Small landholdings: landownership and registration - report

5. Conclusions

5.1. Can a register be (re)established?

Yes, it can. But with the following caveats:

• The archival record necessary to underpin a register is not evenly spread chronologically. Most of the available material relates to the establishment of holdings and schemes, principally between 1911 and 1928.
• Information relating to the later histories and changes in tenancy and ownership arrangements for the schemes will need to be tracked through the available papers of the estates the schemes are situated on. The survival of, or access to these materials is not guaranteed.
• Further information might also be gathered via existing small landholders, their records or oral knowledge of their landholdings; but again this cannot be guaranteed.
• The project team are mindful of the other registers that relate to land and leases in Scotland (such as the Land Register and the Crofting Register) which might be thought of as non-administrative (that is to say, they have property law and third-party consequences) and are sensitive about what lessons can be drawn from them in relation to a potential SLH register.

5.2. What information is available for inclusion? How does this relate to (re)establishing a register?

A wide variety of information is available for inclusion into a register, including:

• Reports, memoranda and correspondence between stakeholders involved in the establishment, financing and management of small landholding schemes.
• Mapping and surveying records of schemes, including those that were not proceeded with, as many of these mapping records have been extracted from the main Agriculture and Fisheries (AF) series into the Register House Plans [RHP] series, it can be time consuming to link back in.
• Correspondence from and other documentation relating to the original small landholders, their finances, eligibility, and on-going management of their small landholdings.
• Duplicate records of court proceedings (Scottish Land Court; Court of Session) and correspondence from legal firms relating to negotiations over the establishment of schemes.
• The annual reports and papers of the main government agencies, the BoAS and SLC.
• Contemporary commentary and reporting on individual cases and the overall workings of the legislation and changes to it in the newspaper press.
• Records from private landed estates relating to the establishment and management of small landholding schemes, mainly consisting of correspondence, mapping, reporting and financial records.

In relation to the (re)establishment of a register, there is a good deal of detailed material on the early stages and establishment of schemes, but much less from c. 1930, making it difficult to track the changes that occurred to individual small landholdings over time (see 5.1. and 5.4.).

5.3. How much time/resource would be required to set up a register?

This project has undertaken the archival scoping work and has compiled detailed histories of seven case study schemes. Therefore, some of the work has already been undertaken and a working methodology tested for the rest.

Most of the work is laborious as none of the records have been digitised and accessing and navigating private estate records are all time-consuming. Attempting to fill in gaps in information through oral history interviewing and working with the current small landholding community would be valuable on a number of levels – but will also take significant time.

This project team concludes that a small team of one lead academic, supported by a 12-month postdoctoral assistant and a PhD student (three years) would be the most efficient way to (re)establish a register. The resource cost would be approximately £75,000 over three years (or approximately £25,000 per year for three years) for the PhD and approximately £45,000 for 12 months (pro rata) of a postdoctoral researcher, plus travel/research expenses costs. In total, a resource of approximately £130,000 would be realistic.

This project took the approach of going back to the origins of the small landholding legislation, and then worked forwards from 1911. If a project were to be set up to (re)establish a register, a more time-resource-saving approach would be to take the existing 68 small landholdings and work backwards on each of them individually. This has the disadvantage of potentially missing key context but might reduce the resource/time commitment by focusing on what is directly relevant today. The potential disadvantage is that the existing archival record gets thinner the closer to the present the researcher gets, which might lead to dead-ends and failure to add some small landholdings onto the register. It should also be noted that while the project team has not checked the veracity of the Scottish Government's figure of 68 existing small landholdings, the process of (re)establishing a register might help clarify that number.

Although not asked for in the project brief, one option might be a follow-on project to pilot the (re)establishment of a register by undertaking this for one of the case study schemes presented here, as an end-to-end history, plus a register, to act as a template.

5.4. How has landownership relating to small landholdings changed over the last century, recording changes to status or tenure type, particularly where no record has been made?

For the reasons noted already, tracing changes that occurred to the ownership and tenure arrangements for individual SLHs after the late 1920s is not possible based on the archives of government agencies such as the BoAS or SLC. As the BoAS always stressed, it did not own the land, and all continuing responsibilities were left with the existing private landowners on whose land the schemes were established. As such, to answer this question in full, for each scheme, the landowner must first be identified, any changes or sales investigated, and any archives created by those estates referred to.

Overall, we know that the number of SLHs has declined dramatically since the late 1930s. Looking at the evidence gathered here, it is likely that in many cases, SLH tenants renounced leases or have died and the landowner was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to replace them with another SLH tenant. Accordingly, this land moved into different tenancy arrangements.

5.5. What and how much compensation in its various forms was originally paid to landlords and large estates?

As the extant archival records are richest at the point of establishment of each scheme, enumerating the amount of compensation paid to landowners or sitting tenants is straightforward. As a template, we have laid out these costs in section 3.17 for each case study. The same information can be established for most other schemes. Compensation could be granted for: (1) loss of rent; (2) loss of selling value [up to 1919]; and (3) Buildings and equipment/facilities.