by just 400 people. It follows previous bids to reform who owns land in Scotland to make it fairer and less of a monopoly for the rich – all of which campaigners say have fallen short.
In a letter to Holyrood’s Net Zero Committee, Villalba said this is a “centuries-old” problem. She wrote in her submission to MSPs: “The extraordinarily high concentration of land in the hands of so few must be urgently addressed if we wish to build a fairer Scotland for families and communities…
“The Bill’s failure to include a total limit on land ownership means wealthy individuals, estates, and companies will be able to continue accumulating an ever-greater concentration of land assets.”
Speaking to the Record, the North East Scotland MSP said: “There is no question that Scotland needs land reform and that there is public support for it. But sadly the government’s watered down offering will not bring the change we need.
“The unequal distribution and ownership of Scottish land is one of the most entrenched inequalities in Scotland and a central foundation of the clear economic injustice that exists in Scotland.” She added: “The government’s Bill should have used this opportunity to radically tackle the unfair distribution of Scotland’s land and to disrupt the relentless increase in cost of land which prices out communities and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few.
“As it currently stands this Bill is disappointing. It does not go anywhere near far enough to help redistribute Scotland’s land in a fair and equitable way.”
Villalba’s own private member’s bill had proposed any landholding of 500 hectares or more be subject to a public interest test to see if it should be broken up or sold to the community. However, the Scottish Government legislation settled for a threshold far exceeding this of 3000 hectares – the equivalent of the entire island of Eigg.
It’s a much larger limit than recommended by campaigners and charities. Below that threshold, there would only be a “transfer test” for when land over 1000 hectares goes up for sale – but not when it changes hands in other ways, such as inheritance.
We told last year how prominent land campaigner and ex-Green MSP Andy Wightman dismissed the plans as “the least ambitious land reform bill ever introduced to the Scottish Parliament”. In a scathing article, Wightman wrote: “The measures fall far short of what most of us following developments believed would be in the Bill. Even those measures were fairly modest.”
He highlighted that “around 30-40 per of land has stayed in the same hands for over 50 years and around 15-20 per cent for over a century, some dating back to the 12th century”. The former politician said this meant any impact from the Bill on patterns of land ownership in Scotland was “likely therefore to be almost non-existent”.
He added: “This Bill is the least ambitious land reform bill ever introduced to the Scottish Parliament. It contains excessively bureaucratic, legalistic mechanisms to intervene in a vanishingly small number of instances with no prospect that much will change as a result.”
In 2023, the Record also revealed how under the Scottish Government’s generous landholding threshold of 3000 hectares, controversial estates like Donald Trump’s Menie golf course in Aberdeenshire – at 560 hectares – would be exempt from the public interest test. The Trump International Golf Links, built by the US president’s company in 2012, has been accused of wrecking the surrounding environment, including protected sand dunes.
The Scottish Government was approached for comment.
Don’t miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond – Sign up to our daily newsletterhere.