Unwilding? A "Community Land" View

Ken Thomson

Community Land Scotland webpage

Community Land Scotland (CLS) is the body (a charity constituted as a company limited by guarantee, and largely government-funded) which represents Scotland's new "community land owners". Its 75-odd members manage over 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of land, home to some 25,000 people. In addition to its traditional goal of promoting community ownership of land, CLS is now thinking about ¡§renewal and repopulation¡¨, partly in response to pursuit of "landscape policy" by many conservation bodies. This policy of course includes the designation of "wild land areas", which cover about 3.8 million acres, or about 1.5 Mha, of Scotland.

A page of the CLS website is now dedicated to this new theme. It argues that, in Scotland, "an elite view [can] tend to value the lack of human presence, emptiness, remoteness, notions of solitude, and what is, mostly wrongly, portrayed and perceived as naturalness. To others the very same places can appear places that can appear forlorn and desolate when those areas once were home to vibrant communities, rich in culture and far more bio-diverse than they are today". Such places include both abandoned villages and shielings that, for many hundreds of years, were occupied for several months each summer. CLS is therefore pursuing people-centred (rather than, or as well as, nature-centred) "landscape justice", a development of the longer-established goals of "environmental justice" and "social justice" (Chris Dalglish; see above website).

Abandoned shieling, Glen Slugain - naturalness or forlornness?
© Graham Marr, from his book “The Mounth Passes”

In a January 2018 submission on the Planning (Scotland) Bill now going through the Scottish Parliament, CLS proposed that: "in considering the National Planning Framework ...Ministers:

• must have regard to the desirability of ... the resettling of land ([which] though long populated, is today largely or wholly unpopulated);
• are given powers to designate [and purchase] land for the purpose of its resettlement ... including compulsory purchase powers; ...
• should be given powers to grant a community right to buy under the Land Reform Act 2003 for the purpose of the resettlement of land to community bodies nearest to such land; ...
• be required to produce or cause to be produced [within 5 years] a map of no-longer-existing communities in Scotland, [and] in preparing future policy, may have regard to such a map."

These provisions, if adopted, would further extend the "right to buy" contained in the reform Acts of 2003, 2015 and 2016.

In May 2018, the Committee published its Stage 1 report on the Bill, recording (para 256) "mixed" views on the creation of Simplified Development Zones (SDZs) - a vehicle (with other uses, many urban and industrial) that might be used for the above purposes but which cannot currently be used in conservation areas, such as "wild land". The Committee was "supportive of their inclusion within the Bill" but with some "changes made" (para 278), but was worried about governance, and costs. In its response to the Committee report a week later, the Government made no mention of "resettlement", considered (p. 19) that SDZs in general were subject to "misunderstandings", and proposed to bring forward "amendments" in Stage 2, which starts this autumn.

NEMT members may themselves have "mixed views" about the desirability and/or practicability of resettlement of "wild land" and similar places. Issues raised include:

• Is it "elitist" in pushing for stronger protection for Wild Land Areas (see NEMT's Planning Bill submission in Mountain Views, #77, Spring/Summer 2018, page 9) and in opposing much development in remote areas, on environmental and visual grounds?
• Does the proposal mean "pressing reset on the Highland clearances" - a charge which CLS denies! - or a step towards "the cohesion and sustainability of rural Scotland"?
• How far would such settlements help to reverse recent projections for further population falls in many sparsely areas of Scotland? (see https://sefari.scot/blog/2018/03/19/a-troubling-demographic-legacy-for-scotland%E2%80%99s-sparsely-populated-areas-0)
• What kind of settlements are proposed? - CLS do not expect that inhabitants should necessarily depend on agriculture, forestry, etc., but that they should be able to utilise "new communications and other technologies". How would second homes, empty for most of the time, be avoided?
• Who should be able to propose "renewal" settlements: anyone? or only nearby communities, local authorities, or central government? How could such proposals be opposed, given the complexity and costs of the current planning process?

Answers, if any, on a postcard, please!

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