 The 16th meeting of this year of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee and remind everybody to switch off their electronic gear apart from tablets and things, which people increasingly use, but phones can interfere with the sound system. Agenda item 1 today is the land reform review group. I apologise before we start that. We have apologies from Cara Hilton and her substitute is Claire Baker. Welcome to the committee. Agenda item 1, land reform review group, final report, and welcome to the committee this morning at the panel Dr Alison Elliott, John Watt, Ian Cook and Pip Taber. We ask Alison if she wishes to give us an introduction just now before we come to questions, which can be wide and various. Welcome. Thank you very much, convener. Should I introduce everyone first of all? I think that if you want to say what they do, we can see their names, but please feel free. John, do you want to say who you are? Yes, I am John Watt. I have been involved in land ownership issues mainly around community land ownership for the last many, many years. I was working with Highlands and Islands Enterprise for several decades, laterally with community land ownership. I currently chair the Scottish Land Fund Committee. Good morning. I am Ian Cook, director of the Development Trust Association Scotland, so we are a national organisation for community-led regenerative agencies. That covers rural and urban communities. My background has largely been regeneration, but particularly in urban areas, over the years, and often from a sort of community dimension. Good morning. My name is Pip Taber. I manage a small rural development charity called the Southern Uplands Partnership, which covers southern Scotland, Dumfries and Galway Borders, south east of Ayrshire and sometimes south Lanarkshire, depending on what is going on there. My background is in ecology and natural resource management. Yes, I am Alison Elliott and I am a former moderator of the CERC and also a former convener of SCVO. I think that we have produced a report that is serious, substantial and comprehensive, but I think that going through it there is a position that is quite clear. We take the line that land is a finite resource and it is a crucial resource for the whole of the country. Therefore, decisions about how it is used and how it is owned should be taken in the public interest and for the common good. That is a straightforward democratic principle, which I think underlies what we are saying. It is a simple principle, but it has several consequences, in fact 62 of them. We look forward to exploring them with you. Thank you very much. I am just going to ask you a general question to start off with about your work patterns. The difference between the interim report and the personnel change and your new activities, which have led to the final report, obviously required a different way of going about those things, because you have expanded the areas that you are looking at. Can you tell us a bit more about your interaction with stakeholders and a bit about why you chose to work this way? Yes. The original plan was that, in the first phase, we would be out and open and trying to find out what was going on on the ground. That is what we did. There was a lot of engagement with people right across the country and with different interests in land reform and land use and ownership across the country. It was always the intention that, in the second phase, we would then start to develop an overarching framework for the report and develop in a bit more detail some of the topics arising from that. Although there was a game of two halves, as people have said, it was always intended in a sense that that would be the case. Having a different personnel meant that we had a second bite at the cherry. It meant that we had seven mines on the job instead of three, which I think we have benefited from. In the second phase, because we were developing that framework and developing proposals that we are going across the whole subject. We know that it is a large subject. It was difficult to have general open conversations with people going forward, but it does not mean that we did not consult people. We certainly went with targeted questions to various sources. We continued to collect evidence during phase two, but our heads were down in phase two instead of being more open. I would like to follow up on that. I have had concerns raised with me that you quite rightly state that you are not an expert committee and you have been reliant on expert advice from others. However, I have had concerns raised with me that, in phase two, if I can put it that way, the consultation that you have undertaken has not been as extensive as some people might have expected it to be. Is it possible to—I mean, you say that you have consulted and put targeted questions—can we find out, as a committee, who you have consulted with in phase two? I think that it would be possible. You mean just now? No, not just now, but if you are able to let us know at some stage. Yes, I mean, as I say, it tended to be consulting individuals with expert information. You are quite right to raise the fact that we had an advisory panel of experts, and we engaged with some of them more than with others, but they were very useful in phase two in giving us that cut of their expertise and also pointing us to other people to consult with. Thank you for that. I am aware that one of the expert panel saw fit to resign last April, I think it was. Can you tell us why? I think that it was for personal reasons. I mean, I think that it is not for us to just put words into his mouth. Okay. Thank you. If it was possible to furnish us with any further details of who has been consulted with outside the expert group since you entered phase two, if you are able to let the committee have that, I would be very interested in that. If that is possible, thank you. A slight follow-up on the technicalities of this, there are 484 documented submissions, some of them are anonymous. Can these all be read by us to see what they said? I think that when people said that they were confidential, then they were confidential and I hadn't asked the question, I don't know. I think that there are three categories, the ones that are named and open to everybody. There are ones that were anonymous but are still available and there are those that are wished for their submissions to remain confidential. So these are available online or where? They are all online. Thank you, convener. I would like to welcome the report and thank the committee for the work that they have undertaken over the last few months. There was some criticism of the interim report but the second report that is certainly encouraging and I think does lay out the wide range of issues that encompass land reform. Just a question about timescales. We have had a letter from the minister that says that the report will inform the debate on land reform for the coming decade. Obviously it is getting the balance right between areas where we would like to see progress and whether we can see progress in this Parliament and also recognition that there are complicated issues in many time to consider. Have you taken any judgment on where there might be opportunities for quicker progress and where maybe there needs to be a bit more consideration? John did a very useful summary for us going through the recommendations and laying them out as could be done now, could be started now, could require research and so on. So we have a sort of aid memoir for ourselves on that one. Is it possible to share that? Is it an intention to publish that or to share that with Government or with the committee or with a steer on some of the timescales? There is recently just an aid memoir for ourselves. We believe that there are things that the Government could start right away and in fact they have made a couple of announcements even in the last two or three days. There are some things that can be started now, might take a little bit of time to do. There are some that will need legislative change, either amending existing legislation or drafting new legislation and there are some which we would admit we haven't got the final answers that they will need further research and study before coming to a final conclusion. But I think there are several things. I was to just take a couple of examples. We talk a lot about the whole issue about state aid and the Government can give clear instructions to its own departments and agencies almost now to clarify how state aid might be made more flexible, interpretation made more flexible to be able to assist communities to acquire, for example. I think that the Government could start the process of being more proactive about transferring crofting estates to communities. I think that making a clear policy statement that diversified land ownership is a key policy objective of this of the Government, those things can be done actually very quickly. I think that that is the kind of things that we will explore as the committee takes evidence both from here with stakeholders and with the ministers to try to draw up our views about timetables and so on. Anything that you have that you see—and it is obvious from the report that there are some things that will take a lot longer—so the work streams will have to be laid out in some detail now once we see what is being said. We should try and concentrate on dealing with some of the specifics now that we have had this opening about. Land registration comes up, first of all, since it has already been mentioned publicly. It is not the first time that I have seen the famous map that shows the very largest estates in figure 4, which shows that, in fact, it should be possible for people to register. Do you think that the timescales that the Government has set up—about five years for public bodies and 10 years for private bodies—is appropriate, or do you think that it should be faster? I think that when we are discussing it as a group, we did not have a view about exactly what the timescale should be but that there should be a target set. We understand that the commitment was there in the 2012 act anyway. It is a case of having a target on it. The practicalities of it, I understand, are considerable. Five years and 10 years seem to be okay. However, if there was encouragement for estates to get on with the job of making their maps, they could then take their turn on the queue to get them registered if they had been done. In fact, there is potential, depending on how we put it, that you could get this process going now if the signals were sent out. Did you take that into account at all? We considered various triggers for the registration as being something that—there are triggers already in the act, but there could be further ones in terms of people applying for public funding and so on. Those would presumably get the registration moving a bit faster, but we did not consider further ways of speeding it up. Okay, thanks for that one. We will look at owners of land next. Claire Baker wants to lead in this. Thank you, convener. I was interested in your comments about registration of land in overseas registration. In the report, you state that, if you could consider whether there might be scope in Scots law to exclude certain types of overseas bodies from owning land in Scotland, it identifies in the interests of traceability and accountability. What are the problems that you see with ownership that is registered outside of the EU? What difficulties does that present in terms of how Scotland's land is managed or is used for communities' interests? Is it being met by the public interest that it is difficult to trace? What are the problems that you then see in the practical sense? When we get into tracing ownership, it becomes many times more complicated when you look at the urban situation than in the rural situation. You can imagine that there are places where there is derelict land in urban contexts. If you do not know who owns it, your capacity to do something about it is considerably lessened. Ian is the person who has the most understanding of the urban situation. The lack of knowing who the owner is and the lack of ability to trace who the owner is and get in touch with them slows down the process considerably. The belief is that if you have ownership concentrated in the EU, there is already a process in place in the EU or there is a process starting in the EU of trying to get traceability improved, so that we would be able to jump on the back of that one. Where would there be, because you refer to urban land, would it tend to be more rural? Where is the instance of overseas ownership highest? Is there a pattern there? Why would people choose overseas? What is the advantage for the owner in choosing overseas? Do you want to expand that question? I am not quite sure what you are asking. First of all, we have been asked what would be the advantages of having a EU. What I am interested in is what is the advantage for the land owner for being registered outside the EU. Is it to do with tax or is it? Yes, it can be a range of reasons really. I think that that is, in any way that particularly the Scottish Affairs Committee is going to be looking at in terms of the whole question of taxation and how that impacts on that. As Alison said, we have come at it from a point of a modern economy requires clear information about who owns land so that you have the ability to recycle land, to regenerate, but also to have more influence over what happens on land in the public interest really. We just see that as being a key part of the jigsaw that has got to be addressed. Finally, when we looked at the land registration bill a couple of years ago, there was an amendment from Rhoda Grant around beneficial ownership, which did not get through at that point. The solution that you come to—I think that it was both trying to address the same problem—why did you come to the solution that you have come to about having a bar on registering outside the EU? Why was that the preferred option for this? Does it present—sorry, it is quite a complicated area—any issues around ECHR? Is there another area that I wanted the committee to look at? I think that we checked that out, but it didn't. There were certain things that you could not—you had to take the EU as being the basic scope and framework for any capacity to limit the ownership. Within that, we thought that what was being proposed was adequate and would pass the test. Obviously, there is a whole range of offshore ownership arrangements that we were quite keen to try to address. I think that the proposal is a reflection of what we thought was a practical proposal to move forward and give us a bit more sense of who owns what and a bit more accountability and traceability as you have asked. It just seemed to us to be the best way to do it and the most logical way to do it. Supplementary is on this at the moment, because it is obviously very interesting to people. It may be