Scotland: Breaking up the estates

Standing proud and elegantly turreted among the rolling hills of southwest Scotland, Drumlanrig Castle is a magnificent symbol of enduring landed power and wealth. Built in the 17th century by the first Duke of Queensberry, it remains 11 generations later one of Scotland's finest country houses and a glistening sandstone jewel in the crown of Buccleuch Estates, the UK's largest private landowner.

Yet even Drumlanrig's thick walls cannot ward off the winds of modern politics. Fired up by a failed independence campaign in which promises of social justice was a dominant theme, The country's governing Scottish National party has promised a programme of radical land reform. Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry, says the prospect fills him with "absolute dismay".

The duke is not the only one worried. Lobby group Scottish Land and Estates has expressed "extreme concern" at the SNP call for ministers to have the as-yet undefined powers to interveneif the scale of land ownership and conduct of a landowner is judged to be a barrier to sustainable development. The Conservative party has denounced the idea as "simply unacceptable". One local news website in western Argyll has even declared that Scotland's landowners face "a form of planned genocide".

Such language is highly exaggerated - the SNP proposals are for new legal frameworks rather than land seizures or violence - but it highlights the passions that can be raised by talk of land reform. Ownership has been an emotive popular issue in Scotland at least since the Highland clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, when rural populations were forced off their land to make way for more lucrative sheep.

Critics of the SNP say such abuses are long in the past and present reform plans smack of class war and a further advance of an over-mighty state that will deter investment and threaten jobs. But proponents see reform as a way of unleashing economic and social benefits that have been suppressed by distant or unsympathetic landowners and of addressing the inequality summed up in the much-cited estimate by author and campaigner Andy Wightman that just 432 owners account for 50 per cent of Scotland's privately held land. Eighty-three per cent of Scottish rural land is still privately held.

The biggest estates are often in the most marginal areas of this northern nation of 5.3m, where thin-soiled hills and hard-to-reach islands have suffered from depopulation and decline. But the SNP also wants to take reform into Scotland's sometimes badly deprived urban areas in the hope of giving residents a greater stake in their cities.

Nor is it just the governing SNP that is keen on change. Asked about the nationalists' plans, Jim Murphy, leader of the main opposition Scottish Labour party, says his prime concern is that they will not be radical enough.

State intervention

Richard Lochhead, the SNP cabinet secretary for rural affairs, believes the case for greater government intervention is clear. "Scotland has the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in Europe, and that raises questions about communities' lack of control over their own destinies and over the concentration of wealth and power," he says.

As well as giving the government power to intervene against problem landlords, which ministers suggest would only be used in response to community complaints, the SNP wants to establish a permanent land reform commission, strengthen the rights of tenant farmers and amend the law so landowners can no longer leave all their land and buildings to a single heir.

In pursuit of its goal of "fairer and more equitable" land distribution, the SNP wants to reintroduce business rates on shooting and deerstalking estates in order to help fund an expansion of community ownership of land to 1m acres from less than half that now.

Community ownership can be transformative, argues David Blair, chair of Kilfinan Community Forest Company in the Argyll village of Tighnabruaich. When the group, set up by local residents, purchased more than 300 acres of land from the Forestry Commission in 2010 it was just dark forest that lacked even a single footpath and generated no local jobs, says Mr Blair. Since then, the group has created access roads, set up a sawmill operation and employs the equivalent of three full-time workers. Now it is buying a further 1,000 acres, expects to employ another five people and is planning to start building houses on the site.

"This community has experienced 50 years of decline," says Mr Blair. "It's like a lifeline."

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Yet community ownership is hardly a panacea, as is clear from the experience of the Isle of Gigha off the western coast of Kintyre. In a pioneering move in 2002, Gigha residents bought most of their scenic island from its private landlord for nearly £4m, making it a test case for community control.

Since then the population has grown from under 100 to 170, businesses have proliferated and many of the dilapidated homes in which most islanders lived have been refurbished, says Margaret McSporran, chair of the resident-controlled Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust.

The trust was able to create a steady income from the "Dancing Ladies" - three 225kW wind turbines, individually dubbed Faith, Hope and Charity - which were in 2013 joined by a 330kW sister christened Harmony.

But harmony is just what some island residents say is now lacking. Though the community buyout was backed by public funds, the trust has struggled with debt and the high cost of house renovations. Some residents say the trust does not operate effectively as a business, complaints fuelled by a bitter dispute between its leaders and a dairy farmer who moved to the island last year.

Don Dennis, a US businessman who runs a flower essence business from the former landlord's house on Gigha that he bought from the trust in 2003, believes community ownership has overall been a good thing for the island. But getting things done can be frustrating. "I deal with the trust as little as possible," Mr Dennis says. "It's not inherent in the nature of the Gigha Trust. It's inherent in the nature of committees."

Island life

Some residents even say they would rather Gigha was still in the hands of a laird, or rural landowner.

