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Land reform in Scotland


Land Reform in Scotland is the ongoing process by which the ownership of land in Scotland, its distribution and the law which governs it is modified, reformed and modernised by property and regulatory law.

Scotland's land issues are rooted in two processes that happened in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the Scottish Highlands:

The Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 intended to protect the farmers' rights, but it was too weak to have any effect.

The Scotland land reform aims to balance the land-ownership situation by:

In 1997 a Labour Government was elected to Westminster on a manifesto which included both devolution and land reform. Upon election, a Land Reform Policy Group (LRPG) was established under the chairmanship of Lord Sewel, then Scottish Office Minister of State, who was also tasked with steering devolution legislation though the house of lords. Policy proposals and an extensive public consultation were published by the LRPG in 1999, the same year that the first elections to the newly devolved Scottish parliament returned a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition. Following the momentum of the 1997 and 1999 elections, devolution and the LRPG's proposals, land reform progressed rapidly in the first session of the Scottish parliament with bills introduced to abolish Scotland's feudal land tenure system and a draft land reform bill introduced in 2000. The same year, the Scottish Land Fund was created and in 2001 began allocating its £10 million budget of national lottery funding to assist rural communities to purchase land.

The first piece of land reform legislation in the 21st century, the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000 was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 3 May 2000 and received royal assent on 9 June the same year. The act formed the core of a three part reform of Scottish property law, alongside the Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003 and Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004. The main provisions of the act included the abolition of feudal superiorities and tenure, to be replaced by a system of outright ownership in which those who had been vassals became outright owners. This necessitated the extinction of superiors’ rights to collect feu duties, for which they were entitled to compensation in the form of a single payment of a size that, when invested at an annual rate of 2.5%, would yield interest equal to the former feu duty. However, as Scotand's remaining feu duties had been fixed many years previously, inflation meant that by the time of the act’s passing their value was, in most cases, effectively nominal. The act also extinguished superiors’ rights to enforce real burdens, conditions on the holding of land, retaining only those conditions enforceable by neighbouring land owners or by certain legal bodies on public policy grounds. The legal basis of real burdens and title conditions was then reformulated in the Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003. The end of feudal tenure simplified titles to land, while the subsequent Title Conditions (Scotland) Act 2003 modernised the types of interests and conditions that can be attached to those titles. Finally, common law surrounding tenements was then reformed in light of these changes under the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004, completing the abolition of Scotland's feudal property system.


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