 Welcome to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee's 10th meeting of 2019. Before we move to our first item on the agenda, can I remind everyone to switch off their mobile phones as they may affect the broadcasting system? The first item on the agenda is for the committee to decide whether to take agenda item 5 in private. Are we agreed? The second item on the agenda is to hear from the Scottish Land Commission on the current work programme, and I am delighted to welcome, for the first time in my convenership, Hamish Trench, the chief executive and Andrew Thin, the chair of the Scottish Land Commission. Good morning to you both. I am going to start by asking you about your public meetings that you have been holding. Can I ask first of all what the key themes have been on these meetings? I know a secondary question about how they have maybe differed in theme between urban and rural locations. That was going to be the first part of my answer. They are different, although strikingly, as you would expect in rural Scotland, they are mainly rural themes. They are predominantly about power, the balance of power, the use of power, often about the way in which communities are or are not engaged in decision making, which is a theme that this Parliament has returned to many times, housing, rural housing, access to land, forehousing, and access to land for communities to purchase for other reasons, amenity and so on. In urban Scotland, interestingly, we get asked a lot about rural issues. Urban Scots care about rural Scotland, and they care about what is happening in rural Scotland. The same issues around power in particular come up, scale and power come up again and again in urban Scotland. In addition, in urban Scotland, and it varies a little bit depending on which bit of urban Scotland, vacant and derelict land is a major theme. As one might expect, we have a very high proportion in Scotland of vacant and derelict land. Many communities resent the fact that they live next to vacant sites and derelict sites, and they want to know what we are going to do about that, and they want to understand. The last thing that is common to all the public meetings is partly why we hold them. It is about us being held to account, and we are challenged. Why have you prioritised this? Why have you prioritised that? That is a good thing, and that is partly why we do it. Do you get a sense when you have these meetings that there is an understanding of what the Land Commission has done up to this point, and what land reform actually means for those communities? Do you get a feeling that they are switched on to what their rights are? Yes and no. Many Scots are very well informed about land reform, and they are very passionate about land reform. That is probably why they have chosen to come to the meeting. You would expect that. It is an issue that many Scots are very thoughtful about, and that is why it has a degree of political weight to this Parliament's return to it a number of times since it was created in 1999. Many people who come to these public meetings are simply interested. We use social media extensively, we write to all the community councils and all that stuff. A lot of people come because they are inquisitive, and they are not well informed. In particular, in urban Scotland, I do not think—people kind of understand that in rural Scotland there are issues about bigger states and community ownership and so on. Many urban Scots do not recognise that land reform is of huge social and economic importance to them as well, and we have got to deal with that and bridge that. You have been having all those public meetings. How has what has been discussed by yourselves and the public in those meetings informed the work of the Land Commission? We find those meetings useful in taking the temperature of local issues and understanding how the issues are playing out on the ground in different places. The experience that we take back from the discussions that we have informs the work that we are putting together. For example, the work that we are doing around land ownership. We made some recommendations last year on community ownership, informed by not just the research that we have done but by the discussions held in the public meetings as well, and the same as the case with forthcoming research around land ownership. In particular, on urban engagement, that links very strongly into the work that we are doing in partnership with SURF, the Urban Regeneration Forum, about community engagement in urban areas and land use decision making. We have done some work over the last year with Young Scot and SURF looking at how people feel able to engage in decisions affecting their surroundings, their place in urban centres. A lot of what we take from those meetings links in with that wider work programme and helps us to shape that. You mentioned that the people who come to those meetings are the ones who are already interested. Have you had any thought as to how you can have more meetings that maybe reach into communities and people who you feel could benefit from knowing a little bit more about what you are doing and getting more involved? We thought about this a huge amount to this committee. There are a couple of things that I would like to see on that. The first is that it is not the case that it is only the well-informed people who come to those meetings. Many people come to those meetings, as I said, simply because they are inquisitive. That is a really good thing, but, of course, that is a very slow drip-drip. In the two years ahead, we are going to change gear slightly. The public meetings need in part to be about us being held to account, that is important. I do not want to lose that. It is a really good discipline for us to be challenged around our priorities and everything else. Increasingly, we will make some of the public meetings about specific topics. That will enable us to target the promotion, but it will also catch interest in a way that, if you say, come to a meeting about land reform and a lot of people just you own. If you say, come to a meeting about affordable housing or if you say, come to a meeting about turning that derelict area into a park, people will come. You will see a shift in the next 12 to 24 months, but it is not going to be a switch. It is going to be a shift. We will evolve. Mark Ruskell, unless anyone else wants to come in. It is just a quick thought on the back of your answer there. Obviously, there is quite intense discussion in urban communities about housing and about development and derelict land and it is part of a local development planning process. I am just wondering how you can align to those very active debates in communities. Often, sometimes those debates do not fully look at the context which some of the development pressures or opportunities present themselves. Yes, and I think that that is where we do and we need to keep working through other existing networks and tap in through local authority networks, community planning networks and particularly working with organisations like SURF and Ditas, the Development Trust Association. These are organisations that are already building up those networks within urban communities in particular. I think that this goes beyond our public meetings. We will continue to do that, but at the same time we need to be working through some of those existing networks. Some of the work that we have done over the last year with Young Scot, for example, and SURF, starts to ask some questions about how engaged people are in relation to land use decisions, what changes they would like to see coming through and how we can feed that through into the work that we are doing, whether on vacant and derelict land or more generally about access to land for housing or community facilities. I would like to move on to talk about some of the papers that you have commissioned, the independent papers that you have commissioned. I guess stimulate debate, but also to inform the future work of the Land Commission that there is one particular paper on the housing land market. It says that reliance on the private sector has led to an undersupply of housing and escalating housing costs. Are you in general agreement with that statement? I am interested in knowing how those discussion papers are filtering through your organisation and what you are taking from them? The discussion papers are there precisely to stimulate debate to raise ideas. They do not pretend to provide the immediate answers, but they are there to stimulate