"You go to a laird and he says yes or no; you go to the trust and they say 'let's have a meeting'," complains Mathew Steele, who works at a fish farm that was not included in the buyout. "It's the lunatics taking over the asylum, the blind leading the blind. That's what this place has become: one big cliche."

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"This place was more enjoyable under a laird - there was less back-stabbing," says Mr Steele. Retired farmer Kenny Robison recalls one resident who said after the buyout that "we all used to hate the landowner, but who are we going to hate now?"

Such disputes within the community are themselves a sign of empowerment, however uncomfortable. And other residents are much more positive, relishing the security that comes with control of their island's fate.

Still, one lesson from Gigha is that, whatever their ownership, estates must be economically viable.

Large landowners such as Buccleuch Estates argue that scale itself can be an advantage when it comes to making the best use of the economically marginal land that makes up much of Scotland.

Political pragmatism

Buccleuch lands around Drumlanrig Castle range from dramatic but near-barren uplands to fertile farms. There is even an opencast coal mine, which the estate is attempting to transform into a renewable energy park combining wind turbines with a pump storage hydroelectric scheme - a challenge beyond most smaller landowners. With 240,000 acres of land, mainly in Scotland, Buccleuch can cross-subsidise. And it is adopting increasingly sophisticated approaches to long-term land management. "Our new thing is whole estate development planning," says John Glen, Buccleuch chief executive.

The Duke of Buccleuch admits that some of his predecessors were less than ideal landowners. One was berated by poet Robert Burns as a reptile in a ducal crown for laying waste to the Drumlanrig woods.

But the duke says the family takes seriously its role as custodian of the land and its concern for the community, a reflection of the connection that many traditional landowners feel toward the estates they preside over.

"I can understand people who have a deep-down visceral dislike of other people who own large amounts of land," he says, from the castle's aquamarine morning room. "All I can do is try and make a case for our stewardship of it as being good and responsive to the best interests of the community."

The duke also warns that misconceived reform could end up exposing the fragility of such maintenance-hungry aristocratic bastions as Drumlanrig. "There's always been an umbilical cord almost linking these great houses with the land around them," the duke says. "If you diminish the ability of the estates to support them . . . within a generation or two it will become increasingly difficult to look after them."

Like other owners, the duke contests the idea that land still equals power in an era of planning processes and democratic controls. "I am as hedged around as the next person," he says. But with land reform pressure growing, Duke Richard, as his staff refer to him, says he expects to soon start slimming down the sprawling Buccleuch estates. "There is a need for us to be pragmatic about the politics of the time," he says.

The sale of some Buccleuch land is likely to be welcomed by reform campaigners. Mr Wightman says benefits will flow from increasing the number of people with a direct stake in land. "You'll have higher levels of commitment to using that land in the public interest. Higher levels of accountability. Higher levels of democratic engagement. And higher levels of investment and productivity," he says.

Certainly, Mr Lochhead, the SNP cabinet secretary, is unsympathetic to concerns about his government's interventionist ambitions. Even politicians are regulated and good landowners have nothing to fear from demands that they serve the public good, he says. "I don't believe that landowners . . . should view any of the measures being proposed as a threat, unless they deem themselves bad landowners," he says.

'Imprint of feudalism': Holyrood goes back to the future on land reform

It was only after the establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999 that Scotland abolished feudal landholding - something France had managed to do back in 1792.

The scrapping of the "archaic and medieval" system of feudal duties was part of a barrage of land reform laws enacted in the first half of the past decade by Scottish Labour administrations. Other moves included right to roam legislation and a better deal for tenant farmers.

For the Duke of Buccleuch, who presides over the largest UK landholding in private hands, that should have been the end of the land reform. "We thought that was the done deal and we all knew where we stood and we could plan ahead," he says.

"To find it being reopened in the aggressive way in which it is, I think, is very sad indeed," says the duke, calling the Scottish National party's new reform agenda a challenge to "the nature of the society we live in and property rights" that risks undermining the rural economy.

Land reformers say Scotland still has plenty of catching up to do. Highly concentrated ownership restricts access to land and contributes to a relatively empty countryside, argues Lesley Riddoch, an author and commentator who says Scotland has suffered because of its lack of a mass rural property owning class of the sort enjoyed by other European states such as Norway.

"Feudalism was formally abolished . . . but its imprint is still all over Scotland," Ms Riddoch wrote in Blossom: What Scotland Needs to Flourish, a book hailed by some independence activists ahead of last year's referendum as a manifesto for a better future outside the UK.

A focus of the latest round of reform is set to be a change to the law on succession that would stop landowners being able to leave all their land and buildings to only one heir. The move would also bring Scotland into line with European states that adopted Napoleonic codes after the French Revolution. But critics say giving all children and spouses a claim on assets could lead to landholdings being split into increasingly uneconomic parcels.

Richard Lochhead, the Scottish cabinet secretary leading the land reform push, says his experience as a minister for agriculture tells him that most families already sit down together to work out how to divide their assets.

Mr Lochhead says that giving heirs the same rights to all kinds of assets is a matter of basic fairness. "The principle of equality of treatment trumps any other argument," he says.

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