The following opinion piece was published in The Herald yesterday, written by Max Wiszniewski, Campaign Manager for REVIVE, the coalition for grouse moor reform.
In the public reception hall of the Scottish Parliament, there is a totem to Scotland’s land reform journey.
It sits quietly among displays on mental health, on youth, on the issues a parliament is supposed to care about. Its presence there is a statement that Scotland’s national land journey is important to our people.
Twenty-seven years on from devolution, with several Land Reform Acts now enshrined in law, that totem deserves better than what the parliament has managed to deliver.
In 2012, half of Scotland’s private rural land was owned by 440 people; today it’s 408 landowners.
The direction of travel on this issue is not just slow; it’s backwards. Scotland has one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership anywhere in the world, and that matters because with land ownership comes power and control.
Land prices have climbed so steeply that community buyouts – once the celebrated centrepiece of Scottish land reform – are becoming unaffordable.
Real land reform is about changing how Scotland’s land is owned and used for the benefit of Scotland’s people, wildlife and environment.
This is not just a fringe concern. Scotland’s Big Land Question, the largest ever independent study of Scottish public attitudes to land reform, found overwhelming support for change.
Around seven in ten Scots back a land tax on large landowners, while eight in ten want obligations placed on those landowners to meet climate and nature targets – something that private estates, which occupy 53% of Scotland’s landmass, conspicuously fail to do.
Around 78% of them are used for country sports, which contributes a fraction of a per cent to our economy. The public has been clear about what it wants, and the public is not alone.
In February, the Scottish Land Commission, the independent body charged with advising government on exactly these issues, published a policy roadmap concluding that Scotland’s land pressures are now sharper and more urgent than at any point in the devolution era.
Drawing on the views of more than 1,200 people across Scotland, it found that 96% believe Scotland needs further change in how land is owned and used.
It set out clear priorities, including opening up ownership, rebalancing the power large landowners hold over communities, and putting local people at the heart of land use decisions.
This is the Scottish Government’s own advisory body, in unambiguous terms, calling for the next parliament to be bolder.
At the SNP’s Campaign Conference in March, the party’s own branches did not mince their words either.
A motion jointly submitted by five branches from across Scotland called on the party leadership to bring forward a bold and transformational strategy for land reform and to deliver it.
The motion called for a ten-year strategic plan for Scottish land reform, a functioning land valuation roll, a meaningful public interest test for large-scale landowners, and legislation to finally equalise rights of succession in land ownership.
An amendment from West Fife and Coastal Villages Branch went further still, calling for a simple land tax on acreage to help fund local authorities, and establishing a Housing Land Corporation to use those funds to acquire land for social housing and community wealth building.
This was a well-considered motion, evidencing deep understanding of the issues. Has the SNP been listening to the public, to the government’s own advisory body and to their own membership?
The answer, it appears, is no.
The SNP manifesto offers a Rural Renewal Bill that promises to “consider a range of strategic proposals” on land reform, a phrase that manages to say almost nothing while sounding almost like something.
There is no land tax, no land reform minister, no ten-year strategic plan, and no commitment to the public interest obligations that the party’s own members demanded in March. What SNP branches called a transformative agenda has been quietly filed under “explore”.
The gap between what SNP members demanded in March and what their party have now put before voters in their new manifesto is the distance between a transformative agenda and a managed one.
Between a party willing to take on entrenched interests and one that has learned to fear their lawyers more than their own conscience. Land reform has been folded into a broader rural bill, hedged with the language of consideration, and left to find its own way to the bottom of an agenda.
Why has this happened?
Experience might suggest Scotland’s party of government is timid in the face of the landowner lobby, a lobby that is skilled at making meaningful reform feel legally perilous and economically reckless. Judicial review threats arrive reliably whenever real change approaches, and warnings of investment flight follow close behind.
The grouse moor licensing Bill is a good example. When it threatened real change, the landowner lobby successfully delayed its full implementation, creating a loophole that, while recently closed, illustrates why successive governments have been so reluctant to take on these industries.
Which brings us to the strangest feature of this election’s land reform debate. It is the Greens, not the SNP, whose manifesto most closely reflects what SNP members voted for in March.
Their language is unambiguous: land must be a shared asset for the common good, not a commodity for a privileged few. SNP members said much the same thing, in much the same terms, just weeks ago, but the party’s manifesto does not.
It is a peculiar situation for Scotland’s democracy, where a party that has dominated Holyrood for the best part of two decades, and whose membership is clearly ahead of its leadership on this issue, finds itself outflanked on one of Scotland’s most historically resonant questions by its main rivals on the left.
The REVIVE Coalition does not take a position on which party should govern Scotland. What we do take a position on is the need for real land reform that reverses the trend of increasing concentration and unlocks our land’s potential. It’s what the public wants, what the evidence supports, and the SNP conference has called for.
The next Scottish Government, whatever its composition, will face a choice. It can continue to prioritise the desires of those who already own most of Scotland, or it can finally honour the expectations of everyone else.
It’s time to use the powers of the Scottish Parliament to declare independence over Scotland’s land, our people, our wildlife and the environment.
Max Wiszniewski is Campaign Manager for the REVIVE Coalition, which comprises the League Against Cruel Sports, Common Weal, OneKind, Friends of the Earth Scotland and Raptor Persecution UK.
ENDS
The REVIVE coalition has produced a Land Reform manifesto that sets out ambitious and forward-looking policies that have broad public support ahead of the 2026 Scottish General Election.
To read the manifesto and to send your comments on it to cross-party political leaders, please click HERE.
Raptor Persecution UK 