Estimate of community owned land in Scotland 2017

8. Notes

The data included in the Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland 2017 publication are based on combining administrative datasets from four organisations involved in community asset ownership. They are: Highlands and Islands Enterprise, who have responsibilities to support community ownership in their area; Big Lottery Fund, who administer the Scottish Land Fund for Scottish Government; the Development Trusts Association Scotland; and Community Land Scotland. These organisations databases were identified by a research secondee from the SRUC into Scottish Government; who had been tasked with identifying as many community groups as possible that own land parcels/assets.

The work undertaken showed that the most feasible way to collect data was from these overarching organisations initially, and then to verify the data held in the longer term with the community groups themselves. It is not possible to identify community groups that own land parcels/assets from information currently held on Scottish Government, Land Registry or Local Authority systems, which explains the approach taken in this collection.

Following the collection of data on community ownership, the data were cleaned and quality assured by Scottish Government statisticians. The quality assurance procedure involved:

• removing duplicate entries;
• confirming addresses of the community groups as locations of the land parcels/assets were not included in the majority of cases and in some cases only the postcode for the community group was provided; and
• identifying where area figures were given in hectares and converting them to acres.

This method of collection also explains why the geographic breakdown is based on the address of the community group rather than current mapping or geodata for the land parcels/assets themselves.

8.2 Feedback

This is the first time the Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland publication is being released and it is being published as experimental statistics. Thus, the Scottish Government would welcome feedback on the publication. Please provide any feedback to the following email address: CommunityLandStatistics@gov.scot

8.3 Other

Land area figures for Scotland have been taken from the Office for National Statistics' Standard Area Measurements (2016) for Administrative Areas in the United Kingdom:

https://ons.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a79de233ad254a6d9f76298e666abb2b

When converting area figures from hectares to acres conversion factor of 1 hectare to 2.47105 acres was used. The figures and percentages figures given in tables have been independently rounded, so they may not always sum to the relevant totals.

The following symbol is used throughout the tables in this publication: - = nil