ANDY Wightman is dispirited by his investigations into land reform efforts in Scotland.
The former MSP, one of Scotland’s foremost land reform campaigners, has discovered that well-intentioned efforts to dilute the concentration of land ownership have failed.
New research to update his 2015 work The Poor Had No Lawyers, partly a history of land ownership in Scotland and partly a survey of current policy battles, has found that fewer people own the land than did previously.
This is despite decades of efforts by the Scottish Government to flip the situation.
The problem, he said, is twofold.
“Existing landowners expanding their holdings, making them larger by buying their neighbour and people building up portfolios,” are the main drivers of higher concentration.
While the first issue indicates the obvious business impulse to expand one’s empire, the other shines a light on exactly what the attraction is in the first place.
A key example, for Wightman, is the firm Gresham House. The former Greens MSP explained that the London-based investment firm is one of Britain’s oldest companies. Its company number is among one of the earliest issued at 871. More modern firms are in six figures. Founded in 1857, it is as old as the Victoria And Albert Museum and Sheffield FC.
Wightman says: “People like Gresham House, who are a big London investment firm, are now the third-largest landowner in Scotland. Now, they barely featured 15 years ago, I’m not sure if they owned anything.
“In 15 years, they’ve come from nothing to the third-largest landowner in Scotland. They’re investing in forests and they’re buying forests all over the country, so their landholding is dispersed, disaggregated but you add it all together, it’s very large.”
Others are at it as well, buying up chunks of Scotland here and there. But why?
READ MORE: Scottish Land Reform Bill introduced to Holyrood
Ordinarily, investment firms will put their clients’ money into stocks and shares, where they can play the international markets to generate massive returns.
But increasingly, companies like Gresham House and others see the advantages in physical assets.
“Forestry’s now giving about 6-8% return on investment - that’s more than you’ll get anywhere else,” says Wightman (below).
“It goes in cycles - these cycles are quite long, though, there won’t suddenly be a crash it just sort of slowly builds up.
“[For example], timber is a globally traded commodity, so the price of timber is a global price. It’s a relatively tax-efficient investment, there’s no tax on growing timber.
“You’ve got the underlying value of the land which, broadly speaking, retains its value, you’ve got potentially add-on benefits from carbon capture and so on.”
And because of the “disaggregated” nature of their investments, with companies buying a parcel of land here or a forest there, they are inherently diverse portfolios, which Wightman says creates a “constant stream of income” for investors.
READ MORE: Land ownership in Scotland more concentrated despite reforms, according to new data
There is a Scottish Government bill currently making its way through Parliament with the ultimate aim of diversifying land ownership.
But Wightman said the bill will fail because it fails to tackle the issues of inheritance tax – which is reserved to the UK Government – and inheritance law – which is within the Scottish Government’s gift.
Wightman praised Labour’s controversial plans to remove the agricultural exemption from inheritance tax, which he predicts will force people to break up large estates, meaning landowners’ holdings will become diluted.
As for inheritance law, Wightman said there should be a system as in France, where children are always entitled to some of their parents’ estate rather than the system in Scotland where children can be disinherited from their parents’ land, if not their “moveable” assets.
The French system, Wightman argued, meant that estates were gradually broken up over the generations, leading to more people owning land than in Scotland, where the concentration is exceptionally high, according to the Scottish Government.
READ MORE: Scottish farmers collar Labour MPs in Westminster over tax raid
And in a claim the Scottish Government may find embarrassing given its efforts on land reform, Wightman has also discovered that the Duke of Buccleuch (below), who can trace his linage back to the Norman Conquest, has redistributed more land than ministers in the 25 years of devolution.
While his selling spree has made landowners of a number of individuals, businesses and community groups, the Duke remains Scotland’s second-largest landowner, second only to Anders Povlsen.
Ultimately, for Wightman, land ownership is a question of power.
“You are the ultimate arbiter of what happens on that land - you decide how that land is going to be used,” he says.
“If that power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, that just means that the use of land, ultimately, is being determined by a smaller and smaller number of people, which is not terribly healthy.”
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