In a scathing rebuke, Wightman said the legislation amounted to “the least ambitious land reform bill ever introduced to the Scottish Parliament”.
Ex-Green MSP Andy Wightman has brutally slammed the SNP-Green government’s flagship Land Reform Bill, claiming its impact will be “non-existent”.
Scotland has some of the most concentrated land ownership in the western world with half of all private land owned by just 400 people. And he warned rather than help more communities to get a stake in the land they live on - a key purpose of the Bill - it instead risked creating a “nightmare of bureaucracy” for them through a new system on land sales.
Instead, there is now only a “transfer test” for when land over 1000 hectares goes up for sale - but not when it changes hands in other ways, such as inheritance. Scottish politics Writing in his blog, Wightman continued: “The measures fall far short of what most of us following developments believed would be in the Bill.
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