the right questions in a way that we then want to work with stakeholders on. The housing land market one is an interesting one that sits very well with one of the other papers that we published on public interest led development. The two of them together have helped to stimulate a debate with local authorities, with the housing sector and with the planning and development sector around how we actually make much more proactive use of the public bodies in delivering good development in the right place. This is as much about culture change as it is about legislation. Those papers have fed into work that we are now starting to take forward research in relation to land value capture. We are also doing some work at the moment on land banking. Having stimulated those issues, it allows us to hone in on precisely where the research requirements are, which then allows us to move forward with those partners in reaching some ideas and recommendations. For example, on the housing land market over the course of this year, we will be taking forward that research and expecting in about a year's time to be coming back with some ideas and recommendations on potential reform of housing land market. From the perspective of your ordinary Scott, you mentioned that the scale of land ownership is something that has come out in your public meetings as well. Does the commission consider that it will be a look at a statutory intervention in terms of public interest grounds might be something that you might be looking at? The short answer is that we have a completely open mind on anything, so the short answer is yes, of course. We would be pretty remiss if we closed our minds to things, but we are very anxious to be evident and sled, so we will go into things thoroughly before we just start producing conclusions. The one thing that is worth adding on this particular subject is that Scotland sits in an international context and lots of other countries are grappling with those issues, too. I do think that it is important that we do not start trying to reinvent wheels that we look abroad, particularly to the continent of Europe, and quite a bit of our research is now doing that, including around all of that. Justin, you said that people in urban areas are very interested in what happens in rural areas as well. Have you mentioned looking to the continent? There are quite a lot of countries for which the people in urban areas have access to the countryside as well. Do you think that it is an important theme that people in urban areas have access to their own natural capital? I think that people tell us that all the time. There is no question of that, and it is partly why this Parliament has legislated in the past, for example, on access rights, which is reflecting what the people of Scotland want. What we need to work harder at, though, is helping people to know how things are done in other countries. It is a feature of some of this discussion that sometimes the discussion is a bit insular. We do say, well, this is the way that Scotland does it, and it is always been done so that this is the way that we do it. Actually, in Germany we do it differently, or in Denmark we do it differently, or in Holland we do it differently. I think that understanding that and learning from that and being outward facing will help us here. Good morning to you both, and welcome to the committee. Could I ask one of the discussion papers just to continue to develop the discussion that the convener has started? One of the land for the many, not the few, limitations on the scale of land ownership states that, I quote, for many, the current concentrated ownership patterns represent a structural inequality in Scotland of significant proportions, which arguably limits or acts against furthering the development of greater social justice. I wonder if you could develop the points that you raised in that paper and in the experience and concentrated land ownership a little bit more for us as a committee. Yes. If I could perhaps say a word about how we have developed some of that work around concentration of land ownership. Having published the discussion paper last year, we also picked up Andrew's theme of looking internationally at how other countries deal with those things. We commissioned some research to look at international experience on interventions and managing land ownership. That was published about a year ago, looking at a range of countries, both in Europe and more widely. That found that it is quite common practice in many countries around the world to have interventions to address public policy issues in determining essentially who can own how much land and what kind of obligations there are around that. Having looked internationally, we then held a public call for evidence on the issues relating to scale and concentration in land ownership. We had over 400 responses to that last year, a very good set of responses and a rich set of information there. We will be publishing a report this week. In fact, tomorrow we will be publishing a report that results from that work on the issues associated with the scale and concentration of land ownership, picking up those themes. Thank you. Could you say if there has been any evidence or information that is leading you towards further thoughts on whether there should be an absolute limit on the scale of ownership? If so, if there has been views expressed as to what, without going into too much detail, but what that limit should be and why? We will publish a lot of detail tomorrow and it is difficult to give you at all now. I am quite happy to deal with the main issue. The main issue is that this is about scale or is it about something else? I think that this is a broad answer, more detail, when you can read the whole thing. In broad terms, we are pretty clear that this is not about 5,000 acres or 10,000 acres. It is not about that. It is about power. It is about monopoly in some situations. It is about constraints on power, which is quite a normal—if you think about any other aspect of the economy—we do not allow a legal or monopoly to develop. We have constraints on it. It is unlikely that some sort of rather blunt tool that says that 5,000 acres is the limit or whatever it is. It is unlikely that that would deal with the issue because the issue is not 5,000 acres. The issue is about power. We need to think about this in a more intelligent way. That sounds a bit unkind, but in a more thoughtful and subtle way. Just setting arbitrary limits is unlikely to deal with the issue. Can I ask you—either of you—generally about the issue around what you have highlighted several times about power. It is argued by some that it is about how the land is managed, not who owns it, that matters, whereas others would say that it is who owns it, because in fact the land owner can say no in the end. I am just wondering if much of that dialogue has come up in the urban and rural of Scotland? It has. Maybe we might both answer this one. Crudely speaking, it is about power, and power is about ownership. I think that it is important that you cannot separate them. Do you want to hand a wee bit to that? It is very clear in what we have seen in terms of the evidence that has come to us over the last year. In fact, in the discussions that we have in the public meetings around the country, ownership and use of land are inextricably linked. It comes back to the power of decision making that ownership conveys. For us, the two are linked very closely together. Has rural depopulation come up as one of the issues in relation to power? That does connect back to our convener's question about housing, but it does go into a lot of other economic issues, obviously. It does come up in public meetings, particularly in the north of the country, but it actually comes up in public meetings in urban Scotland, too. People are anxious about what they perceive to be depopulation, often in the past. The population on the whole of Scotland, the population of Scotland, is rising. We must not get this issue out of proportion, but clearly, if you own a very large area of land and in doing so, that gives you the power to determine whether houses can be built, jobs can be created or anything else, then you potentially have power over what happens to the population. Can I add to that? I mean, we certainly see the work that we are doing around housing and development being directly related to the challenge of depopulation and addressing rural depopulation in particular. I suppose that I would just highlight that. I suppose