SIR, – The chair and clerk of Sleat General Grazings Committee (The SF, July 30) are among a growing and encouraging number of crofters calling for convener Kennedy to pack his bags, and, in some cases, for the Crofting Commission as a whole to be abolished.

However, their letter would have been more enlightening if they had devoted less of it to buttering up some of the hard-working employees of NFUS (which has not yet 'seen the light' on this issue) and more to explaining their own ideas for replacing the commission.

Their published proposals, while claiming to create 'self-regulation', in fact do nothing of the sort. They envisage a hierarchy of committees, with an advice team of solicitors (more jam for them?) and appeal structures, to regulate the individual crofter, including, of all things, a specially created ‘crofting ombudsman’, and the Land Court as a last resort.

Behind all this, of course – although they do not spell this out – there would inevitably be some big stick in the new Act that they propose, especially since this is going to cost a large but unspecified amount of money.

Since these committees are envisaged as replacing the commission’s functions, they would inevitably extend their tentacles to regulating a crofter’s rights over her or his own land (although the Sleat proposals strangely only cover the dwindling number of tenant crofters rather than owner-occupiers. Where, one might ask, does that leave the rest of us?). The remedy would be worse than the disease.

It has been well observed that committees need to have an odd number of members and that three is too many. That is absolutely the case here.

The proper body for regulating the use of common grazings, in the interests of the environment, individual graziers and the public, is SNH. That would be similar in some respects to the role played by Natural England south of the Border.

Other than that, set crofters free from the wilful, inconsistent and, above all, control-freak tenants of Great Glen House. Scrap ‘crofting’ legislation, give tenant crofters full ownership (without the nonsense of having to have their own ‘tenant’) and let us all get on with running our land and determining its future, just like any other farm owner, as we judge best.

Michael Otter

155 Oldshoremore,

Kinlochbervie.