that answers some more of the questions that Claire started on. Dave Thomson, Jim Hume, Alex Ferguson and Angus MacDonald. Thank you, convener, and good morning to yourselves. Just to follow on, this is obviously a hugely complex issue and it's not going to be solved overnight. The Government has said that they want the register complete within 10 years, the public part of it within five. Did you get any evidence of what it might cost to do it more quickly, what the constraints are in terms of registrars in Scotland and so on, and how we could overcome that? It strikes me until we get the register sorted. That's the foundation of the whole thing. Until you get that sorted, we're not going to be able to move on quite a number of the other things. Ten years is quite a long time, so just to get your views on whether the Government should prioritise reducing that timescale. If so, what would the cost be or would it even be possible to get the staff with the right qualifications and so on within Register Scotland if there was a big surge in that, to do it maybe in five years or something like that? We had an indication of what it was going to cost without the target and therefore without reducing it. Obviously, it would cost more if you were going to have to do it more quickly, so the cost would increase certainly. Exactly what that would be, I wouldn't be able to say. I do think that it's crucial. We would like to see the Government making it a priority to get this done. Maybe I could just put it in a slightly different way then. In principle, you would want it done as soon as possible. The Government have come out and said 10 years, 5 years for the public. Do you think that that is adequate or would you prefer them to try to speed that up? Obviously, we would like them to speed it up. We would like to know tomorrow who in Scotland and if we could do that, that would be great. There are a whole lot of other opportunities here for the Government to spend money. Exactly how they prioritise that is something that would take its place in a national land policy. That is one of our other recommendations. We have some overarching picture of what is going on. People have been complementary about the report and we pooled together a whole lot of stuff about land reform, which has been in different areas. People did not necessarily see the connections previously. The importance of having an overarching picture of what the Government is trying to do is crucial. You probably have to have that idea first of all before you prioritise the costing of it. Can I maybe have one final go there, convener? You are recommending a couple of organisations be created. That will obviously take time as well. Those organisations will take a lot of time to bed in. Do you see the registration and the development of those organisations running in parallel so that something between five and ten years would actually be reasonable in that respect because it is going to take a bit of time? This is an issue that probably should have been dealt with 50 or 100 years ago. We are where we are. We are tackling it now. I think that your report is a fantastic report. There is an awful lot in there. I am not sure that I agree with everything in it, obviously, but you have given us a lot of stuff to get our teeth into. Can I give an example? One of the recommendations that we have is that the Government should consider land value taxation. If you are going to do that, you need to know who owns the land. There are some proposals in there that are going to be dependent on the register being complete. On the other hand, they are also going to take time to be assessed and to be properly given an economic model and researched in that way. The registration will be the sooner the better, but there are other things that are also going to need to be developed, which will then benefit from the registration being complete. Those things will be going on in parallel, I imagine, for some time. It may be that there is pressure coming from those other kinds of goals of the Government, which would protect extra pressure on registers of Scotland to speed up the process. I will try not to keep those two slightly shorter questions in the supplementary. Jim Hume. Jim Hume. I will try not to thank the question. I hope you will. I hope you will. Morning, everybody. Just regarding the ownership of land, it clearly states in your recommendations that the Scottish Government should make it incompetent for any legal entity, not registered in the membership of the European Union to register title to land in the land register of Scotland. You mentioned already, Dr Elliott, that that was to help traceability and accountability. I am not sure why they would really help traceability and accountability just because someone is out with the EU. I would just like to clarify that when you say any legal entity, of course that means individuals also like clarification on that. I just wonder—we already have ownership by Americans. All sorts of people in Scotland regarding land ownership, what would happen with their land, would it be taken off them? Obviously, if they are not a European legal entity, that statement really means to me. A few clarifications on that would be useful. I think that we were thinking of this as being a new registration of new land, new registrations, that they would come under that rule. You are saying new registrations, but there is already probably a land owned by people who are non-Europeans, because this is obviously against anybody that is European. That may not be registered, but they may actually already be owned. The purpose of this was really looking at companies and corporations. But it says any legal entity, and that is an individual as well. We did not consider the question of new people from outside the EU owning the land in Scotland. I do not think that we were considering that as being something that we wanted to prohibit. The Scottish Government should make it incompetent for any legal entity, any legal entity, not registered in a member state of the European Union, any non-European, to register title to land in the land of register of Scotland. That is quite clear. I can see that it is quite clear, and I take the point, Ian, if you want to comment on that. You have to draw a line somewhere to create some sort of, if you want to improve traceability and accountability, you have to draw a line somewhere. There would be no problem for an American, for instance, to set up a company within the EU to acquire land in Scotland therefore, so we did not see that as being prohibitive, but it would increase the accountability and traceability as part of the process. Right. How far do we boil this down to? Is this even building plots or anything like that? In a reaction to that from other countries, do you think that it would be fair that someone from Scotland would be unable to buy land in other parts of non-European the world? I think that it would set in a kind of building plots or anything. Well, I mean, it wasn't our remit to say anything about owning land elsewhere. React in a way like this, that other countries can react backwards, that's what I'm trying to say through the tune. That's potentially one of the implications, but I think that because we were driven by a desire for greater accountability, greater openness, identifying beneficiaries as the one who owns land in Scotland, we reckoned that registering a company under European designation was one way of restricting that. It's time, convener, because that's similar to my question. Okay, thank you. Angus MacDonald? Yeah, thanks, convener, and good morning. Can I just briefly follow up on land registration restricted to entities within the EU? If I recall correctly, Parliament passed a land registration bill, I think, in early 2012, and at that time the Scottish Government rejected the idea of disaling any entity outside the EU registering land. So I'm glad to see it back on the agenda. Have you looked at the situation in other northern European countries, say, with regard to the air stance on land registration as part of your deliberations? There are other European countries, and obviously the pattern is quite mixed, and certainly some Scandinavian countries, you've got to be a national tone land. So, I mean, the pattern across Europe is quite mixed here, and I think that we're in a situation where, if we want a land reform programme, we've got to come to a view about how we move that forward. So that was the kind of view that we came to as a recommendation. We did a research paper at which we're looking at a lot of these aspects across different European countries. The way in which arrangements are made when Denmark joined the European Union, there's derogations to stop Germans buying holiday homes on the west coast of Denmark. Restrictions on who can own land is something that's quite common in the European Union at the moment. You've found that out, I guess. So, therefore, the idea that Guernsey and Cayman Islands are not in the European Union is one of the things that you were thinking about. That's good. Thank you. I think that we go on to Claudia Beamish next. Well, convener, would you like me to ask... Crown property rights, first, to say, oh, we've got that wrong order. Right, no, I don't think that you've got it wrong, it's just... Rayham Day is going to ask about Crown property rights, and then you're going to go on to... You may ask about that. Come in. Quite a good, that cleared up, convener. Thank you. Good morning. Yeah, Crown property rights, your report suggests that ending the Crown Estate commissioners' involvement in Scotland, we'd deliver wide-ranging and important benefits to Scotland. You also say that there should be further significant reductions in types of Crown property rights in Scotland. I wonder if you can expand upon that, and I will use to say exactly what you mean by that. The first bit about ending the Crown Estate commissioners' involvement, this is looking particularly at the situation in coastal communities and bringing into a Scottish context a lot of the decisions that are made about the management of the Crown Estate. This is a recommendation that has been made by many committees that have looked at this, so it's not a new suggestion. The suggestion is that it should be devolved and then redevolved, in fact, generally to local authorities. We don't see that in the recommendation, but there is that view around as well, that it's something that can be devolved right down to local authorities. The question of the other Crown property rights in Scotland, they tend to be very archaic things about mussels and oysters and whales and things like that. Some of our recommendations are really tidying up the relics of the feudal system, which are still around. It takes a clear mind to spot them, but I think that we've spotted some of those. That's the main thrust of that recommendation. On your right, a number of people have suggested that this is being done before yourselves. From the evidence that you've taken, what are the wide-ranging and important benefits to Scotland? Can you give us examples of why you think that it's a really good thing to do? Iain, do you want to pick that one up? I mean, I suppose that if you're looking forward again and we're looking at opportunities, the whole marine environment is particularly important to Scotland, I think, going forward. And we're quite conscious that it just seems to us that it makes sense that if the Scottish Government or whatever is investing in, for instance, technologies, then having some sort of democratic control or accountability over that process is really quite fundamental. Thank you, that's useful. We want to move on to local community land rights now, Clare Baker. Thank you, convener. I was interested in the community land ownership proposals that you bring forward, and I think that there is a recognition that we want to extend opportunities for communities to own land, and at the moment the system of in place is maybe too slow and is dependent on a willing seller being in place. Now, there's been different ideas around how you resolve that, and you know there's a proposal that you extend Crofter's rights to communities, there's been one way to do that. You seem to have decided on a compulsory purchase order method of making it easier for communities to have access to land. Why did you choose this particular model? As the report recognises, it's a model that isn't well used at the moment, mainly because it's seen as quite cumbersome and quite difficult, local authority seemed reluctant to go down that road. So why have you chosen this one as a solution to this year that everybody's trying to address? I think that this goes over to you. This is an example of where several of our recommendations fit together. They're not sort of stand-alone recommendations. We suggested a menu of community rights. We're not looking exclusively at the compulsory purchase. There's a range of community rights, which communities, some of which communities have already, through part 2 of the land reform act, as it currently is. We also, as you know, have suggested the creation of our community land agency, whose role would be to facilitate or mediate in discussions between landowners and communities, which would avoid the necessity of using legislation at all, because there may be an unwilling seller and an enthusiastic community, but they may be able to be brought together rather than have meeting courts, as it were, through using legislation. We thought that there was a range of rights that communities could have, but one of the ones that we have suggested is in those extreme situations where there's an impasse and there is no willing seller and there is a community desperate to acquire land for specific purposes. Then there would be a right to buy, as would be in part 3 of the act, applied to communities in the public interest, and that would have to be submitted to ministers for approval. As I said, we didn't come right down on compulsory purchase. There's only one of a range of ways in which communities could acquire land and continue to acquire land. In many ways, better than the situation that we've got at the moment, because most of the community acquisitions that have come in the past 10 years have not been through the legislation. They've been through negotiated purchases and sales, sometimes with mediation and sometimes just with the two parties sitting down and working out. We think that that's probably the best solution, but there will be extreme situations in which communities ought to be given a stronger right if that is in the public interest. There are various points where we're talking about compulsory sale order, compulsory purchase order and so on. One of the most interesting things that I think about this whole process, from my point of view, has been realising that if you have a strong framework in place for when things break down completely, that facilitates