that the work that we are doing—there are two angles to that in relation to housing. One is around the ownership and reducing the constraints around ownership to the release of land in the right place, at the right price, and the other work stream really is about land values and how we make sure that land values are shaping that effectively and, again, not preventing development happening in the right place where it is needed. John Scott Confusing two issues here, the difference between access and ownership. I agree that the First Land Reform Act 2003 gave access to which I think was a huge success. With ownership comes responsibility. I am not quite saying it, but you are managing to imply that land owners in Scotland are responsible for the depopulation in Scotland. Perhaps you would clear me or advise me on that point, but that seems to be the kind of direction of travel because, by exercising power inappropriately through their ownership of that land, they were somehow responsible for the depopulation of areas of Scotland that are being depopulated. I find that offensive, declaring an interest as a farmer, a very minor land owner, but notwithstanding, I find that offensive to those who I know who are land owners, and I am surprised to hear that implication. Further in the notes here, you are essentially talking about willing buyers and willing sellers, so I presume from what you are saying that you foresee the end of that. They are being willing buyers and willing sellers with regard to the exchange of purchasing of land in Scotland. Do you seek to control that process? Let me deal with the population first. I am being absolutely clear. I certainly did not say and would not say that land owners are responsible for the depopulation in Scotland. What I did say was that, clearly if you do own a large amount of land, and if as a consequence you have power over housing and power over employment, then you potentially have power over population and depopulation. How that is exercised, of course, is another matter, but I think that there will be instances throughout history where land owners have contributed to population growth and population fall. How far back are we going here, then, throughout history? You see, what are we going back to? I am simply making a point. I am not going back anywhere. I am simply making what I think is a logical point, which is that if you have that power, then that is what potentially can happen. That is the only point that I am making. I also did say, and I will say it again, that the population of Scotland is broadly rising in almost all parts of the country. You are somehow managing to imply that this power is being improperly used, that the ownership of land gives to the land owners. Well, let me be clear. I am not implying one way or the other. I am simply saying that the power exists and it is therefore there. I made the analogy with other parts of the economy. Where monopoly power exists, we have to decide whether we wish to regulate the use of that monopoly power. Can I bring in Mark Ruskell? I mean, obviously, you are considering very important questions around economic participation, but I wanted to come back to a conventional economic argument, if you do not mind, perhaps a bit odd coming from me. That is around economic productivity. Are you looking at economic productivity from land and what opportunities there might be through more diverse ownership models? Is that an issue, or is the current system that we have the most economically productive that we can have? I do not think that we would assume that the current system is necessarily the most productive. We have deliberately put a strong emphasis on productivity in the objectives for the land commission's work alongside diversity and accountability in land ownership and use. Certainly, our sense of productivity is certainly strongly about economic productivity, but it is also about the wider public value that we get from our land. It is about the social and cultural value and environmental value that we get from land alongside the economic value. I think that, increasingly, whether it is in urban Scotland or rural, we should be open to question the model of economic productivity in terms of getting more out of land use. Certainly, there are elements of that that come through in the evidence that we have taken over the last year, particularly around scale and concentration of ownership, both in terms of economies of scale and potential different models. Probably in the back of the comments that John Scott has made, I am a bit concerned that that has been highlighted as well, that the power that landowners have to influence rural depopulation are otherwise. Is it really significant if you take into consideration the powers that local authorities have through their planning policies to indicate where housing is allowed or not allowed, or local authorities' investment in economic development? Is that not far more significant when it comes to rural depopulation or housings, rather than actually landowners deciding whether they should have houses or not? I think that what is very clear to us is that it is a system that requires all those parts of the jigsaw to be playing their part in order to deliver housing where it is needed. There is no question that the planning system has a crucial role to play. We have identified in some of the work that we have done over the last year that there are some questions around the role that planning plays in shaping land values, et cetera, and the proactive role that we can play through planning to make these things happen more quickly. Equally, it is also clear from the evidence that ownership does play a part in that as well. We have to match up the willingness and the ability to release land in the right place with the planning system, with the right land value approach. What would you suggest is the most significant local plans that local authorities put in place or barriers that landowners put in place? I am not sure that I can answer that, because I am aware of many sites that are designed for planning that are not being built out. Clearly, there are other constraints beyond planning. I am just for the record. I should refer members to my register of interests. I want a non-domestic property in the Outer Hebrides, which is situated within any state that is subject to a community buy-out attempt, and it is at a sensitive stage. If I could turn to the SLC's strategic priorities for 2018-21, which we know the remit is to build on existing land reform legislation and the work of the LLRG, now there were four priority work areas identified, one that comes under the REC committee and the other three were land for housing and development, land ownership and land use decision making. How were the commission's strategic priorities decided upon and which areas were considered but not included? I will have to try to answer that, because Hamish was not there until the latter part of the stages. The board was established in December 2016. We conducted a very large number of public meetings all over the place. A lot of people came, a lot of people had priorities, out of those. We distilled those four. We then discussed them with Government, of course, but those were the four that came through from all those public meetings. There were a lot of people who undoubtedly would like us to be focusing on other things, but we have to prioritise them. When you are considering these priorities, is consideration or will consideration given to reserved matters as well as the potential impacts of a UK exit from the EU if it happens? Yes. Will you say that the guidance and the codes of conduct are or will be sufficient to deliver real progress on the ground in areas such as promoting a culture of inclusivity, collaboration and accountability? It is really important to say that we do not see land reform as being primarily or exclusively a legislative matter. It is fundamentally a cultural shift that is needed here, and that is why we have put so much emphasis on developing protocols and so on and so forth. We do not know what the answer to your question is, but we think that we should find out, which is why we are going to do this. What we do know, and I was very much involved in it, is that when we put codes of conduct in place for agricultural holdings, guidance and so on, that sector has responded really well. Landlords, land agents and tenants in the agricultural sector have responded really well, and many, many people in that sector say that they