We believe that much land is needlessly unproductive, and would urge the Scottish Government to encourage ways to allow people to use land more intelligently. We believe that making land available to poorer Scots offers them a way to grow healthy, accessible local food, and build skills and food security at a local level. While there may be a legal requirement to retain land in public ownership, we suggest that a presumption of a community right to use, land assets which are not used, should be considered.
During wartime – food growing was seen as a national necessity, and the food grown in gardens, spare ground, allotments, across the UK including Scotland was high quality, and healthy, and I’d argue that it was a factor in the fact that the population’s nutrition was better during war time than at other times.
We are in times of economic downturn, and what Scotland does have in abundance is land. Both in our urban areas such as Glasgow there is a lot of land which is largely passive and unused, while in rural areas, patterns of land ownership which concentrate land into relatively few hands also mean that availability of land for ordinary people is scarce. Public agencies such as Forestry Commission, and others such as National Trust for Scotland, National Museum, and Scottish Natural Heritage, all manage large land holdings. Private landowners and forestry concerns, as well as a range of NGO’s such as RSPB and others also have assets that potentially could be used more creatively.
Businesses – especially utility businesses such as Power companies, Scottish Water, and many others have land that could be used productively – and this could help them to address their Corporate Social Responsibility obligations.
What Scotland also has, and with economic conditions being as they are, will continue to have, is a lot of people who are unemployed, or who are under-employed – or are young and new to the labour market, and have never worked.
There are a lot of people who are also under-employed assets – who would love to have useful and worthwhile work, or volunteering opportunities.
Scotland historically (as is true of all industrialised countries) has gone from being a peasant economy with the bulk of people growing food locally, Scotland has gone through it’s clearances, and rapid industrialisation, and now is into a post industrial period.
The question is what is going to happen next – and it seems not unnatural to expect that some return to a 21st century equivalent of the peasant economy – albeit very different in this internet age – will evolve. And a significant blockage with this, is access to suitable and affordable land. A model of land ownership which is successful in a country equivalent to Scotland is Norway, which has had a rather different history.
We believe that the current economic downturn is going to be long term and finding useful activities for people will have lots of benefits – self esteem, fitness, health, and being self sufficient will have huge benefits to us prospering into the future.
Access to land is absolutely key to this transformation.