negotiation and it's very seldom needed to be used. We had a very interesting conversation with the director of planning from one of the big cities in Scotland. When he came into post initially, he used his compulsory purchase orders clearly and people knew that he was prepared to use them. In the years afterwards, it's very seldom had to use it because people recognise that that is available as a backstop. One hopes that it doesn't have to be used. The compulsory purchase, as far as the menu of rights is concerned, is right at the very end. We're not suggesting that that should be, we're hoping that that should not be used very often. There would have to be a very strong case for it to win out because it would have to be in the public interest. That's helpful. It's a very detailed report that we received on Friday, so the clarification on some of those issues is helpful. When it comes to definition of public interest at the start of the report, you give the park estate example. That's often something that comes up. How do you define the public interest? Do you want to say a little bit about that? Maybe I'll link that to you discuss ECHR and what that means. You talk about the human rights commission, the recent work that they've done. Are you confident about the ECHR position? Do you think that more work needs to be done around that? Do you think that there's any role for the Scottish Government in helping to provide some clarity around how ECHR relates to land reform issues? As far as public interest is concerned, there are lots of ways of approaching it. The way that we have approached it is believing that the guardian of the public interest is the elected member and, particularly, the minister. The public interest, therefore, is embedded in what the understanding of the elected representative is at the time. In practical terms, that's what it boils down to. It boils down to this being a decision that he would make, preferably in the context of a national land policy, but also in terms of what is the current thinking of the Government. For example, we have a Government that is keen to encourage community ownership, but there could well be a Government that is keen to encourage private ownership or other kinds of issues. The public interest is something that is variable in that kind of way, whereas a common good, we think, is being something that is a goal that is beyond an identification. It's something that the public interest serves, whatever the flavour of the current administration. As far as ECHR is concerned, we have had conversations with Alan Miller, and we have also had an adviser on the group who is an expert on ECHR and its relationship with land reform. We understand that the move—I mean, the article one, protocol one, which is the point at issue here, is one that does allow individuals the right to enjoy their property, but that the state has the right to intervene in the public interest. There is that balance. We understand that a lot of the case law is moving in terms of taking the public interest more seriously, but it is that balance that is treating land ownership as good citizenship. Seeing that ownership should be something that takes account of the consequences of that for the rest of the community. I would like to pursue that, because I think that you have neatly talked us to a position that I would like to make sure that I understand. One of the things that you have talked about in the context of compulsory purchase is the process. One of the things that you have alluded to in the report is some of the difficulties in that. It is not simple. It is therefore very easy for local authorities, in particular, to say that they do not want to bother because it is too expensive and difficult to do. It seems to me that that is something that you are suggesting that we need to get round. It is up to us as legislators to sort out the process. The other thing that you have just articulated is the difficulty of working out what is the public interest, what is the common good and what is the potentially quite fickle and flopping political view of that at any point in time, which could easily change in five years in this place and back again five years later. I am seeing the conflict in terms of public interest and common good. You are not going to be able to solve that problem for us, but I would be interested to know if I have got that interpretation right. I would also be interested to know if I have got the right interpretation that you feel that the whole process of common good, not common good, but compulsory purchase and or sale, needs to be sorted out and whether that is something that you really want to leave on our plate? I think that my understanding is that it has been equipped with what you have said there in the way that you have described the situation. In terms of compulsory purchase, our experience from looking at the evidence and speaking to various people was that if you look at over a period of time, there has been less and less use of compulsory purchase powers by local authorities and their public bodies over the last 10, 15 years. As you suggest, that is caused by a number of reasons. Overly complicated legislation needs to be modernised, so that would certainly help, and that is certainly something within the scope of the Scottish Government. Because of the lack of use, there is a lack of confidence, there is a lack of capacity within local authorities, so I have suggested ways that we can help to rebuild that capacity through the creation of a house incorporation, which takes us on to the housing section, but I think that within the report, and you have got to jump about a bit to see where the various bits fit together, we address that there are problems. I think that the question of costs is often overused by local authorities. There can be costs, etc., but if you look at local authorities who do and are prepared to use compulsory purchase powers, they would say that over the balance of projects that they take on, the costs tend to even out. Again, it comes back to that lack of confidence just to go down that road in the first place, I think. I think that we have got to get back to the position where we have got the confidence within our public bodies to be able to do that. Clarification, thank you, convener, if I may. Originally, there was some quite controversial language used, and I think that I am right in saying that the phrase that came into the domain was that you would be looking at the right of a community to buy—I think that I am right in saying that even in the absence of a willing seller was the phraseology that was used at the time. I just seek clarification, because I think that I am right in saying that you have slightly come away from that, in that you are saying that a compulsory purchase order should only be pursued over vacant or derelict land. Am I right in my interpretation of this? I am afraid not. I was rather afraid that I might not be able to help you. We use the idea of a compulsory sale order over derelict land, and that is different from a compulsory purchase order. A compulsory purchase order is where the local authority or the body knows what they want to do with it. A compulsory sale order is where they just want someone to do something with it. In that sense, that is where the compulsory sale order comes in. The compulsory purchase order is where there is a purpose for acquiring the land in the first place, so that is rather different. A hypothetical situation to you. Someone has a small holding on the edge of a community, and the community believes that there is a public benefit in it taking over some of that land for public good, and it might be totally laudable aims. In pursuing that order, the small holding might be rendered completely inoperable. Do you envisage that being taken into account during that sort of process? It would surely be wrong for that to be pursued if the business that you are affecting becomes unsustainable as a result of it. I would refer that as a part of the public interest. The situation that we come across and a number of our members confront is in small rural communities in particular, where there is a need for, in some cases as little as two or three, half a dozen houses to be built, affordable houses, and they are completely landlocked in terms of one landowner who is not prepared to sell land, and therefore threatens the future sustainability of that community. That is the situation in mind where there is quite clearly in the public interest if we want to save rural communities, particularly fragile and isolated rural communities, that we can begin to shift the equation about land addresses and particular issues. It is a long report and there are a lot of bits that fit together and maybe just a couple of words of clarification. We make a recommendation about modernising and bringing up to date the compulsory purchase legislation, and that is mainly for public bodies compulsory purchasing. In the menu of rights that we are suggesting for communities, one of the rights that we are recommending is the right for communities to request a compulsory purchase by a local authority. The third one, if you like, is that we are also recommending within the menu of community rights the right of the community to acquire land where there is not a willing seller. All that has to be judged to be in the public interest through a due process. Just to complicate it or hopefully clarify it, the concept of the compulsory sale order is that at the moment we are restricted to vacant and derelict land where we are encouraging land that has lain derelict for potentially many, many years, giving the power to local authorities to force that to be sold, not to communities not to be sold and usually by auction. I am sorry just to pursue this, convener. Does it have to be vacant and derelict or vacant or derelict? Thank you. I apologise for not having understood that difference like others that we have had very little time to consider all of this. I am grateful for that. You would have no, I agree with half of it. I think that your example is an interesting one in pointing up the difference between a legal process where you have one owner here and one community here or a potential buyer where you have a conflicting kind of approach, whereas the public interest is something that should be wide and should consider the consequences of that decision right across, not just for the two participants, but also for the wider community. We hope that the community land agency would provide space for that to be explored more effectively than just being done through the courts. Thanks for the clarification. A housing issue that we can slot in here before we come into the acquisition costs in a minute. Thank you very much, convener, because I have been trying to find a way to raise that particular question today. I am going to go off at a slight tangent, but please bear with me because it pertains to rural housing. One of your recommendations is that to address housing need in the changing nature of the private rented sector, a change is required in the nature of tenancy arrangements within the sector, and you recommend that the Scottish Government introduce longer and more secure tenancies in that private rented sector. I wonder what evidence you may have come across in relation to estate houses in that regard, because the relationship between tenants and estate owners and estate houses is quite unique. In many cases, there will be very low rent paid, or maybe no rent paid, but at the same time, the occupants may have been there 20, 30 years and have invested heavily in their houses, and they have no rights at the moment. Was that something that you were thinking about when you made that recommendation? I refer to one paragraph to the question of tied housing. From what we could see, it accounts for about 40 per cent of the private rented sector in the rural parts of Scotland. Despite having a very accomplished rural housing adviser on the group, there is a distinct lack of information around tied housing. I suppose that our greatest concern, particularly in the land reform context, was, as you have suggested, the lack of tenancy agreements that seem to exist. It is very difficult to know how secure people's tenancies are. As you say, people are investing in houses and so on. That is certainly an area. We have made a specific recommendation, but we have flanked it up to something that needs further research, and it is quite urgent, I think. Okay, that is welcome. Thank you for that. Community Acquisition Course. Steve Thomson to lead on this one. Yes, convener. I was particularly interested in the issue of the state aid. If you get further views from you in terms of making government guidance, as you say here, to ensure that public bodies take a more solution-focused and less risk-averse approach, I would certainly agree with you that the state aid rules appear to me to have been used by bodies in the past as an excuse and a reason for not doing something, rather than for those bodies to look at a way around those. If you could elaborate a wee bit on that, did you have any particular examples of where that might have been the case that might help us to understand it? It is one of the topics that came up in our discussions with stakeholders a lot, and it characterised a lot of the evidence that we received in the early stages of this. Communities were feeling that their aspirations were being stultified by what they thought was the interpretation of regulations rather than the regulations themselves. I know that the Government is very aware of that, and I know that work is going on right now in terms of clarification of interpretation of state aid regulations, which I think is potentially extremely helpful. However, there are several communities that we were aware of and made aware of, especially those that were interested in land that involved forestry, wishing to acquire, wishing to manage forestry in different ways than was currently being managed, who felt that they would be unable to acquire those bits of land because they could not access public funding due to state aid rules. The interpretation that this is an international market in timber is that any assistance from the state has to be well within the limits that are defined by the state aid rules, and therefore public bodies are being reluctant to fund on that basis. The argument is that the scale of the activity that those communities wish to be involved with is going to interrupt international markets. That kind of judgment as to whether the state aid regulations appear to us and to our stakeholders who told us about that, to be erring always on the side of conservative and caution rather than on risk aware. Our recommendation is that the Government, without changing any of the rules, could actually take a more flexible approach to that, which we feel is being taken in other parts of the UK. I follow on from that. It runs on to