are in a much better place now than they were three years ago. We do know that it can work. Whether it will work everywhere and in all circumstances, we will need to find out. We may well be back here in a while to try to tell you what we have found out. That is good to hear, convener, particularly given the evidence that we took in the run-up to the land reform bill in 2016. We have a question from John Scott. The Scottish Land Commission's programme of work 2018-21 states that the commission's role combines leadership and non-regulatory culture change with statutory functions to review and advise on legislative and policy change. A moment ago, you said that cultural shift was your main emphasis, yet your role, as defined by the Government, appears to suggest that it is to review and advise on legislative and policy change. Where is the balance in that? Where is the emphasis? You said that it was essentially a cultural shift, but it appears to be different from the information that I have been given. I am not sure that that is what I said. What I said was that what is required, what needs to happen in Scotland, is that there needs to be a cultural shift. That is a message that comes home again and again at public meetings. That is what people are looking for. How that cultural shift is delivered will depend on a number of factors. Some will be legislation, some will be codes of practice and all the rest of it. We actually just do not know at the moment how easy it will be to achieve that. I do not have the act in front of me, but the job of the land commissioners is to advise Government, but it is also to advise and produce guidance for others, which is where the protocols come in. I am turning now to your programme of work. What key changes were made to the programme of work between September 2017 and March 2018? I think that you are probably referring to this time last year. We updated the programme of work at the start of the financial year. That really was reflecting the point that we got to. 2017 was obviously an establishment year for the commission. It was the first year that it was established. We were putting together the staff team doing the initial work and getting the initial priorities under way. Having done that, it gave us much greater focus on the key issues to address from March 2018 onwards, which is where the programme of work was updated. That led us through the work that we have delivered over the last year, focusing on looking at international experience in land ownership and land value taxation, looking at historic experience on land value capture and focusing particularly on the research and recommendations on community right to buy, which we made in November of last year so those things were the main focus for our work over the last year. Can I ask, was the initial programme of work over ambitious given that it was reviewed after six months? I mean, have the skills and experience of Scotland's research community been insufficient to carry out the work specified? Are the gaps knowledge and understanding? No, we've always made it clear that the programme of work will be updated probably every six months or so. We've not been rigid about it. It's really important that we adapt and evolve our thinking as we learn where the priorities are. I would expect us to publish a revised programme of work roughly every six months. I stress revised, not a new one, not a different one, but one that is evolving with circumstances, including evolving with what people are telling us. Every six months, that's a rolling update. How will the commission approach areas where there is little or no consensus about a way forward? Can stakeholders be compelled to engage with you? No. That's clear. Will the commission highlight examples of poor land management and ownership practices and identify individuals who are considered not to be working collaboratively with either the SLC or local communities? We see that as part of the broader picture on supporting good practice in land rights responsibilities. That involves identifying good practice and establishing expectations about what normal, reasonable and expected behaviour is, but also being willing to call out examples of bad practice and poor examples of where we see that. That's very much the approach that we're taking with, for example, the protocols on community engagement and offering to support and advise on ensuring that good practice becomes the known. Parliament has asked us on agricultural holdings. It has put in place a very specific process with codes of practice, with allegations of breaches and so on. There's a process already been put in place by Parliament for, if you like, calling out bad practice in relation to agricultural holdings. We'll have to see what we can learn from that, but it may well have applicability more widely. We don't know yet. I'm a bit naive about the current jargon of calling out. What do you mean by calling out examples of poor practice and good practice? If there's a code of practice, for example, in place, as to how you should conduct a rent review, and if you don't follow that code of practice, then a breach of the code may be alleged to the commissioner, the tenant farming commissioner. The commissioner may then investigate and may, if he wishes, publish his findings. You would expect to highlight good and bright practice or just bad practice? The process that Parliament has put in place is to alleged breaches of the code. More widely, we are deliberately promoting examples, case studies of good practice, not just in the agriculture side but, for example, in community engagement. There is a wide range of support there, including examples, case studies of good practice, because that's the most effective way of sharing what should be normal. I would think that that's to be recommended, yes, that good practice, dissemination of good practice, would be probably much more valuable than highlighting bad practice. Could I turn my mind specifically to the land use strategy in relation to your work? As you will know, but just for the record, the 2016 Land Reform Act specifically includes the land use strategy as a matter that the commission can review and recommend changes to. I didn't know until recently, but I have taken a keen interest as has a previous convener, Graham Day and others in the previous committee in the last session of the Parliament. Do you have any plans to review the effectiveness of the land use strategy as a whole? This is something that has also been highlighted by Environment Link. We don't have a plan to do a formal review of the land use strategy, but it is something that we are continually talking with stakeholders and government about in terms of implementing the current land use strategy. It comes across again as a strong theme actually in many of the discussions that we have over the year. One of the core issues is around participation in land use decision making and whether it's in public meetings or some of the other research work carried out. Undoubtedly, we see opportunity to improve the ways in which particularly local communities and people are able to engage in decisions about land use in their surrounding area, particularly in relation to land use change. That's where we see a particular role for the land use strategy in improving perhaps regional and local level decision making mechanisms. We're actually bringing to a head choices and understanding about land use choices, trade-offs and priorities and ensuring that there's a wide range of views influencing and feeding in and understanding those decisions. If you've looked specifically either in relation to the land use strategy or in the wider remit that you have, which does go back to the programme of work, but in relation to how we use land in the battle against climate change. There's been a lot recently about concerns about driven grassmores, for instance, with just a highlight one issue and protection of peatlands as well. I wonder if any of those issues are forming part of your considerations. Not specifically. We don't at the moment have plans to do any specific reviews in relation to those. However, those subjects are integral to a lot of our other work, particularly the issue about community involvement in decision making. In many of the public meetings in rural Scotland, what people tell us is that they would like to participate in decision making about the management of grassmores, for example. Some of those people do so because they are anxious about climate change, others