Friday was the deadline for submissions to the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee on the Land Reform Bill. MSPs have plenty to ponder as they further shape the legislation, not least a significant ministerial retreat.
There is difficulty in tracing owners of Scottish land, if they are hidden in a company registered in an overseas tax haven. So the Scottish Government originally proposed that land should only be owned by an individual or a legal entity formed in accordance with the “law of a member state of the EU”.
This was a welcome attempt to make the ownership of Scottish land more transparent.
However it has been dropped. New regulations are proposed instead to allow only those affected by land held secretly in tax havens, to request information on ownership from the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland.
The holder of this office would then have the power to request information from the likes of the British Virgin Islands on companies registered there.
The Scottish Government explained it decided its original proposal wouldn’t significantly increase the accountability of landowners,and might have encouraged more land to be held by trusts.
Leading land campaigner Andy Wightman finds this “thoroughly unconvincing" and has seen no evidence of offshore trusts owning land in Scotland, only companies.
Community Land Scotland, umbrella body for buyouts such as Eigg and Assynt, also finds “this part of the Bill is very weak” and urges MSPs to “closely scrutinise why it has not been felt possible to proceed with the original proposals”.
Global Witness, the NGO that campaigns to expose hidden links between natural resources, corruption, armed conflict and environmental destruction, has also made an important submission.
It argues that if potential loopholes on secret ownership have already been identified, then drafting the Bill is the ideal opportunity to address them “rather than just setting the entire proposal aside”.
Global Witness has been heavily involved in campaigning to strengthen the measures for beneficial ownership transparency in both the European Anti-Money Laundering Directive and the UK’s Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act.
It says neither would deliver substantial improvements in transparency of Scottish land ownership, but both adopt robust definitions of beneficial owners that could be useful to the Scottish Government.
Global Witness says Scotland is “a conundrum” to those working on land reform globally.
“On the one hand, the steps already taken to empower and enable communities to own their land and resources are some of the most progressive policies for community based land ownership found anywhere in the world. On the other, Scotland has the highest concentration of land ownership of almost any developed country and the lack of accountability of those landowners to the local communities living and working on that land (driven in part by the lack of disclosure about who owns Scotland’s land) is very far from what is considered international standards for land governance.”
The challenge for Holyrood is to frame a final Bill which closes that gap.
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