the whole issue of market value and the insistence that state, land, forestry or whatever is to be sold at market value. There is also another related one, which I would appreciate your views on. Individual bodies such as the Forestry Commission or individual local authorities, especially smaller local authorities and so on. We mentioned just a minute ago about the reduction in number of CPOs and so on. It strikes me that one of the reasons why this is happening is that they maybe do not have the expertise themselves in their own legal departments, some of them because they are quite small authorities, and, therefore, if they are going to go down a particular road and there is a danger that it will be appealed and they have to hire QCs, they can get into huge expense. Have you thought at all about any kind of way around that, whether in those circumstances there should be some kind of national fund that can be tapped into to allow them so that they are not frightened to tackle what could be very wealthy individuals or organisations in relation to the CPOs? That would apply generally to local authorities, forestry and so on. Would you envisage that one of the national bodies would have a power to assist smaller local authorities or forestry or other bodies when it comes to those issues, especially when there is a matter of principle involved, so that they could come in and they would have the wherewithal to tackle the very powerful vested interests that they might be challenging? Within the establishment of a housing corporation whose prime function would be to assemble land for housing development, a capacity and experience around using compulsory purchase powers, we mentioned the possibility of working alongside local authorities and beginning to share that. We have not looked at the question of a separate fund, but we have looked at the question of trying to build the expertise and then look at how we can cascade that down so that we build up the expertise within, as you say, particular local authorities. We are looking at asset transfer, and part of the problem seems to me that if you are asking a local authority or a public body, particularly local authorities, what the cost should be, the question often is that there are six answers coming from a local authority and there are different departments. I have a different view on this depending on how they are thinking about this. Again, what we are suggesting is that we need to encourage local authorities to take a much more strategic approach to this, so they have a cross-departmental line on transfer and assets at what sort of cost. Quite often, by transferring a list of market value, you are by definition investing or achieving some other aim that the council is trying to achieve. I think that that more strategic approach is something that we will try to encourage within the report as well. If I may ensure that there are just a couple of extra points there, there is the whole issue about the transfer of publicly owned land to communities, which does not involve compulsory purchase at all. Compulsory purchase is primarily for public bodies to acquire from private owners. If we look at the asset transfer or disposal of publicly owned land to communities, we identified again through stakeholder discussion two things. One was the state aid issue, and the second was the rules under the Scottish Public Finance manual, which gave the impression that public bodies are unable to dispose of their assets at less than market value. Our research indicated that public bodies can do that if various financial arrangements are put in place. In terms of the national forest land scheme, the whole issue about market value in terms of transferring public assets to communities is a major stumbling block. However, to give credit to the Government, it is looking at the Scottish Public Finance manual again at the moment in terms of the issue about disposal. In the broader economic analysis, the Government could be saving money by transferring a list of market value, but there are issues about departmental budgets and agency budgets and resource accounting that have to be taken into consideration. Again, because of the integrated nature of some of those things, we are making suggestions about state aid regulations, we are making suggestions about the public finance manual and also about local authorities who have slightly different powers in terms of disposal than other public agencies, making it easier for local authorities to transfer at less than market value, which some are doing currently. There is a complexity there, again indicating how a lot of those things fit together. Claudia Beamish I ask you about your recommendation 14, which relates to—I would not expect you, even after all the hard work, to remember what that is, but I can just read the part of it that I have a particular interest in at the moment. The review group concludes that communities embarking on land and property ownership and management require considerable support. The group recommends that the types of support services provided in the Highlands and Islands should be made available to local communities in the rest of Scotland and that the Scottish Government, just to read the last part of the recommendation, should take a more integrated and focused approach to encouraging and supporting the growth of local community land ownership. In view of that recommendation, which I do not only have an interest in because I happen to represent a very large rural region of South Scotland, but throughout the whole of Scotland, I wonder whether, perhaps, I might ask if that is right with yourself, Dr Elliott, if Pip Tubber could maybe comment on that and any others of the group that we wish to. From my experience of 14 years in southern Scotland, there is a difference in interests amongst communities in the south and communities in the north in buying land. To date, we have had no large community buy-outs of land, even though there is a land fund that has been offered several times to encourage communities to think about taking a different attitude towards land on their doorsteps. Part of the difference, I think, is because in the Highlands there has been a long-term support structure for communities to help them to think through what the land means to them and to help them to think about buying the land and supporting them in doing that. We have never had that same integrated support for communities in southern Scotland, at least not consistently. I think that there are all sorts of systems in place, but they are very fragmented. We have argued for a long time in southern Scotland that we would love to see a body with a remit of high, Highlands and Highlands Enterprise covering southern Scotland as well, because I think that that difference is significant. We have never had a body promoting an integrated approach to rural community development that we have had in the north. This recommendation comes very much from that background. I think that the community land agency that is being proposed could play that role by helping people to think through what the land means to them and what they could do with it. I am not thinking that we are talking huge scale—I suspect that we are talking relatively small scale—but I still think that that thinking through process could bring about significant changes in community capacity and community dynamics and regeneration on the back of that. If that is okay with you, I would go on to talk with the group about the agencies more broadly to support communities and oversee governance. I see that, as John What you have already referred to in the evidence this morning, the group recommends that the Scottish Government could establish a community land agency within government with a range of powers, particularly in facilitating negotiation between landowners and communities. I believe that I am correct that you mentioned John the mediation issue within negotiation as well. To promote support and deliver a significant increase in local community land ownership in Scotland, you also recommend or consider, and I will quote again a need for a single body with responsibility for understanding and monitoring the system governing ownership and management of Scotland's land, recommending changes in the public interest and that the Scottish Government could establish another agency, which would be, if that is the correct word for it, the Scottish Land and Property Commission. Could you expand or give us some detail rather than expand at this stage on your reasoning for the establishment of the two groups? I think that that would be helpful. That is not to criticise it, but to open up this conversation. On the community land agency, we see that very much as a hands-on, on-the-ground support structure. We list several things, but the mediation role being one of the most important. That happens at the moment in an informal and rather ad hoc way, where sometimes independent individuals or bodies can actually do that mediation role. That is why many of the community acquisitions to date have been done through that process and not through the Land Reform Act. We just feel that that should be formalised a bit more so that it is less ad hoc and more consistent across the country. In addition to that, it provides support to communities who want to do this in terms of capacity building and some small-scale financial support. It is very much a hands-on support network. In addition to that, using existing resources, we did not think that we needed to set up a completely new organisation to do that. There are support networks already working effectively across Scotland in different places and at different scales. We felt that the agency, through either contractual or secondment, could actually be using some of the existing resources, because we are very conscious about using more public money for more of that. However, there is a much more co-ordinated approach to that. That was the agency view. There are two very different kinds of animals. The agency, as John says, is more hands-on, and it would be a unit within Government. It would have a day-to-day purpose. The Land and Property Commission would be an external body appointed by Government, which would have a monitoring function over the whole. The way in which circumstances change and therefore the need to keep an eye on landform questions is going to change in the nature of things. It is not a hands-off one, but it is a more monitoring function. There are two very different functions, so that is why there are two different bodies. We hope that the community land agency, because it is internal to Government, would be less expensive and less of an investment in a sense than some models of community land agency that have been proposed. Through the convener, I would perhaps have concerns in relation to the comments that Pip Tubba has already made about when you are talking about resourcing and funding, that there are strong models in some parts of Scotland for support and in other parts there are not. I would have thought that that would have quite serious financial implications for Scottish Government within the relationship with the land agency and supporting communities. Do you have a comment on that? I think that that would be one of the purposes of the agency to try to iron that out and to be able to use experience and expertise from one part of the country and ensure that other parts of the country benefited from that. At the moment, in the administration of the Scottish land fund, Highlands and Highlands Enterprise and the Big Lottery already provide a nationwide support system for those communities who are wishing to use the fund to acquire land. That is already there as a national level service, if you like, across Scotland. I think that what we see the land agency doing is that plus and more of that and equalising the opportunities across the whole of Scotland. Could you expand a little bit more on the role of the Land and Property Commission? Perhaps, without wanting to put words in your mouth, is the reason for wanting it to be at arm's length from government so that it can continue whatever beyond any particular government and have a monitoring role and keep things constantly under review. Could you comment about how that process might be taken forward? I think that we haven't thought particularly about how it would be taken forward. We thought mainly about the function of it, which would be that monitoring function. It's in the nature of land ownership and it has been through the centuries that it gets out of kilter for a variety of reasons and that you can keep it in check at one point or you can introduce reforms, but they don't necessarily stick for a long time. There are all kinds of different circumstances that can come up that will change the picture and will require that kind of adjustment. We would expect that there should be people who have particular expertise. It should be an expert group. In that sense, it's arm's length from government in that it's more its composition than its relationship with government to think that matters, that it should be independent people who are experts in the relevant areas. The kinds of expertise that are required will change as the circumstances change. We should now move on to urban renewal next. I was pleased to see in the urban renewal section of the report the statement that bringing former vacant and early gland back into productive use can immediately boost local confidence and I'm sure we would all welcome that. The report also tells us that the annual Scottish vacant and early gland survey tells us that there were 11,114 hectares of urban vacant or early gland in Scotland in 2013 with over 40% of urban vacant or early gland being unused for at least 21 years and it goes on to say that at moderate development densities this could site more than half a million new homes which helps to concentrate the mind a wee bit. I was quite surprised to read in that report that there's only been a decrease of 265 hectares or 2.3% in the total amount of derelict and urban vacant land recorded since 2007. You make a number of recommendations relating to the persistent challenge of vacant and derelict land in urban areas including exploring the feasibility of introducing a majority land assembly measure and also investigating the potential of introducing an urban partnership zone mechanism in Scotland. Could you maybe elaborate a bit more in detail about the majority land assembly measure and other measures on how they would bring vacant and derelict land urban land use into play? I think that the first point I'd make is that we would certainly acknowledge that the figure that you quoted right is in terms, and I think that you've got to take into account the turnover so that the Government's policy of monitoring and investing and the work that local authorities do has been fairly successful, but there's a kind of underlying endemic problem that's