are anxious about wildlife, others are anxious about jobs, you would expect all of that. A lot of that will, I think, if we can get the... We're developing protocols, we're developing guidance, we're developing good practice case studies, all the points that have just been made around community involvement and decision making. If that can happen, I think that people will feel a lot more comfortable. It's the sense that people are unable or powerless that is frustrating a lot of people. Thank you very much, convener. Before I do so, let me declare that I have jointly with my wife a three-acre registered agricultural holding. I use that to illustrate some of the issues around owning land, particularly in rural area. If I were to sell those three acres of hill grazing, I might get £5,000 for them. On the other hand, they are an adjunct to a rural house, where many householders want to keep horses, so therefore it probably adds to the value of the house by £20,000. If I could persuade... Those figures are quite arbitrary and not to be questioned is the principle. If I could persuade the local authority to provide planning permission for four houses, it would probably be worth a quarter of a million or thereby. Now, the local authority, I hasten to add, has a policy that would mean that it's an extremely distant prospect. It isn't going to happen. That brings me to the role of councils in relation to land and housing and business development, in particular not my holding, which is not vacant or derelict, but vacant and derelict land. Has the commission been working with councils? I think that there's quite a view that the price and availability of land is, to some extent, determined by how much land councils choose to designate for housing developments and local plans. If they designated twice as much, if I were simple-minded, I would say that the price would halve, but, of course, it's not quite that simple as Adam Smith would remind us, I'm sure. What has the commission been doing with local councils, particularly vacant and derelict, but it does open up a broader issue? I'm not trying to open up the issue of land ownership, which will come later in our questioning. Yes, we are speaking with a number of councils, particularly around those issues, obviously specifically in relation to vacant and derelict land, but also that leads into the broader questions about land value capture and the role of public bodies in brokering development, essentially. From our point of view, there are certainly two strands here. One is simply the planning system and the effective use of the planning system in zoning sufficient land and the role of planning policies in shaping land values. The other, I think, equally important one is the role that public bodies can play, including local authorities, in using their power of brokerage and leverage to help good development to happen. That is back to the proactive role that planning authorities and local authorities can make in relation to funding infrastructure and unlocking development in marginal sites. Certainly, when looking at the vacant and derelict land local authorities, there are some great examples of local authorities making some of these sites happen in some very challenging circumstances. The role of the group that we've put together, the task force working with the Government on this, is to learn the lessons from those and be able to make some of the changes to the system, whether it's in regulation, finance or indeed planning, that will unlock that in more sites across the country. I would also come back to the fundamental role that public bodies have to play in proactively brokering development. Again, looking internationally, it's quite common for public bodies to play a role in land assembly, facilitating infrastructure investment through land value capture and then returning sites to the private sector for development, or indeed taking a stake in a joint venture approach to development. Those are the kind of approaches that we should be exploring further here. Slightly cheeky question, but are you aware of any significant housing development which has not attracted objections from adjacent people? I'm not sure if I could answer that. Well, let me turn it this way. The councils clearly have a set of tools at their hand, but equally, although communities want more housing, they don't want them next to them, in general terms. Is that the sense that you get from your consultation, your meeting of communities, because there is that tension between the status quo and people who are there, and the need to develop the land? The short answer is yes, but that is the sense that we get at many, many public meetings. We hear from people who are desperate to see more land released for hiding. At quite a few public meetings, people turn up who want to tell us about housing development that they think is wrong and ought to be dealt with by the Land Commission. It takes, in some ways, to the fringes of our remit. Planning decisions are a democratic matter for local authorities, and local authorities not only have to decide about individual cases, but they have to produce strategic plans that are going to meet the needs of their community. Land reform is, I wouldn't say separate because it's clearly integrated, but it is an additional aspect. I accept that people will always come to our public meetings who hope that we might be able to solve their particular angst. Let me steer us back to vacant and derelict land. How are we doing on that subject to things like compulsory sale orders proving of value? Last year, we put together a proposal for a compulsory sales order mechanism, and there is, as I understand, a commitment to bring that into legislation, but that, I think, is important to say, is designed to tackle only a subset of sites, and it's really a subset where it is, in those cases, ownership that is a barrier and perhaps unrealsed expectation of value that the owner is holding out for, where a compulsory sales order mechanism would shift the balance in the negotiation. There are many other sites, as you'll be well aware, where the issue is simply financial viability and cost, including remediation of vacant and derelict sites. We're currently working with Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Futures Trust in breaking down the vacant and derelict land register into, essentially, baskets of different types of sites because there will be very different solutions to different sites in there. There will be a subset that are marketable and can go through normal market channels. There will be many others that are actually suitable for community-led regeneration, green infrastructure, and there will be many others that require public intervention in order to bring those sites back. I hear what you're saying and I can't disagree with the word that you've said, but how are we doing in practice on vacant and derelict land? We are reducing the register by about 1.3 per cent a year at the moment, which would take us 77 years at the current rate. So, there is room for further improvement or a significant room for transformation? I must say that I had a constituency case where there was a derelict house, well, perhaps even more than derelict, in one of the villages in the area that I represented, where it took us 10 years to get effective communication with the trust-based in Panama, who would only deal with us if we communicated in Spanish, which cost my office expenses budget quite a lot of money to do that. But successful outcome at the end of the day, I hasn't heard, but we still don't know who actually owned it. Without opening up the issue of ownership, have we the tools where the ownership is uncertain that would help us in particularly urban areas, as well as where it is vacant and derelict? I understand your point that the identity of ownership and establishing the identity of ownership remains an issue for some of those sites. Clearly, the work that is currently under way in terms of transparency of land ownership in Rocky is designed to help to address that, but at the moment it remains an issue. According to the programme of work, certain activities are scheduled to start this year, so could you provide us an update on the research into land assembly, the housing market and on land banking, when it is due to commence if it hasn't already commenced? So this is an ongoing process. The work that we delivered over the last year is looking at a historic review of land value capture experience, learning the lessons