Owning land in Scotland is a funny thing. A status symbol, it denotes power and implies economic dominance, but behind its exclusive privilege lies one of the most disparate ownership models in the Western world. The concentration of land in the hands of a small group of owners is an anomaly in the United Kingdom, and generates a profoundly unequal structure that causes tension and can lead to abuse of power. The Scottish system of land registration is the oldest in the world, and a recent attempt to modernize it, with an integral registry meant to be completed in 2024, has been abandoned on the premise that the plan lacked viability.

Despite successive reforms promoted by the Scottish government — the most recent was approved this month — half of private land in Scotland belongs to just 420 property owners. Perhaps most concerning is that trends over time, which once pointed towards less concentration of land ownership, has reversed course in the last two decades, leading to the accumulation of property in fewer hands, according to the project *Who Owns Scotland, *which is run by analyst and writer Andy Wightman, who has dedicated the last 20 years to investigating the phenomenon. His platform is updated every year, and currently covers more than 76% of Scottish rural areas.

Scotland’s current situation originated — as it did throughout Europe — in the feudal pyramid. British territorial imbalance, the centralization of power in the country’s southern region, and Scotland’s lack of autonomy until 1999, when the Scotland Act gave the territory its own executive branch and parliament, were also crucial components that set the stage for the contemporary situation.

But the persistence of its model lies in the historic singularity of the United Kingdom. “Land reform tends to take place after colonization, revolution or a large-scale political event. In Europe, it began after the French Revolution, but the United Kingdom, and by extension Scotland, wasn’t part of that European project, because it didn’t have a revolution, or any big changes. The land continued to belong to the men who ran Parliament and it is always unlikely that such owners will reform the system. We never had the reforms that were undertaken in other European countries,” says Wightman in a conversation with EL PAÍS.

He explains Scotland’s current situation by speaking of its integration into the United Kingdom in 1707, and its uneven territorial development. Scotland “was relatively poor at the time, and when the Industrial Revolution began, industrialization and colonialism generated a huge surplus of capital, but predominately in England.” Vast additional funds were allocated to leisure, which led to significant fortunes being spent on buying large tracts of land in Scotland for activities like hunting.

Another important factor were the so-called clearances, forced displacement of the populace, especially in the highlands in the northeastern part of the territory, through which large landowners evicted tenants, a process that freed up a vast expanse of land that would become part of the so-called leisure economy.

In the model that has emerged today, the traditionally dominant aristocracy has been replaced by a new demographic. Around half of the landowners come from the wealth typical of the last 150 years, from new industries to colonization, and 4% are foreigners, like the emir of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who owns some 63,000 acres. The largest private owner of land in Scotland is the Danish textile magnate Anders Holch Povlsen.

Debate has prompted successive interventions by the Scottish National Party-led government, which believes that profits and opportunities from land should be distributed more widely and fairly. The most recent intervention was approved in early November, with the so-called Land Reform Act, which aims to regulate the thorny issue of land use, as well as the terms of purchase and sale.

Among the proposals is the responsibility of large landowners to inform the community about what is happening with the land, to facilitate acquisition by community groups when land comes up for sale, and to deal with the agricultural and environmental use of the land.

The problem, according to critics, is the complexity of the law, and that it doesn’t go far enough. Even Parliament’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, despite recommending its approval, considered the regulation “too big and too complicated”. Wightman predicts “very little effect, if any.”

“It introduces highly complex bureaucratic processes to give communities slightly improved purchasing rights, but not many people live in or around these large land extensions, which are often concentrated in mountainous regions, so it’s hard for them to benefit. As land reform, it’s not great.”

After the approval of the law, Sofie Kirk Kristiansen, the Lego heir, bought a piece of land for $33.5 million but, according to Wightman, the market value of the property was $9.5 million, which in his opinion is “proof that the law isn’t making a difference.” “There are billionaires acquiring land in small towns, which puts them in direct conflict with communities. But this law doesn’t deal with that, because the land in question doesn’t cover many acres” and the legislation focuses instead on large properties, he explains.

Change, he continues, must be “structural” and reformulate the system from its roots. “To reform land, it’s important to be clear on what the goals are. It’s not enough to say that the model is unjust or unequal, or that some people have too much land, or that they’re too rich. Those are legitimate observations, but it’s important to be clear on what you want to do,” he says. He believes that “democratizing how one owns and uses the land is not coherent with the fact that so few people possess so much land.”

The primary changes to date have taken place through so-called reforms, assisted by the market, that have been promoted as attempts to redistribute land when it is put up for sale. “The property owner wants to sell and as long as they’re being compensated, they have no problem with it,” says Wightman, who nonetheless points out that every year, a minuscule percentage of land goes on the market, which challenges “the idea that it will be able to substantially change the model, especially if the land is very expensive. If that is going to be the only process, change is going to come very, very slowly,” he warns.

Scotland is the example: “The land is already very concentrated, but the owner is going for even more, reversing historic trends,” says Wightman. Explanation for this can be found in the “large forces of a very liberal market, that allows as much purchasing as is desired, with no questions asked.” The analyst also offers a double solution: adopt the same laws of inheritance found throughout a large part of Europe — which are limited to the right of children to inherit — and revise tax codes. “Large tracts of land should pay more taxes. Faced with an annual tax burden in line with the market value of the land, people would think twice about accumulating large tracts,” he says, which would help shift the priority to “the economic use of land, rather than holding it as a speculative asset that will generate profit if sold.”

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