The Scottish Greens and Labour are advocating for amendments to the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill.
The Bill was introduced by the Scottish Government to help reduce the concentration of rural land ownership, where a small number of people own vast areas of Scotland’s countryside.
The legislation aims to increase opportunities for community buyouts of land and proposes that ministers could break up large estates into smaller areas, a process known as lotting, if certain conditions are met.
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However, a Holyrood committee has already said the changes to allow more community buyouts ‘are unlikely to accomplish much on their own’.
Earlier this month, MSPs on the Net Zero, Energy and Transport committee said ‘significant change’ was needed to the Bill.
Scottish Labour’s rural affairs spokesperson, Rhoda Grant, said: “The Bill does not touch on urban land reform and proposals for a public interest test on land transfers have been ditched completely.”
Adding that the Bill was a ‘chance to empower communities’, she said Scottish Labour would now seek to ‘strengthen the Bill and deliver on its potential’.
Meanwhile, Green MSP Ariane Burgess said the Bill ‘has the potential to be a huge step forward for rural communities’, adding that it could address ‘historic wrongs that continue to block the fairer distribution of Scotland’s land today’.
She said: “That’s why it’s vital that this Bill goes much further in delivering robust powers that will allow us to break up big estates that come up for sale and to manage them for the wider public benefit.”
While she pointed out that community right to buy laws had been passed more than 20 years ago, the Green said under the current system ‘one of the biggest barriers to community ownership is the complex process for communities to register their interest to buy land when it becomes available’.
Ms Burgess added: “Our country should belong to all of us, we need to ensure that landowners are using their land in ways that benefit our communities, our nature and our environment.
“From our cities to our countryside and from our hills to our iconic rivers and our beautiful coastlines, huge swathes of Scotland are owned by a very small number of extremely wealthy people.”
Rural affairs secretary Mairi Gougeon said that reform was a ‘journey towards greater fairness and opportunity’ that involved ’empowering communities, tenants and individuals across Scotland’.
She stated: “This Land Reform Bill will support communities by giving them greater involvement in decisions about the land on which they live and work.
“It will empower them with more opportunities to own land.
“For the first time, it will also allow ministers to consider how the sale of large landholdings impacts communities, and take steps to intervene when necessary.
“And it brings forward essential reforms to deliver equality of opportunity to Scotland’s small landholders and tenant farmers – recognising their contribution to Scottish agriculture.”
Ms Gougeon added that she had set out changes to ‘further strengthen and simplify the proposals in the Bill’ in response to the committee’s report, along with penalties for landowners to breach their obligations, saying these would be a ‘real deterrent’.