from many previous attempts, particularly throughout the 20th century. And then we've moved on to working with the Scottish Futures Trust to model particular options for land value capture that might work in different markets around Scotland, recognising that the different geographies and different land values inherent in that. We will be publishing some initial work on that shortly in relation to the planning bill looking at proposals around land value capture. But then going on from that, we've also commissioned just in the last couple of months a review of land banking. Again, an initial bit of work because I think what's important is that we actually understand what we collectively mean and think of as land banking. We need to understand what we mean by that, what are the types of what people call land banking, what are its implications and how prevalent is it. Importantly, we've asked that bit of work to look in a rural context at rural towns and communities as well as the main urban context. From those building blocks, we'll then move on and over the coming year we're scheduling a formal review of options to improve the operation of the housing land market drawing on that. We'd expect to be coming back with recommendations on that next year. My next question was on what parameters are you looking at, but I think you've answered that. I just wanted to come back on one of the points that emerged from Stewart Stevenson's question. That's around the challenges that local authorities have, having identified a suitable site in the planning system for housing for new development, trying to assemble the right upfront infrastructure, be it schools or facilities for active travel or whatever, in that area to make a community sustainable from day one. I'm just wondering in your thinking around what happens elsewhere, perhaps around land valley tax or other tools, are there ways that we can ensure that new communities, because we do need to see more housing, we will need to see more communities in Scotland, can be built in a way that is sustainable from day one. I see a number of stalled sites, for example, in my own region, which had been earmarked for development years ago, but have never happened because the upfront money isn't there to really get them up and running. Yes, I think that a more proactive approach to land assembly is certainly key to this. This brings together a number of bits of work that we're looking at. The first is land value capture, looking at how we actually use some of the value inherent in land to make that infrastructure investment happen, but I also referred to the role of public bodies in this and the potential for joint ventures and different approaches. Recently, we published some work looking at how public authorities in the Netherlands and Germany approach those issues. It's quite common in other countries for public bodies to play a more active role in the land market, either stepping in to assemble land where necessary or forming joint ventures with private developers to do that, using the land value to provide the infrastructure and then either selling land on or continuing to play an active part as a joint venture partner. There are several approaches that we are keen to explore further in Scotland, not just around the land value capture and potential role of land value tax in that, but also around the proactive role of public bodies in land assembly mechanisms. I'd fully expect over the next year that we'll start to model and test some of those potential options for different land assembly measures. Mark, if you'd like to continue with your questioning on land ownership, please. Sure, if I could maybe change the tax slightly. We've had a lot of discussion this morning around scale and concentration of land ownership. I'm just wondering what the discussion has been like with the Scottish Government on these issues, other particular reforms that you're pushing? Firstly, perhaps which bit of government are you talking to? Is it environment? Is it Kevin Stewart in planning and local government? Is it Fergus Ewing in rural? How do you engage with government and what is the response to these issues that you're getting? Maybe we should both answer this. In terms of how we engage with government, we report, as you probably know, mainly to Roseanna Cunningham, but also for the agricultural stuff to Fergus Ewing. That's the formal line of reporting, and that's all the usual regular meetings and briefings and so on and so forth. We do, because of the nature of the work, cut across into other areas, land value tax for example. We have managed to establish communication channels with other parts of government. It is quite early days in terms of the dialogue on the specific points that you raised, but I'll just pass to Hamish so he can tell you exactly where we are. Yes, in the programme for government, they asked a specific look at, first of all, community ownership, which we reported on in November last year. Secondly, issues associated with scale and concentration of ownership, which we'll be reporting on this week. Those are the two headline asks from government. We, as Andrew says, we report directly on the lead relationship with the land reform policy team, but certainly at an operational level we have good connections across regeneration and planning, local taxation and other Scottish government teams. Okay, so I think that that's clear, then. The recommendations will be out this week on land concentration of ownership. Can I just ask then about the other strand that you mentioned, which was community ownership, where we are with community ownership delivery group that's been proposed? Do you know when that might happen, which interests will be reflected on that group? Yes, the Scottish Government is taking the lead on setting up that community ownership leadership group, and I'm fully expecting that that will be up and running over the next month or two, and it will certainly deliberately draw together representatives from different sectors, so from land ownership community development planning sectors. I think part of the purpose of that group is it needs to be really cross-sectoral to bring together the different interests that are needed, and that obviously follows the direction of travel that we set out last year about community ownership needing to be a normal option for communities across Scotland and be seen very much as a part of regeneration and community planning. Just a couple of other quite specific questions as well, and it's about the research into charitable and trust status in land ownership, just where you're at with that particular form of research. This year we've been carrying out some initial scoping work really to understand the nature of land ownership by trusts, and I think it's important that we probably separate out private trusts and public and charitable trusts, different issues probably around both. We'd be doing some work and taking some legal advice on the background and the context for those, and again we'll be publishing a paper for discussion shortly over the next few months, and that's very much intended to stimulate discussion with the sector, with the land ownership sector, with professional advisers and understanding the issues and the relationships around charitable and trust status ownership. Does the commission expect that the recently enabled community right to buy a band of neglected and detrimental land will have a significant impact on the mind of land and community ownership? Will there be a difference between land owned and rural areas in urban areas? Partly it is too early to tell, but I suspect that that power will be used for relatively few specific sites. It is a last resort mechanism, and coming back to our recommendations on community ownership, what we would like to see and what is necessary for community ownership to become a more widespread, normal part of the picture is for the norm to be a willing buyer negotiation. That is by far the most productive, constructive and likely route to securing more community ownership. Given that there is an absolute right to buy in that instance, how does that fit in with the presumption for negotiated transactions between a willing seller and a willing buyer? It is well established that both are part of the picture. It is quite right that there are backstop measures in place to provide communities with the ability to take action where they need to. That should not prevent their normal practice being about willing negotiations. Finally, work