not being such a challenge and not being properly addressed. We've tried to look at that, I suppose, in two ways. One, which is more sort of individual site-specific, so it's a plot of land or whatever, it's between two buildings, et cetera, and that's where we look at something like the compulsory sale order has been a mechanism which would encourage the recycling of land. I wanted to stress that because there has been criticism, it's a sort of statious report, that what we're talking about is transferring land from what we regard as passive owners to active owners, whether they be private, public or community. It's this bit about the importance of land recycling really. In terms of the land assembly measures, I mean, I would have to acknowledge that they are two of the newer ideas within the report, and while we've looked into them and there's some international experience we can draw upon, I think that they do require some further research and exploration really. One of our advisers, Professor David Adams, is a particular expert in this area, and we drew a lot from his work and the work of some others down south to try and pull those areas together. I think that they are attempts to look at particularly the situation of large-scale land assembly, which can be immensely challenging for particular urban communities trying to move big infrastructure projects forward. Having said that, as Alison has mentioned, cities like Dundee have done some questions and work along the waterfront, the former dock area, and have managed to assemble some land, but we do feel that there is a need to give local authorities and other developers some increased powers to try and make this a bit easier. At the moment, from what we understand from the evidence, the major problem is that a site could involve nine, ten different landowners, but to find who they are, if you can find it out, and it's a whole consensual problem. Certainly speaking to Dundee, the situation in which the last person is in a very strong negotiating position, and we looked at what happens in other countries and they've managed to flip that a bit and change that, so that the relationship changes and the emphasis or the opportunity to have a sway over that discussion switches down to a lower part of the process. Both are what we think are fairly practical solutions that might address the question of the challenge of large-scale land assembly, but we acknowledge that they require further research and exploration. That you have looked at international examples, you've probably heard of the group Nordic Horizons, and they've certainly highlighted some situations with regard to majority land assembly in Helsinki and also in Reykjavik, in Iceland. Have you looked at these in any detail? There's quite a lot of actual evidence from a whole range of countries over a period of time, really, so we've just tried to pull together what we thought were the key ideas that might fit within the Scottish context. I think that, in taking forward these ideas, certainly you'd want to go back and draw on that international experience, because it's not just in Scandinavia and parts of the Far East—a whole range of places this has been used, or these mechanisms have been used quite successfully, and we do think that there's something that's worth further exploration. We'll move on to rural land now, Alec Ferguson, to lead in this. Thank you very much, convener. I suspect that we could spend two days on this. Never mind a few minutes that we have available to us, but it's a fascinating topic, and the report has some very interesting and not uncontroversial proposals, I think it would be fair to say. But on the subject of rural land use, as opposed to ownership, which we will come on to, one of the things that the report says is that it notes that the land use strategy process will lead to, and I think I'm quoting correctly, reductions in the current flexibility in rural landowners' choices over how they use their land. I just wondered if you could expand a little bit on the current flexibilities that exist that concern you. The flexibilities which exist or the discretion which owners have is considerable, because ownership means that you have rights of how you use the land. At present, I think it's more a question of there being not very many constraints on how that land should be used, and we see the rural land use strategy as being something that is going to be, for example, bringing to bear on land use a lot of questions that derive from climate change, and from the importance of ecosystem services approach to land use. That's one of the cases where circumstances are changing, because our knowledge of how what good land use is is becoming influenced by what we know about climate change. So it's that sort of change which is likely to decrease the complete rights or the complete discretion that owners have about how they use their land. We're going to quite a lot of examples, quite a lot of detail about the question of how the middle areas of land can be used and the kinds of decisions that have to be made over that, in connection with whether it's grouse moors or woodland, for example. I'm sorry, can you just define the middle areas of land for me? What do you mean by that? We're referring to the squeeze middle that was defined by Maluri in their report, James Sutton Institute. Apart from the high uplands, which have one kind of use, and the rich agricultural land, which is quite different, it's the bit in the middle. Where there's more decisions have to be made over what kind of use is going to be appropriate. Considerable competition for the use of that land as well from various sectors. Could you perhaps expand a little bit on the specific mechanisms that you're recommending to ensure that land is used more in the public interest, as you would see it? As I understand the land use strategy, the idea is to encourage an overview of all the possible uses and all the possible benefits that you're getting from land at the moment, and where the opportunity starts to get more benefits from that land, and then make that information quite widely available so that people can make more informed decisions about future land use. I suspect, although nobody's confirmed this as yet, that as the resources under the SRDP and other grant schemes have become tighter, it'll be more obvious to try and target those scarce resources to encourage land use that's going to deliver maximum public benefits. The land use strategy becomes a mechanism to guide land practice. I don't think it's going to be prescripted in any way, but I think it will guide future land use so that it delivers maximum benefits to the people, and we think that's probably a good thing. You're effectively endorsing the land use strategy in this part of the report, simple as that. We do have one recommendation, is that we felt that land ownership patterns are quite an important part of the land use strategy, and they haven't actually been included as part of the work of the pilots, and we're quite strongly encouraging that to happen. Can I just move on to land ownership in that case, Confrida, because that very neatly leads me on to the next topic, which is indeed patterns of land ownership. Obviously, the one that's hit the headlines is that you are recommending a cap on the amount of ground that any individual or family interest to put it simply can own. How much is enough? I find that an extraordinary thing to say, to be honest, because I find it incredible that you should come out with this recommendation and not have an idea of what you mean by it. I can understand you not wanting to answer it, but I do think it's an interesting allegation, because is there not a difference between, and is there not a danger of confusing the amount of land that's owned with the influence that the owner has? If I live in a small village and I own the only single available building plot in that village, I think you could argue strongly that I have more influence over that community than somebody who's got 10,000 acres of more land half a mile up the road. Is there not a danger of confusing the amount of land that's owned and often really well managed and employing a lot of people and a lot of public benefit and all of these things that we all want to see, because there are very good examples out there as well as some poor ones, but is there not a danger of confusing those issues of amount of land that's owned and influenced? There certainly is. We acknowledge in the report that the question of the monopoly position that some landowners can be in can be over a very small area of land. We are aware of areas in Scotland where one landowner has considerable power over the life of people in the community. That is as much a function of the social structure of that part of the country as anything else. In some parts, the community doesn't have anywhere to move other than to the existing landowners. There is an issue there about a local monopoly. The question of putting a cap on the amount of land that can be owned is something that comes out as a suggested answer to two questions. I think that the two questions are the ones that need to be asked. We are suggesting that that's an answer to the two questions. If there are other answers to these questions, okay, but what is important is that the question be asked. In terms of the relationship between the quality of ownership and the quality of relationship between the owner and the local community and so on, certainly that is a question—that is not simply a function of size. However, the moral hazard increases the greater the amount of land someone has. At the heart of that discretion is a democratic question as to how much control someone individual should have over decisions that affect a wider community. The more land that is involved in that, the greater that risk. That is one of the questions. How do you handle that? How do you deal with the undoubted local monopoly that some people have and some people abuse, and not everybody does? I acknowledge that all the time. The more land someone has, the greater the risk that that is going to happen. The other question which the cap was meant to address was a question of investment by people who have a lot of money and who see land simply as an investment without necessarily intending to do anything with it. It is that kind of attitude to the land ownership that we see as being contrary to the thrust of the report and we believe contrary to the thrust of people's views in Scotland. Again, Scotland is laying itself open to abuse in that sense by people who have a lot of money. We give examples of the comparison of how many castles you can own in Scotland compared with a flat and night's bridge just now. There is a lot of money around and there is a lot of people who will be seduced by the kinds of headlines from land agents saying that a Highland estate is the top of the Christmas wish list for the super rich. That kind of approach to land ownership is something that we are vulnerable to unless there is a cap on the amount of land that someone can use. Again, it is a question that is important rather than the answer. We are clearly not going to agree on this. That much is obvious because I just don't accept some of the premise of that argument. I come back to this question of how much is too much because I can have 100 acres. I come back to the question of influence I think because we are in terrible danger of taking a general brush across an issue which you rightly highlighted that is a minority of cases. I do believe that there have been tremendous changes in attitudes since the establishment of this Parliament in many ways of the relationship between landowners and tenants, landowners and communities right across the country. It is gradual but I believe it is there and I think you would acknowledge probably that there are some very, very good examples of improved relations with Scotland. I think there has been a good attempt at partnership working which has not worked in all cases but that I do believe and I would be interested in your views on whether or not you think these relationships have improved a lot over the last 10 years. What concerns me about this is that I think that partnership working, that working together, persuasion and gradual process which will continue to improve these relationships is in danger of being not blown apart but brought to a bit of a certainly slowed down by what is a fairly controversial and certainly confrontational recommendation in this report. I would be interested in your comments on that because I really think at the end of the day, despite my differences in yours, I think we are all after the same thing at the end of the day. Yes. I will just add one or two comments on that. We became very much aware, as everybody is, that Scotland has a particularly highly concentrated land ownership pattern compared with other Western European countries and other countries further afield, and that is fairly well known. We were also aware that there is probably a trend towards increasing concentration rather than decreasing concentration, and we also had a remit from the Government to look at potential solutions that would encourage a greater diversification of land ownership patterns in this country. We came up with some ideas, and one of them is restricting who can own it to companies that are based in Europe. It is one, putting a cap, and you are absolutely correct that we did not come up with a figure or a percentage as to what that should be, but it seemed to us that if you wanted to tackle a completely open and free market, anybody with enough money can buy anything that they like in Scotland. Was that the trend that we would want to see for the benefit of resilient rural communities? Our conclusion was, no, it wasn't, and those were some of the ideas that we came up to try and restrict that. Can I make one final point on this, convener, if I may? Thank you. I appreciate that. I go back to a situation in sheep farming that I used to indulge myself in. In fact, I made a living at it remarkably. When sheep quotas came in and you were limited, the amount of shoes you could have in order to obtain quota, Scotland's biggest sheep farmer gave some advice which many of us followed who were in a position to go and see your lawyers. Because people became limited companies, they became partnerships and they found, with considerable ease, a way around these restrictions. Is this not a charter for lawyers? I can't help seeing that. There is a similarity in that. Lawyers will be sitting there rubbing their hands and saying, We've got work here for years. I had a comment along these lines from a friend over the weekend. I'm not a lawyer, but I know that they have a capacity to find their ways around all kinds of things, and that's their job. It's the job of the Government to spot that and to see ways of again improving and restricting loopholes, if it means that they are perverting