408 landowners own half of all privately-owned rural land in Scotland
There are now 408 landowners controlling 50%.
The report shows that 83% of rural land in Scotland is privately owned.
Dr Josh Doble "With so little public and communal land, and with one of the greatest inequalities in landownership anywhere in the world, Scotland is an international anomaly.
“This has real impacts for all of us. We are facing economic, social and environmental crises firmly rooted in our archaic landownership pattern.”
Doble said that private landowners controlling so much of rural Scotland “stifles local economic development, blunts our response to the depopulation crisis and means we can't stop ecologically disastrous land management.”
“Without robust regulation of landownership and land sales we will not be able to prevent the amassing of vast estates by billionaires, asset managers and aristocrats,” he added.
“Rather than taking bold and necessary land reform measures, the government continues to allow public money to flow to wealthy private landowners and encourages further land concentration through subsidies and tax breaks.”
Doble called for a “structural and strategic approach” to land reform in the next parliament, adding that the Land Reform Act had provided “some beneficial tweaks” to the current system but did not “fundamentally break the power of monopoly landowners” or the concentration of land into “fewer and fewer hands”.
“The next Scottish Parliament needs to provide the robust legal means to finally prevent this accumulation of land, wealth and power into the hands of a tiny group of billionaires, asset managers and aristocrats,” he added.