Estimate of community owned land in Scotland 2017

1. Introduction

The Scottish Government has a target of there being one million acres of land in community ownership in Scotland by the end of 2020. The Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland publication will track progress towards this target. The 2017 release is the first Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland publication and contains the current estimate of the area of land recorded as being in community ownership.

The area of land is an estimate as not all land owned by community groups will be known to the Scottish Government. In addition, the recorded area is likely to be an underestimate as some land parcels/assets are recorded as having no area. This is likely due to the area of existing buildings that have been purchased or transferred in community ownership not being known or being too small to record so have been recorded as zero.

The publication is being released as experimental statistics as the data collection method is still being developed to resolve quality issues with the underlying data. Further information on the data issues are given in Section 4 and details regarding improving the data quality are given in Section 5.