Call for Scottish Government to resist punitive Land Management Plan amendments

Press Release

Scottish Ministers were today urged to rescue their plans to demand rural businesses produce publicly available land management plans or face a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’.

The proposals to make owners and operators of landholdings over 1,000 hectares publish land management plans are included in the latest Land Reform Bill which is going through the Scottish Parliament. MSPs will hold a final debate on the Bill in the coming weeks.

Scottish Land & Estates, the rural business organisation, said today that scores of amendments tabled by opposition MSPs on the management plans section of the Bill threatened to turn the proposal into a bureaucratic nightmare.

Land-based businesses will have to foot the cost of producing the management plans which are forecast to cost many thousands of pounds each. Failure to comply would result in an investigation by a new Land Commissioner.

Land-based businesses also face the prospect of substantial fines if they do not comply with new community engagement guidelines.

Sarah-Jane Laing, chief executive of Scottish Land & Estates, said: “Land management plans, in principle, were a good idea in that they could encourage greater openness and help inform communities what an estate or large farm business does.

“Instead, the whole issue has grown arms and legs and we now have a blizzard of amendments which would have the effect of making land management plans a big stick with which to beat land businesses. These amendments include suggestions to make it compulsory to review a management plan every year instead of every five years. This would be an absurd level of bureaucracy and nowhere else in society do we see perfectly legitimate businesses being held to this level of public scrutiny.

“Our concern is that the more punitive these proposals become, the less aspirational and forward looking rural businesses can be. With the cost of falling foul of these provisions being so high, the government is sucking the ambition out of the sector, creating a race to the bottom for the least risky management plans possible.

“We strongly urge Ministers to resist amendments to the Bill which will only serve to damage rural estate businesses and jeopardise their ability to function properly. Imposing this extraordinary level of red tape would put at risk investment by land businesses in employment and their ongoing commitments to produce public benefit such as environmental biodiversity projects.”