A review of Community Right to Buy will begin this summer to look at how effective current powers are.

Community Right to Buy has now been in use for 20 years and during that time, there have been several additions and amendments to the original rights in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, and various reports and recommendations on how to improve and amend them further.

Speaking during a visit to an Edinburgh facility that was bought by the community in 2021 through the Asset Transfer process, rural affairs secretary Mairi Gougeon said: “We want to increase community ownership as an important way of delivering our vision for Scotland and our three central missions of equality, opportunity, and community.”

The review will begin in the summer of 2024, following the introduction of the Land Reform Bill and report at the end of 2025, and will cover all the current rights to buy to see if new legislation is needed.

Speaking to The Scottish Farmer, Ms Gougeon acknowledged it is an unsettling time for landowners with the amount of legislation coming forward, but said the concentration of land ownership ‘is not normal.’ She said: “We are undertaking this review because we want to get to grips with some of the issues and barriers there are to community ownership.

“We have been on a journey in relation to land reform for the past 20 years, as well as community ownership and I think it has been absolutely transformative for some rural and island communities.”

Ms Gougeon pointed to the success of the process on Ulva. “The population doubled there and they were able to put more investment into housing and into areas that are really important to them, so I think it can be transformative.

“We have four different community right to buy through various pieces of legislation over the course of the past 20 years, some of that is about the right of communities whether urban or rural to register an interest in purchasing land, we have the crofting right to buy and we also have right to buy for further sustainable development for abandoned or vacant land.

When challenged on whether this is an urban-centric policy that will impact farmers, landowners, and rural communities, the minister said:

“I’d say there is a broad range of measures that are not just aimed at urban communities, but they started off aimed at rights for rural communities where we know in Scotland we have scale and concentration of land ownership. “We think it is really vital that we have a system of checks and balances between the rights of landowners and also ensuring the communities have those opportunities, but I think this review gives us a real opportunity to delve into the different rights we have because we know some of them haven’t been used successfully at all.

“We have had people apply through the community right to buy for abandoned land, but none of those applications have been successful and we have only seen one successful application through the right to buy for sustainable development so we need to understand what the problems are.“I do think we have to recognise the scale and concentration of land ownership in Scotland isn’t normal. “When you compare us to other European countries and look more broadly, we are an outlier.

I think there are around 430 people who own the vast majority of land in Scotland – that is an issue.

“We have an obligation to make sure that not only is the system fairer, but we should also be more transparent. The legislation we are looking to introduce is another step on that journey.” Ms Gougeon said the Scottish Government has only been in the process of land reform since 2003 and the proposed bill will continue that.