on the proposed land value taxation. Given that there is a recent paper found that there was a lack of evidence that land value tax has actually delivered the theoretical benefits that are attributed to them, how is that progressing? The next phase of work on land value tax is referring to the work that we published on international experience. There are about 30 countries in the world that use some form of land value tax, so it is important that we learn the lessons from that. That research pointed to three areas that we will be taking forward this year. The first is specifically in relation to vacant and derelict land. We do not know, but we want to investigate whether a land value tax could have a part to play in unlocking a subset of vacant and derelict sites. The second is in relation more broadly to land value capture and particularly in relation to the housing market. Does land value tax have a role to play in that long-term approach to land value capture and reinvesting land value in making development happen? The third area is does land value tax have a role to play in increasing the diversity of land ownership? Those are three areas that we have identified that we want to explore further. We will be setting up an expert working group over the course of this year to take over a view of that land value tax work. When do you expect that report to be delivered? I expect that to be reporting about this time next year. That is a substantial bit of work over the coming financial year. I have a supplementary question to some of the things that Fin Carson has just mentioned. The willing buyer, willing seller, is there anything in place where the willing buyer has plans for an empty building that would retain that building and use it for public good versus the seller wanting to dismantle a building and use it for something that is not necessarily in line with public good? Is there anything there that we need to be looking at? You could probably guess that I am actually thinking of a particular instance, but where something maybe is not in line with things like regeneration of a town or using that land for public good, where does that leave communities that want to go in, take an asset and develop it for the good of the community versus other interests? In those circumstances, it is probably the community right to buy for sustainable development that is likely to offer more scope and be a more useful mechanism. The right to buy for abandoned neglected land is clearly and deliberately designed for very specific circumstances and probably does not address those use issues. Is that something that could be looked at? Is that something that has come up in your public engagement sessions, where people have very different views about the use of a particular site? It does come up, and I think that it is very early days. We simply do not know how the right to buy for sustainable development is going to work at very, very few cases developing the may well be legal challenge to it anyway, so I think that we have to wait and see. As Hamish said, the vast majority of community acquisitions have and will, I think, take place through willing buyer, willing seller. If we look at the international work that we did on this, it is the norm in a very large number of countries across Europe that communities own or control in some way land round and about settlements. As we try to move towards that pattern, I would anticipate that most landowners will be willing sellers, but that is part of the cultural shift and the behavioural shift that needs to happen. What I think is very helpful is highlighting what normal looks like in many other countries. John Scott, you want to ask a question on this thing? I did, yes. I am not quite all fair with all of this, but across particularly in Ayrshire, where I am from, there are a lot of brownfield sites in villages and towns in Ayrshire, but right for redevelopment and housing, are those available for community right to buy as well, or is community right to buy essentially just for rural areas? I know that it is very much for urban land as well. The current operation of the Scottish Land Fund bears out that many of the applications that are coming to the land fund at the moment are for urban sites, buildings or urban plots. Both the rights to buy and the wider support for community engagement is very much focused on urban as well as rural sites. My limited experience of Scotland would suggest that there might be more brownfield sites where there is neglected and derelict land, and there are sites of that description in rural areas. Do you have a feel for that? Certainly, if we are talking about sites that are officially on the vacant derelict land register, then those are generally urban or town-based sites. Of course, the community right to buy is a broader definition in relation to abandoned neglected land. I suspect that there is quite a wide variation across rural towns and communities as well as urban centres. Certainly, it is designed to apply to both. Forgive me for not knowing. Is there a standard definition of what neglected and detrimental land is? I am afraid that I am not going to try and remember it. Is it the same for urban and rural, or is it different for urban and rural? I think that in the way that those regulations work, it is obviously the same definition in whatever context you are operating, but I would have to refer you to the guidance on that particular right to buy. Just a quick on the willing buyer, willing seller, it is asserted quite regularly that the existence of compulsory powers as the backstop when there isn't a willing seller are often an incentive for a seller to become a willing seller and to engage in the process. Is there any evidence that you have to hand that sustains or shoots down that assertion that's made? It's one to which I've personally got some sympathy. I think that it's almost certainly the case that there are instances where that is true, but I do think that it's wrong to see landowners as unwilling sellers in this instance. I don't think that's the case. The vast majority of landowners in Scotland have understood and have so far cooperated. That's partly why we have such a large amount of community land already. Going forward, what we've tried to set out in our report on this is that we maybe need to refocus this whole business from the types of acquisitions that have taken place over the last decade or so and rethink that into something more typical that we can learn from other parts of Europe, which is, as I say, community ownership is not an end in itself. It has to be a means to some sort of end. We need to be clearer about what are the ends that community is trying to achieve here. We can learn awful lot from other parts of Europe where community ownership, community control of land around settlements is the norm, often acquired over the past 200 or 300 years. It's not necessarily a recent thing, but we can learn from that, and I think that that will direct it. I have seen no evidence to suggest that the majority of Scotland's landowners aren't going to be willing to participate in that process. Does any of the work that you do highlight the issues where there may be as a willing seller but, because of the liabilities that are associated with a building or a piece of land, so the examples that spring to mind are Airstation hotel and Stenna, the old Stenna East Pier and Stenra, so there may well be very willing sellers, but the liabilities associated with those pieces of land are actually a huge barrier to either local authorities or communities buying those. Is that something that can cause problems in the future? Can you suggest any solutions to those sorts of situations? Community ownership may not be the solution to those sorts of situations. I think that that's the first point to make very clearly. We have to be clear what is the purpose of community ownership. It isn't just assault to take on problems. That would be a real mistake, which is partly why we have emphasised this point, not an end in itself but a means to an end. Airstation, for example, seems to be highly likely that the solution to that may not be community ownership. I don't know, but it seems unlikely. There is a lot of work going on. The land fund has been really excellent in helping communities to figure out what is our purpose here, what is the end, what is our capacity, what is sensible here, but let's not underestimate the capacity of communities. There are some extraordinary examples of communities