The Scottish Parliament debated the latest Land Reform Bill last week.  As a Scottish Labour and Co-operative MSP I want to see these proposals go much further.

Donald Dewar gave Labour’s enduring view on land reform in a 1998 lecture. He said that change was required “on grounds of fairness” to increase “local involvement and accountability” and deliver “greater diversity” in land ownership because there was “too much control in too few hands”.

After 17 years of SNP Administration, the concentration of land ownership is getting worse—0.025 per cent of Scotland’s population still owns 67 per cent of Scotland’s rural land. As it is currently drafted, the bill will not change land ownership patterns, nor will it deal with the power that is vested in those who own land to hold communities to ransom.

The purpose of land reform is to empower communities, build economies and retain populations. Those things impact service provision, national and community wealth and the sustainability of the Gaelic language.

Stakeholders are very disappointed with and critical of the bill. They do not believe that it will make any change to communities owning land, nor will it change land ownership patterns.

Central to the bill is the setting of two thresholds in defining “large landholdings”: 3,000 hectares for the requirement to have a land management plan and 1,000 hectares to require prior notification of a sale that might trigger a community right to buy or a potential lotting decision. It is confusing and unnecessary to have different thresholds for different purposes, and it is widely felt that those thresholds, even if unified at around 1,000 hectares, are still too high. A reduction in all thresholds to 500 hectares would keep all crofts and 97 per cent of all farms out of the scope of the bill.

The bill does not include urban land reform. A new criterion to allow communities to register an interest in land of significance to them could be a measured way to trigger urban communities getting prior notification of sales and the right of pre-emption.

Proposals for a public interest test on land transfers have also been completely ditched. Public interest tests are well understood in law, so to change that and to use a transfer test will risk having the legislation held up in the courts. Labour wishes to see amendments to reinstate a public interest test.

The bill will allow community bodies to have the opportunity to be informed about certain sales of over 1,000 hectares and will give them 30 days to register an initial interest in buying the land. Communities will get a subsequent 40-day period to get consent to make a right-to-buy application. Those timescales are unworkable, given that it can take the Scottish Government two months to approve the constitution of community bodies that are able to make the application. The 1,000 hectare cut-off threshold again means that very few transactions will be caught in that provision.

As it stands, the bill is unlikely to bring about any change in community ownership or the desired diversification of land ownership. Urban Scotland is also excluded.

We will work in good faith with the Government to strengthen the bill in the hope that the consequent act will make a step change in land ownership patterns in Scotland.