Background

In the Programme for Government 2017, the Scottish Government asked the Scottish Land Commission to review existing Community Right to Buy mechanisms and recommend how best to enable community ownership in appropriate circumstances, including making Community Right to Buy processes as simple as possible.

The research examined all routes to community ownership, including direct sales done outwith legislative processes. Although this goes beyond the Programme for Government commitment, it is helpful to consider community ownership in the round, rather than focusing on single channels. The methodology consisted primarily of interviews, including with community groups who had sought to acquire land and assets in various ways, professional advisers such as lawyers and land agents, and various stakeholders, as well as Scottish Government officials.

The Scottish Land Commission developed key strategic recommendations from the report, and these are intended to support the development and articulation of a vision for the continued development of community ownership over the coming decades. In particular, the recommendations seek to encourage communities to consider proactively the ownership of land and assets and to streamline processes where possible.

One of these recommendations referenced the former million acre target specifically:

• Recommendation 2: Development of a new suite of indicators to replace the ‘million acres’ target with targets and indicators that reflect the outcomes sought from community ownership and are relevant to both rural and urban contexts.

The million acre target helped to promote community ownership and it served to galvanise communities, stakeholders and government into action. As the Scottish Land Commission report notes, it was a clear statement of ambition. However, as the land reform agenda has progressed and as community ownership has evolved, it is clear that a target based on the area of land in community ownership is becoming less relevant.

With the introduction of Community Right to Buy into urban Scotland, communities are able to acquire land and assets that have a positive impact but do not necessarily cover large areas of land. Similarly, in rural parts of Scotland there is an increasing trend towards community acquisition of smaller areas of land for discrete purposes, which provide benefit to the community but do not contribute large areas of land to the national total. As such, the million acre target was increasingly irrelevant to the current reality of community ownership.

As a start to this process a new National Performance Framework National Indicator on Community Ownership, the number of assets in community ownership, was developed during 2019 and reported on for the first time in December 2019.

The Community Ownership and Community Right to Buy: Recommendations to Scottish Ministers report can be found on the Scottish Land Commission website.

As a consequence, the name of this publication series was changed with the release of the 2018 publication in December 2019 from ‘Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland’ to ‘Community Ownership in Scotland’. This reflects the move away from the million acre target and recognises that community ownership is about more than just the area of land owned by community groups.

Moving away from the million acre target also meant that the area of land in community ownership could be reported in hectares as opposed to acres.