the purpose of the introduction of their recommendation. I'm sure that discussion will continue, but thank you. I'm probably much more sympathetic in principle of what you're trying to achieve here than Mr Ferguson. However, I wonder if there's not an obvious flaw in the general concept of a one-size-fits-all cap on land ownership. If, let's say, you own 50,000 acres in the centre of Scotland on an estate, you have what you talked about, the influence over so many people's lives, set against owning 50,000 acres in the far north of Scotland, which is not to denigrate the far north of Scotland, you may have far less influence. I wonder if it's too simplistic to talk about an acreage cap when different parts of Scotland, the amount of land that you own, would have completely different impacts? I think that that's why we would like to approach this in terms of saying that this was a proposed answer to particular questions. As you look at the question and you look at how—that's another reason for leaving the question up to the Government as to what the cap should be. If the cap were to go down that route, it would be one that would be geared to the answer to the question as they articulate it and as they see the important political question. Whether it's a universal cap or not is partly the way in which they address that question. We would like to see it as being a saying that the answer has flagged up two questions, which are very important ones, and we would like to see the questions explored a bit further. That's useful to hear, though. It does sound a little bit like you've let the blue touch paper and retired a safe distance. Not quite. We're still good. Dave Thompson? One point to that. One issue we didn't get to explore in full, which we would like to have done, was the idea of some sort of system that would allow the Government to look at people who wanted to buy large areas of the land to assess what they wanted to do with the land and determine whether they were worthy buyers of large tracts of Scotland. We didn't fully explore that, but that might be another way of coming at this whole issue of a cap, because you could then have some screening process that would allow people who had the right motives and had the right business plan to acquire land, but people who you were slightly worried about or perhaps were coming in from abroad simply to invest in land as an investment, you could screen them out. We didn't really explore that fully, but it was something that we would have liked to have looked at. I agree with the general principle that we need to curb the power and influence of certain folk in the country in terms of what they own and not just in relation to what they own in other ways as well, because I think it's one of the problems we're having in the UK that there are a small number of people with massive power and influence and an awful lot with very little. There are issues and problems and potential dangers though in whatever system you choose to try to deal with that, but that's not to say that we shouldn't try to deal with it, we should, we must. I'll give you one little example of where power and influence can distort things, and that's in relation to an experience that my father had in Lossymouth. A good chunk of Lossymouth was a kind of new town where the burgers of Elgin who owned it created what are really kind of small holdings which gave people enough ground to grow their own and all the rest of it, but when the town council decided that they needed to build more council houses it was these very small holders that they tackled and the reason they tackled them with compulsory purchase orders was that they were easier meet than tackling the people with the big houses overlooking the west beach who had money who could fight them in court. So the small people lost their bits of land and the big people got off with it. So as a general principle we need to try to rebalance I think that the whole issue of power and influence and that includes land ownership in Scotland, so I'm very pleased that you are going down that road and I'm sure as we go through this that we will find a way to get that balance right. Do you have any comment to make of that, no? No, just thank you. Right, okay, we're agreeing that's great. Claire Baker. The points have been covered, it's just to say that John Watts comments around the trends that we're seeing in Scotland and I think that we do leave ourselves vulnerable to greater concentration of land ownership. I'm not going to suggest what the cap is, but I think that it's an interesting proposal to bring forward and does try to address how you restrict that. Was there any other areas that you looked at if you were trying to think how do we, because the aim of the report and the proposal from the Government was to how do we increase diversification and if you have a trend that is actually working quite strongly against that, how do you try and redress that balance? One of the examples that you use is the fairly well-known Danish owner of muchland in Scotland who pays taxes in Denmark on that Scottish land but doesn't pay anything in Scotland to either local authorities or to UK government. Those issues that you looked at as well in terms of the concentration of ownership. There's a difference between increasing diversity, which you can do in a variety of different ways. One of the ways that you can increase diversity is increasing the number of houses that are built, for example, and reducing the concentration of ownership. We certainly are of the view that there is no single bullet point that will reduce the concentration of ownership. It's something that has to be addressed from a variety of different ways. John has got a very good diagram here of the way in which a variety of different proposals and recommendations in the report would have a knock-on effect, a cumulative effect on that figure. We are talking about half of all privately-owned rural land in Scotland is owned by 0.008 per cent of the population. That, as a measure of inequality, is exceptional. It's when you put it in the context of other measures of inequality, you see that it's something that we can't just sit back and say, well, that's okay. We have to understand it first of all, understand why it's there, and see whether there are ways in which it can be addressed. We did look at one or two other things but didn't develop the ideas. We looked at the possibility of owners having to be resident. As Pip explained, we looked at the idea of incoming purchasers having to pass certain tests in terms of land use and sustainability issues. In other words, there were other different interventions in that open land market, but we didn't develop all of those ideas. Many of us, as Alison said, there's no single silver bullet for this. A range of our suggestions will all have some impact potentially on the land ownership pattern in Scotland. We'd be happy to give you the polite version of this, which tends to summarise that. Did you look at the situation in Denmark where, at the beginning of the last century, they decided that nobody could own rural land to a greater extent than 250 hectares of forestry or agricultural land? In particular, we looked at the summary report of the current situation that was looking right across the EU. Again, it comes back to the question of what question is this the answer to. A lot of the countries that did have a cap on ownership size were ones in Eastern Europe, where there was a particular political question that they were trying to answer. I thought that it would be useful to know. In Ireland, the Government of Britain took the view that it would split up the estates and that tenants would become owners on 50-year mortgages and that landlords would be thus compensated. The question was about concentration of ownership. It's slightly different here because we're not talking about huge numbers of tenants who are starving because of the potato famine and all the rest of it, but we are talking about influences, which are great. It would be helpful if we could see your diagram and I hope that we can perhaps inquire of our other panels a bit more about it, because I think that there is a dialogue that we have to expand on just now. Thank you for that. Nigel Don wanted another supplementary in this. I'm just wondering, convener. I'm conscious that we must be running out of time, but I'm just conscious also that the report includes a section on the law of succession of movable property, and I'm not asking you to rehearse the words that are in there. I'd just like some feel as to how important you feel that subject is. It's extensively discussed, but I didn't really pick up how far this was up your agenda and how important the people who'd spoken to you about it really thought it was. I think that there were various submissions on this when we called for evidence, and generally the angle that people were taking on succession law was that this was going to chop up estates and it was going to reduce the size of estates. I don't think that that's actually when we proposed the abolition of the distinction between movable and immovable property. It was more along the lines of this being a question of justice rather than that it was going to be a mechanism for changing the size of estates, because most of the biggest estates are in companies anyway, so it doesn't apply and so on. Speaking to lawyers who have had experience of dealing with cases like that, if it is going to be divided between the different children and offspring and so on, then what's going to happen is that the business itself, the agricultural business, is going to be divided. That doesn't necessarily mean to say that one is going to get two fields and the other is going to get three fields. It's more likely that the business itself will go to one and they will buy out the other, so there are a whole lot of practicalities there in terms of the practice of it. The reason that we proposed this was that we felt that it was elevating land to a position that was very anomalous in the European context and it was also something that seemed to be unjust rather than it being a tool for changing patterns of ownership. No, I'd got that, but I guess I would come back to the point as to how vexed were people about this. I'm actually with you, I think it is just simply unjust and I'd like to change and I'm sure the laws of trust and the ways of holding land, there are plenty of ways of doing that. Lawyers won't even be rubbing their hands with glee because this is straightforward. It's actually not a problem, a lot of it's already that way. I'm trying to get some sense of how vexed people were that we still haven't managed to do this after centuries. We did have some submissions that we're picking up on the justice question. There was a women's land reform group, for example, who were concerned about it from a justice question. As I say, most of the comments came in terms of the breaking up of the property rather than saying that they had an example of where there had been distress caused by this. As you say, I think that when lawyers get together on this one then there are a variety of ways of solving it. The thing is that when it comes to bid at present people can be disinherited from owning land but not from owning other kinds of property. That's the distinction which is problematic and the situation which is unjust. It's more in terms of... Appropriately, we'll move on to land taxation, payments and markets and Jim Hume's going to lead on that. Thank you very much. There's nothing too controversial here, thankfully, he said. Just following on quite neatly from the last question, we are always concerned, obviously, about new entrants. I think that it's quite the view of most of us here, anyway, at least myself, that the best way for a new entrant in its special agriculture is through tenancies. I note that the group's intention is to retain the amount of tenant farmers, but you also state that changes to the current fiscal regime should include restructuring them to encourage an increase in the number of landowners in rural Scotland. That doesn't really balance out, because if you take away from, I suppose, estates or et cetera, to private individuals, that land doesn't come back as somewhere that somewhere can start cheaply enough, because nobody can just afford to buy property, tenancies are the way into agriculture. How can you balance that? It's not my immediate area of expertise, agricultural tenancies, but we talk a lot about it. We were very much aware that the agricultural right to buy issue was one of the most contentious, and we looked at that in some depth. I'm also aware, of course, that there is a separate inquiry going on at the moment. Again, we related that to the actual increase in the value of land and the price of land, which, by standards and comparisons, is actually very high in Scotland. What were the causes of this high value? We then took us into the issue about tax exemptions from certain taxes and, of course, the whole regime on payments and on the CAP, which also all influenced the price of land. A lot of those tax exemptions and payments have all been capitalised into the value of the land, making it very difficult for new entrants. It was a complicated issue. The conclusion that we came to in terms of agricultural tenancies was that it was probably not our remit to look at how that impacted on agriculture as a sector, but how it impacted on the social and community aspects of rural communities. Again, a concern looking at trends of reduction in the number of tenants in rural areas and the amalgamation of farms was a concern for us in terms of what impact did that have socially and in terms of community resilience. That's really the area that we focused on. You said that you weren't to focus on the remit of agriculture but on communities, but main rural land users are my area. I'm from a farm in the background, so I'll declare that interest if you like. Are agricultural people working on agricultural land? I can't see how you could have focused on changing the whole land ownership and therefore tenancies without taking into account agriculture in that very large community. We were aware that the agricultural holdings review was going on at the same time. Our recommendation was that, in undertaking its work, which I'm sure will focus on the agricultural sector, it should be cognisant and aware of the social and community aspects of changing tenancy arrangements as well. That's the conclusion that came to me. Just to follow on to that, and I'm sure that there's others wanting in here as well. You mentioned that taxation changes land value taxation. There's no clear public interest in maintaining the current universal exemption of agriculture, forestry and other land-based businesses from non-domestic rates, although there are large pairs of domestic rates, of course. Was there any economic impact done on how that would affect the farming