taking on and successfully developing and delivering a great deal more public value out of chunks of land that were delivered before and doing it very well indeed. Could the land fund be a limiting factor to communities' ability to take over? We will be going back to properties and town centres that are not used under the development of town centres, or specifically in the east pier in Strunrar, where there is a substantial financial burden associated with bringing that piece of land back into manageable use or whatever. Is that a limiting factor in the ability for communities to take ownership? It is one. In the report, we have emphasised that the land fund has come along fairly recently. Prior to that, the vast majority of community acquisitions were privately funded through crowdfunding, through philanthropy and all the rest of it. We mustn't lose sight of that, very important. If the public sector started to crowd out private funding, that would be extremely unfortunate. However, our community taking over something like the Strunrar pier is partly a financial challenge, but it is more than just financial—it is capacity. I emphasise that it is horses for courses. Let's not see community ownership as a solution to all our problems. We have questions from John Scott on the land use decision making. I would say that it is not yet the intention of the people of Ayr and the Ayr constituency, which I represent, to see the station hotel turned over to community use, at least as far as I am aware. I just ask you now about land use decision making. Could you provide an update on the baseline research to establish appropriate measures indicators of community involvement in land management decision making, as that has now been implemented? Very simply, the answer on that specific issue is that that is work that we are currently doing, so now it is not implemented yet. We have focused recently on publishing the protocol for community engagement and getting the support around good practice in place. We are conscious that we will be asked to advise government in two years' time on the effectiveness of the guidance on engaging communities, and that is what the baseline measures are being put in place for. What impact has the land rights and responsibility statements and the guidance on engaging communities in decisions relating to land hard and is expected to have? What further clarity does the commission expect to have to give on implementing the land rights statement? It is very early days in terms of impact, but I think that the vast majority of landowners are well aware that they have responsibilities, as you said earlier. The statement has been helpful in highlighting that. The guidance has been helpful in setting out a clear methodology, but I think that it is some way from being widely understood by why awareness is still quite low. In terms of going forward, we have just produced a protocol on community engagement that builds on that further and attempts to provide people with clear, simple guidance as to what would be sensible here. It is early days, so I think that it is the short answer. How does the commission intend to monitor the success of the newly published protocol on community engagement in decisions relating to land? Does it apply equally to private and community landowners, regardless of whether they are urban or rural? At the last point, we are very clear that the guidance and expectations apply equally across all types of landowners, whether it is public, private, NGO or community. Equally, the expectations are reciprocal on both those with the responsibility for managing and owning land, as well as those who are community and using land. That is very much about the understanding of the reciprocal expectations and how that should work. Going back to your first question, how will we measure it, we have specifically identified in the protocol that we have specifically asked for feedback, both for examples of good and bad practice to be fed back to us, but that will also form part of the monitoring that we are putting in place. We are intending to use survey mechanisms with both communities and landowners and managers to establish a measure and an on-going measure of both awareness and effectiveness of the guidance. You said that you intend to use what kind of measures? Survey measures. Could you provide an update on the review of the costs and impacts of fiscal policy in relation to diversity of ownership and land use decision making that is due to commence in 2019? Yes, that review has not started yet. Essentially, we are in the position where I think a lot of our work over the last couple of years has identified, effectively scoped out, a number of issues where tax and fiscal policy, particularly taxation, probably has an important part to play. Over the coming financial year, we will be pulling together a group to look at tax, including land value tax, as mentioned earlier, but I think importantly looking at that in the wider context of the existing tax regime and both looking at options for changes and what the implications, understanding of the implications of those would be. So have the specifications and parameters yet been drawn up and the contracts awarded for this research or not? Finally, what aspects of economic, social and cultural human rights might be further realised by the commission that are not or have not already been covered by this work programme? I think we see the human rights framework as something that runs through all of our work. It is less of a work stream in itself, but it is about providing a frame and an influence that shapes much of our work. In relation to realising economic, social and cultural rights, it is significant around, for example, in practical terms, rights to housing, to work, employment etc. That influence is, for example, the work that we have done on putting together a capacity of sales order proposal. It influences the work that we are doing around land ownership. It is a way of framing some of the issues that we are looking at rather than being a topic or to itself. Mr Thin, earlier mentioned the risk of legal challenge to some of the stuff that you are doing. Have you any specific areas where you expect legal challenge currently outstanding? No, not at the moment. I would like to ask one final question of you. I guess that it comes back to full circle to the public. Do you feel that, two or three years on from land reform and going through Parliament, that there is enough guidance, straightforward guidance out there for members of the public who are perhaps looking at a part of their town or village, whatever, that they feel that the community can benefit from? Do you feel that there has been enough sharing of the guidance on the processes of how they can help communities? Is there enough sharing of good practice where it has worked? I am going from the point of view of thinking of myself as a resident of a village and thinking, where would I start? Is that something that needs to be looked at more? I do not want to imply any criticism of the huge amount of effort that has gone into this. It is a huge, huge challenge, and there are great many organisations, including Government, but also NGOs and the Government of Scotland, that all those bodies have and are doing a huge amount of work. There is an awful lot more there than there was two years ago. Is there enough? I very much doubt it. I think that we all have to continue as part of the cultural shift, it is part of the dialogue shift, it is not just about guidance, it is about expectation, it is about confidence, it is about capacity, it is about a range of different things, and you cannot flick a switch, they take time. Yes, there is quite a lot of technical guidance out there, but it is much more about the support and the capacity that is required. As an example, we have been working with surf recently in holding conversations in Cacoddy, Rothsape, Government about engagement and community options there, and I think that that just emphasises that this is a long process. It is not simply going in with a technical bit of guidance about how to use a particular right to buy, it is actually a more fundamental discussion with the community about their expectations and how those can be realised through a whole set of measures, some of which are land reform, some of which are far broader. Do my colleagues have any more questions? I don't believe we do. I want to thank you very much for your time this morning. I'm going to suspend this meeting briefly.