CAMPAIGNERS have said that significant reform of how Scotland’s land is owned is needed if the country is to emerge successfully from the Covid-19 pandemic and tackle the threat of the climate crisis.

Community Land Scotland (CLS) has sent a briefing paper today to MSPs returning to Holyrood next week urging them to view further land reform as a vital tool in addressing the sheer enormity of the dual challenge.

The paper follows a commitment for a new Bill by the end of 2023, contained in the draft proposals published by the Scottish government and Scottish Greens last week.

CLS welcomed the prospect of a public-interest test to apply to transfers of large-scale land holdings, and a right of pre-emption in favour of community buyout where the public-interest test applies. 

It said these measures are essential in helping to diversify Scotland’s unusually concentrated pattern of rural land ownership.

Two-thirds of that land has been calculated as being owned by a staggeringly low 0.025 per cent of the population.

In her letter to the SNP, Labour and Greens, CLS chairwoman Ailsa Raeburn welcomes the parties’ commitments to pursuing further land reform during the current parliamentary session. 

She said of the proposal: “With the need to rebuild so much of society in the wake of the pandemic; and the existential crisis of the climate emergency, the power of that argument is now irrefutable.

“It’s clear we need a step change in land reform to ensure that Scotland becomes the greener, fairer and more inclusive nation to which we all collectively aspire.

“A new land reform Act can play a vital role in that by ensuring that the interlinked benefits of land ownership and land use are distributed more equitably within communities.”