communities in Scotland? From a policy point of view, the question of the agricultural exemption is something that is questioned in a lot of theoretical work on taxation. Why do you exempt a whole sector from taxes rather than targeting them, the exemptions more carefully? There's a question coming up there. There's also a question of the relationship of the policy of protecting agriculture in that sort of way, while at the same time having the Government policies of encouraging greater rural diversity. There does seem to be a disconnect these days about exactly what provision people have of the kind of rural Scotland that we need. It was really to emphasise the importance of the parts of Government thinking that are tying together. Just on the last supplementary question, how does increasing taxation on one community increase diversity? I'm trying to think where that question comes from. If you're reducing the tax burden or the tax take on a particular sector, a whole sector, then that is giving favourable attention to that sector. It's also having the knock-on effect of that being capitalised into the land values, so it's making it more difficult and paradoxically for people to get into agriculture. That seems a strange position to have while at the same time, so it's encouraging greater agriculture while at the same time having another policy that says that you're wanting greater diversity of rural businesses. Pip, you've got more things to think about. One of the points that was raised seems very unfair that an agricultural business is not paying tax on land use when neighbouring business, who's also trying to run a business in a rural location, is paying tax on their business. I think it's a matter of trying to make sure we're fair, but also make sure that we're encouraging the right business in the right place. It's that openness again, transparency. I don't think we're saying that tax should necessarily be levied. I think we're just saying that if there are exemptions in place or if they're going to be taxed in place, they need to be thought through and set at an appropriate level. Sorry, I just raised a point about an agricultural business and its neighbouring business not paying tax. It's also forestry as well, of course. What land-using businesses are paying non-domestic rates whereas agriculture and forestry aren't at the moment? You stated that they're unfair. Shops and pubs? I'm talking about land use though, so we're talking about land use, shops and pubs. Rural businesses, not just land businesses, is the point that we're making within the report. Taxation, this is a whole lot of wider ones, but look at those, there's one or two more questions on that, but I was going to say, if you're talking about taxation and taking those things into account, presumably this is one of the things where you'll be looking for us to explore ways in which the whole question of how tax on land is dealt with, not just the matter of exemptions, that it isn't something in isolation, that it is an overall matter about land values and so on, which is going to have to be researched and gone through. So, while there may be concerns that somebody is going to be penalised, it's not about penalising, it's about balancing, am I right? Absolutely, no, it's important that when you make a change to the taxation system, you look at the impact on the whole system and so it's a review of the whole system that is really being asked for here. That's interesting. We have the review body on agricultural holdings coming to see us specifically, so if we can avoid going through that twice, it would be helpful committee members at the moment. Alex Ferguson's first and then Dave Thompson. Well, I will avoid the topics that might come up under the agricultural holdings review, but I'm just surprised to put it fairly mildly that you haven't looked at the impact on agriculture. I represent Galloway and West Humphreys. We are about to lose over £100 million over the next five years out of agriculture, and, therefore, out of the local economy, and this is the point that I want to make, that I believe and I don't think anybody would argue that a vibrant agricultural community helps to sustain a rural community, full stop, and that is certainly the case in my part of the world, and there is a huge concern that this amount of money coming out of a very low economy, like Dumfries and Galloway, is going to have a major impact on the communities of Dumfries and Galloway, not just the farmers. Therefore, I find it really worrying that there is a proposal to increase the financial, the fiscal burden on farmers, for which there may be a perfectly good case without taking into account the apparent impact on the community as well, and I just want to lay that on the table. Any comment you've got is fine, but I think that there is such a tie-up there between community activity, community vibrancy, and, certainly in my part, rural Scotland, a vibrant agricultural sector that I think to look at one without considering all the implications is not helpful. I was hoping that our recommendation was put in the context of a concern with the community as a whole, rather than the impact on a particular part of it. As in the rest of the report, we are trying to emphasise the wider context that things come through. We recommend the gradual introduction of business rates in that sense, and we are also aware that we do not do those things overnight. However, we are conscious that, for a long time, one of the things that I did was go back to the John McEwen lectures that were produced in the 1990s, when people were thinking about land reform in the first place. Donald Dure at that time was saying that, of course, the whole rural situation is changing, and there is a whole variety of different rural businesses coming along. However, there did not seem to be much indication in the reading that we had, other than statements that that was a good thing, that it was being backed up by other kinds of policies. The wider question is, what kind of rural Scotland is it that we want? How can that be pulled together? We would welcome that being done. I think that the sole issue of taxation raises a pretty major issue in terms of how you deal with it, because the convener mentioned that it is really important, and I think that you are saying that as well. The problem is that the Scottish Government only has responsibility for certain aspects of taxation. The rest of that lies with the Westminster Government. Therefore, to make any real progress where, if you want to change it—and I am not suggesting anything in particular should be introduced or taken out or whatever—but if you want to change it, you have to have the ability to reduce or increase at one point in order to keep your overall tax take and balance to reduce or intake somewhere else. When you were looking at this, how easy do you think it is going to be for the Scottish Government to introduce any meaningful, sensible change in the taxation system without having access to all the tools in the toolbox? One of the interesting features about it is that when you look at recurrent taxation, most of that is in the gift of the Scottish Government. Those are local taxes. The questions of inheritance tax and capital gains tax are transactional taxes. They are the ones that only happen when something else happens. However, the recurrent taxation system, you currently have council tax, which needs to be looked at because it is literally 23 years out of date. There is room for looking at council tax again. There is room for looking at business rates again. Of course, there has been a consultation on that, but that is still part of the mix. Those are the recurrent taxes, and land value taxation would also be a recurrent tax. You have a clutch of taxes there that are all within the Scottish Government's Scottish Government to look at. There is an opportunity for looking at that subgroup of taxes together and coming up with a different system. Sure, there are other taxes that are reserved at present. That is the point. There are a number of those taxes, and we can create new taxes, I dare say, on land value tax or whatever, if we wish to. However, if you do not have the other taxation powers, it is going to, by definition, restrict your ability to have the real effect that you might want to have. Obviously, if you could influence the other taxes, you would have more influence. However, the recurrent taxes are a sufficiently defined subset that you could explore anyway with the powers that are presently available. That is something that the Scottish Affairs Committee is looking at within Westminster. Is there some kind of tie-up between the two that would be worth exploring? I think that, if I may, the fact that we have the taxation system that we have in terms of the reserved powers—what we have at the moment—would be extremely difficult for us to be able to influence Westminster in the way that we might wish, because they will say that those are their responsibilities. They have to look at the whole of the United Kingdom, and therefore, if they altered one of the taxes under their remit to tie in with something that we want to do in Scotland, that would have a knock-on effect on England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Therefore, they are not going to do it. Therefore, being realistic, we can only restrict ourselves to the devolved areas. Therefore, that, by definition, is going to restrict our ability to deal with this overall problem. Do you agree with that? I would say that there is still a lot that can be done within the devolved powers, and that Ian Davidson and his team down in Westminster are a powerful force. Clare Baker. Thank you, convener. I hope that Dave Tofton welcomes the fact that the Scottish First Committee is looking at many of those areas. We need to recognise that 58 out of 62 recommendations from the review group are under devolved competence. When it comes to taxation, I think that you are right to highlight the exemption that exists for land-based industries and at least raise questions about why that area continues to be exempt when you compare it to other rural businesses. However, I am sure that it reassures Alex Ferguson that the minister has already ruled out that proposal. Even though, when the last legislation was passed, John Swinney said that there was an on-going review and reflection on it, it is possible that there is still some discussion to be had around the continuation of those kind of exemptions. Have the committee made any kind of evaluation of what the value of the exemptions is and how that then reflects across the wider rural business community about who is actually paying the carrot—not the burden of taxation—but who is making the tax contribution within those areas and what the loss of revenue or what the equivalent of that exemption is? That is the thing that came up recently with the national audit office, who was concerned to start exploring exactly what that was going to mean in terms of revenue for gone and to get a more transparent account of the way in which those various taxes, payments, tax exemptions and how they all relate to each other. They were concerned that there was not sufficient transparency, so I think that there is likely to be movement in that direction so that it will be more clear later on. No, we did not do it. We can do it to work coming from the national audit. Under this heading, you have talked about the recommendation that the Government could review the current exemptions from sporting rates and introduce a reformed rate system, which is appropriate in the public interest. You have talked about the possibility of sporting rates being tailored to each of the species involved. How deeply did you delve into that? Can you actually do that legally? Is it practical to do it? Is it permissible from a tax point of view to tailor it to the species? My understanding is that it is not. That is interesting. One of the things that taxation does is that it provides incentives and disincentives, and there are different ones involved. For example, you want to conserve salmon, but you want to cull deer. It is likely that the balance of the purpose of the tax is likely to be different in those cases. That is as far as we got, but we certainly did not look to see whether it was possible to make them targeted on particular species. Do you want to do this, but there may be some difficulties in that? No, we did not explore that. I will move on to crofting at the moment. First, I will ask you about the crofting lawyers who will be making recommendations to the Government about simplifying crofting law. Did you hear the argument about him trying to have one form of land tenure in the crofting areas, which has been put forward by Sir Crispin Agnew and James Hunter? You can find people with crofting law and their neighbour is in a different form of tenure. There is a question about whether you can, in the same piece of land use, really have two different types of laws applying. Given the Shucksmith review and the creation of new crofting legislation in recent years, we were aware that this is a big and complicated area. I would say that we did not get into the guts of making more suggestions about changing crofting legislation, but we did get representations from crofting communities that said, can you make it simpler and easier? That is probably as far as we went dipping our two into that. In that case, we will take that as rent for the moment because it is going to be leading into the next question. One of the things where there are unwarranted challenges to communities in their attempts to buy has been highlighted by the park case in particular. Would you like to expand on any of that but facilitating more crofting rights to buy? On the other side of the coin, as you know, some communities do not want to buy. It is rather of the landlord being the Government and taking on the expenses that they see of running the estate. Those two sides of crofting have both got to be addressed. Do you have any suggestions? In terms of the transfer of the Government's crofting estates to communities, we did look at that in some depth. We are aware, in looking back many years, and you will be familiar with them, convener, about efforts to do that in Sky and Rassie in previous times. There is a rationale for the community just being perfectly happy with the benign landlord, which is the Government. We felt that perhaps renewed effort and a new proactive promotion of this. Now, when the Sky and Rassie experiment was attempted way back in the early 90s, it was way before other community purchases. I think now with 15 years of experience of communities actually owning and running estates of different types, some of them with crofting tenure on them, we felt that there is probably a time for a renewed proactive effort by Government to try and dispose of these by making them more attractive to communities to acquire them. Of