Do we want Scotland’s finest landscape controlled by a benign dictatorship?

Andy Wightman makes an appeal for the local voice to be heard on land use

Who is best qualified to look after Scotland’s wealth of fine landscapes and internationally important wildlife sites? It is a question, which currently seems to be being answered by an accelerating rate of land purchase by voluntary conservation organisations.

In 1980, such groups owned around 135,000 acres in Scotland; they now own more than 345,000 acres, a 156 percent increase in little over 15 years. If this continues at the current rate, they will own around 10 percent of Scotland by the year 2010.

These bodies have taken it upon themselves to do the job that government has failed to do. In the process, however, they have unwittingly become caught up in a wider land reform debate. Not only is such expansion a tacit admission of failure on the part of government, it is also an implicit criticism of the system of private property rights which has contributed to the threats to wildlife, scenery and wild land in the first place.

Conservation groups have been wary of tackling this in the past. However, two recent fund raising appeals have been revealing in their frankness. The leaflet prepared by an appeal by the National Trust for Scotland to purchase the 300,000-acre Morenish estate in Perthshire. It claimed that, at a cost of Ł300,000 the Trust will be able to secure the land before it is put on the open market, where it faces the threats of overgrazing and intensive forestry.

Even David Laird, chairman of the Cairngorms Partnership, pointed out recently that, with around half the core area of the Cairngorms owned by conservation organisations, good progress could be anticipated in producing a management plan.

Such claims merely confirm what apologists for land-owning interests have been attempting to deny for years: that the ownership of land confers power-power which, by extension, has been responsible for much of the environmental degradation which has taken place in areas like the Cairngorms, Eigg and Morenish. So conservation groups have ended up exploiting the very power (albeit for worthy ends) which they recognise lie at the root of the problem.

This not only places these bodies in a somewhat contradictory position, it has also generated suspicions and raised tensions; locally about what they intend to do with this power.

An innovative breakthrough in all of this has been provided by the Scottish Wildlife trust (SWT), which has taken the bold and imaginative step of agreeing to share power with both local people and The Highland Council on the board of the company set up to try to buy Eigg. It deserves a lot of credit for this. David Hughes-Hallet, the director of SWT, has said its aim is to get the best possible deal for wildlife conservation on the island. Fair enough - that is the job of the SWT. But he has also said he thinks the best way to do this is with the community and to spread the burden of power and responsibility. The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) did not agree, however, and refused to support a funding application on the basis that local people could not be trusted to look after the public interest.

This is quite a startling claim, given that 88 percent of the entire country is in private hands and that government conservation policy is based upon their voluntary co-operation. Are none of them to be trusted? The official adviser to the NHMF is Scottish Natural Heritage. What advice did it offer in the circumstances? If it supported the application, then on what other advice did NHMF turn it down? Are local people less trustworthy than the other 100 owners who own more than half the Highlands and Islands?

In the past year alone, the NHMF has given Ł1.4m towards the purchase of 10,000 acres in Glen Finglas by the Woodland Trust. The Millennium Commission has given Ł800,000 to the Royal Scottish Forestry Society for the purchase of 3,000 acres at Loch Lomond, and at least one other major conservation group has won approval for NHMF funds for the purchase of land from the Forestry Commission.

The lesson is clear if you are a conservation fund-raiser: it is easier and more profitable to go it alone than to attempt to involve local people in the project. Even where local involvement is promised, this often amounts to no more than some token consultation exercise. The Loch Lomond project has even appointed forestry consultants based in Dumfries and Northumberland. Local people are to be given trees to plant and some paths to walk along.

The Woodland Trust has made much play of involving local people-they were pictured with the obligatory primary schoolchildren planting trees on the day they announced their purchase. But to whom is the Woodland Trust accountable? To no one, least of all the local community. Despite a membership of more than 60,000 and plans to expand their land-holdings, the trust’s members do not even have a vote. The organisation is run by a self-selecting group of directors based in Lincolnshire.

Meanwhile, the Laggan Forestry Initiative, which is an energetic and imaginative community forestry project run by local people, has been refused funding by the Millennium Commission to purchase Forestry Commission land.

Meanwhile, the NHMF is happy to approve such funding for conservation groups.

It appears that if you are a charitable environmental body you are eligible for millions of pounds of lottery money, but if you are a community group you are not. Despite the fact that community-based economic regeneration of a type happening in Assynt, Eigg and Laggan is desperately needed and can be integrated with conservation needs, the lottery distributors appear to think differently.

But the problems of integrating economic and social development with environmental protection will not be solved by a few powerful groups increasing their power with the aid of lottery cash. In the final analysis, the rapid rise of conservation land owning in Scotland is a statement of failure, not success. It represents a first-aid response to the deeper problem of power over land.

To solve this underlying problem, we need to make that power more accountable to the wider public interest through a fundamental review of property rights. We need to distribute that power more widely, and we need to integrate conservation with wider land-use policies.

Conservation should be seen as an engine of economic and cultural regeneration in the remoter parts of the country and not something to be run by outside elites.

Unless one wants the country to be run by a benign ecological dictatorship, then local interests must be given more responsibility, authority and accountability over land use.

A change of government might like to consider the kind of reforms, which would mean a welcome end to this frantic process of land purchase.

Meanwhile, it might start by insisting that all bodies receiving lottery cash are democratically run, that they share power with local interests and that charitable status, which can ossify and stifle development is not a necessary precondition of public support. We can then slowly begin to dispense with first aid.

Source: Scotland on Sunday, 23 February 1997.

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