course, it gets down to previous discussions that we have had about state aid and transfer it what value in terms of communities acquiring. Also, reading back some of the Arkleton research on Rassie and Sky was quite interesting. Crofters being actually concerned that they would lose their rights, their individual rights as crofters, if it was owned by a crofting trust. Of course, crofters would lose no rights in that transfer. That level of misunderstanding, I think, is time for us to look again at how that might be facilitated and encouraged. We are aware that there are communities who still look at the possibilities of this, and some were put off by the fact that they would have to raise huge amounts of money to acquire them. If there were better mechanisms for easier transfer, and we know the West Harass story really quite vividly, the struggle that the West Harass community had in acquiring land from the Government, we would need to make that easier, and the Government would have to take some proactive measures to ease that process. We understand the Government's side of things, but in terms of what was called a hostile buyout situation, the unwarranted challenges, how would we remove them? We would just believe that some form of compulsory sale, like in derelict land, or whatever. How would you apply something that altered or simplified part 3? I think that there are suggestions in the report as to how that should be done. We went up to park in the first phase of the report, and I can still see the frustration on the face of the person who was putting in the submissions. The complication of the postcode situation, that was just an amazingly complicated way of doing something that could be done much more simply. The fact that it was complicated meant that there were endless appeals coming in, because there is always one that you will get the wrong side of the burner or something like that. It was a situation where it was just set up for appeals. There is no point in having legislation that is actually not delivering what it is meant to do. There are suggestions there about how that can be made. I am not going to expand a lot on crofting at the moment, except that I will bring in Dave Thomson on this one, because there are a lot of things that we will have to review anyway when we speak with crofting representatives to see what they say. I thank you very much, convener. I was just really to comment on John Watt's mention of Razi and the historical situation. Of course, even more recently, last year, the community on Razi turned down the option of buying or getting the croft from the Government and not to stay with the Government as landlard. There will be a number of reasons for that, but at the same time, they were looking at purchasing off the forest, and there was a huge cost in relation to that. I am sure that that would have weighed in people's minds as well. I think that there are a lot of complex issues coming into play when we start looking at those things, but I do not disagree with your general recommendation that we should look at those estates being transferred to communities, but we need to make it as easy and as simple as possible. They need to be assured if they are going to go down that road that they have all of the assistance and help in terms of how they do it and then how they run things thereafter. We make some suggestions as to how Part 3 could be simplified and to address some of the concerns that you had about challenges, but there have been no successful acquisitions under Part 3 since the act was brought in. The nearest we have got is in part, which has eventually ended up, we understand, in a negotiated agreed sale. I think that the community land agency would have a role in helping with this. They would be helping with crofting acquisitions as well as other community land, so support would be available, and hopefully with all the technical and legal elements that are required in that particular type of tenure. I think probably what we'll do is that we'll be coming back with other questions in due course, and once we've looked at your report in detail we can perhaps temper some of our questions to the stakeholders in terms of what they think about your proposals in due course. Thank you very much for that in general. There are many more questions to be sure that we have. One specifically about process I think would be useful at the moment. You've referred at times to research papers that you've drawn on. Are those available? Are they in the public domain? Or, if we ask for particular areas, once we've seen the official report, is that sort of thing? Will you certainly be open to sharing a lot of the research papers that are in the public domain? That would be useful. I want to go back to my question about the witnesses, because I haven't found the word confidential anywhere in the list that you've provided, only anonymous. Is it possible to get the anonymous evidence, with redaction, obviously, if need be, so that we could, if we wished, scrutinise these? Confidential will not be on the website, but the numbering sequence is missing. That's from the confidential ones. The ones that are anonymous will be on the website, as I understand. We haven't got to that stage yet of interrogating the website, but thank you very much for those things. We noticed that you've come down to a definition of people-centred land governance, the views of Mr Michael Taylor—a very apt set of words, I think, to describe this. Would you like, finally, to sort of say, given your experience over these last couple of years, do you see the means of achieving this people-centred land governance in the next five years, the next ten years? Do you think that it's something that can be achieved in various work streams at various times? I think that you've said already, but do you see that this is a process, just like devolution itself, that can be achieved in a reasonable time scale with the political world to do so, under consensus? I would hope that that's where we're heading. The speed at which we go will depend on the practicalities and people taking on the challenges, because there are challenges in dealing with this. I think that, consistent with attitudes in other parts of Scottish public life, we're into asset-based approaches, aren't we? We're into saying that people can, if they're given the tools, make a much better job sometimes of being in control of their own lives and of their own communities. I think that that's the way in which this area is moving. I would hope that, as I said at the very beginning, the general position that we're taking, which is saying that decisions about land ownership and use should be taken in the public interest and for the common good. If we actually believe that, we can get quite far down the line of a lot of this. I thank you very much for that at this stage. It's us dipping the tool when you've provided us with an awful lot of interesting waters to wade about in and perhaps swim eventually to extend the idea. It's really interesting. It's obviously one of the biggest reports that we've had and we thank you for the time that you've taken to explain to us just now about it. Perhaps we may well want to bring you back to explain some other things in due course if necessary. I'm going to have a five-minute break at the moment before we deal with the last two items, which are shorter on our agenda so that people can have a comfort break. Item 2. This is an item for members to consider a Scottish Government memorandum relating to the public body's abolition of food from Britain order 2014 draft. This is a UK order and the Scottish Parliament must give its consent to the order. I refer members to the paper and invite any comments that you may wish to have. Does anyone have any comments just now? There are no comments. In that case, I invite you to decide whether you agree to recommend to the Parliament that the draft motion has set out in the public body consent memorandum is approved. It's approved, agreed unanimously. Thank you very much. Agenda item 3 concerns the last item today about the draft annual report. Again, I refer members to the draft report, which the clerks have provided us with. Note that the guidance is that it should not exceed 1,500 words. Any changes that you may wish to propose have to be on the basis that, if you're putting something in, you've got to take something out. And it's like the budget, exactly. I'm wanting to get any comments, but that's now... Perhaps I could kick off with one that might just want to emphasise a little more. The role, particularly paragraph 12, the committee asked all subject committees to include an assessment of how the budget in their portfolio areas had taken account of climate change issues in their reports. If we could just add a little more about saying something in relation to this is an on-going cross-committee activity, which we want to encourage, something of that sort, which would encapsulate the more detailed discussions that we've had. Claudia Beamish On that specific point, I don't know what the views of the rest of the committee are, but I was actually disappointed by the response of some of the committees, and I would like to see that marked in that section. I don't know how many words we've got to play with, how many out of the 1,500 we can add a little bit, but I do take your point that we want to encourage committees, but I would like to see a marker put down about the disappointment of the response, especially as we had to go back to some committees. Do you members agree that we should try to reflect that sentiment just now? Well, in that case, we'll ask the clerks to drop words, which I think you'll find congenial to most people's interest there on that point, yes? I absolutely agree, and we should mark that. I think that we should also highlight the fact that, despite our disappointment, there is ongoing engagement with the other committees. That's important, because we will be attempting to set up the process in a more structured fashion in the future, but I'm sure that we can reflect that in the form of words that the clerks deal with just now. Are there any other parts in this report that you wish to raise? Claudia Beamish Right, thank you, convener. It was looking at the report I picked up on a particular area, which is the deal management area, where, under point 22, when we published our letter to the Scottish Government, I'm reading this out summarising the committee's views and setting out its recommendations on the future of deal management, we did agree as a committee that we would revisit that issue, and I would like, again, that marker put down because of concerns about whether the voluntary code is appropriate and whether we need to move to a statutory one, and I would like to see something about the committee revisiting this. I'm sure that there might be quite a lot of issues in this report that we'll be revisiting. I take that point, convener, but maybe it's not appropriate to put down a marker in a particular area. No, in a simple phrase to which the committee will return or some sort of way into linking with the sentences there, I think that the clerks can handle that. Are you happy with that? Folks? Members? Of what's happened, rather than what our future programme is. Sorry, Claudia. It's a record of what the committee has discussed in almost a minute of the year's proceedings, isn't it, in a way? It's about reports in the previous year, not about our future programme. I do see Claudia Beamish's point. If there was scope, and I appreciate there may not be in terms of the number of words that we have, to perhaps highlight in a paragraph the items that the committee has indicated that it will return to a future date, but if we don't have the scope to do it as an overarching thing, we can do it for one item. It's very difficult because of the timing and also because of the limitation of words. I mean, there are actually quite a lot of issues, as I hinted earlier, that we will be returning to. So, if we were to list them, it would make it very difficult, indeed, I think, to fit in. In this case, can we just sort of agree that we know we're going to be making a future work programme? That that is not going to be because you'll have the opportunity in public at that stage to make sure that it's on it, not that anyone wants to keep it off and that it would be easier for this report if we didn't actually mention that just now, the sentiments there. As long as, convener, from my perspective, it was possible to note, if that's what I'm understanding that you're suggesting, at some point in the report, the general point that there are issues that we will need to revisit in relation to whether there need to be either legislative changes or other changes that we would consider. That's an awfully long sentence, but yes. We have done over the previous year that the moment we want to expand it to include what we're going to return to later, it becomes, I think, a different class of report. I think we start just giving ourselves work to do in the future that we honestly don't need. I'm not disagreeing with a word of what Claude is indicating in terms of reality, but I don't think it's in this report. In the way that you've explained that, in the course of this conversation, it's obvious to me that there are other things that are online already, including the work programme, which says that these are the kinds of things that we're going to be doing. The report of what we've done is, on the one hand, the fact that we have the work programme and, indeed, that we decide it in public, and then it's there for all to read, includes dear management and a watching brief, so it is going to come back up. Can we separate the two for simplities, for logic's sense of the way in which Nigel Don has put this? Go with it. It's been useful to put—it's on the record your concerns, so that in itself allows us to note the matter when we come to the work programme in future. We'll keep it to that simpler matter of the report card. Are there any other points that need to be raised on the— something that I thought about—I don't know whether we—we didn't mention in paragraph 25 on behaviour change. It struck me as something that we've mentioned at above 23. There's a list of other evidence sessions. Okay, so behaviour change is covered. Right, got that. Anything else? If not, we have, first of all, to sign off the report. Do we agree that, as the convener, she'd finally signed this off with the small changes that we've agreed? We've agreed, and the annual report will be published next week, like all other annual reports from the committees. I thank you very much. The details of our next meeting before I close that, on 4 June, the committee will take evidence from a round table of stakeholders on the land reform review group final report at a later starting time of 11am. So that's for your note, and thank you very much. We'll close the meeting now and go into private.