'Vaguely expressed' plans for public Scottish land register will need further work, says expert

The Scottish Government intends to include the power to create the new register in the Land Reform Bill, which is currently before the Scottish parliament. Announcing the policy, Scotland's land reform minister Aileen McLeod acknowledged that "complex legal issues" would have to be resolved in order to get it up and running.

Property law expert Alan Cook of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the proposal as currently drafted seemed to be "little more than an expression of political intent" which had the potential to distract from much-needed work to complete the Land Register, which records all changes in ownership of land.

"Previous Scottish Government proposals to address their policy desire for greater transparency around who actually owns Scotland's land have been dropped as being unworkable, and I suspect they will have similar difficulties turning this vaguely-expressed proposal into reality," he said.

"By the Scottish Government's own admission there are complex issues to resolve before this can be taken forward, such as data protection and determining what information the new register will contain and how this information will be obtained and kept up to date. The current priority is to have all land in Scotland registered on the Land Register by 2025: this is a significant challenge for the Registers of Scotland, and the Scottish Government needs to take care that resources and attention are not diverted from achieving that goal," he said.

The Land Reform Bill was drafted to take forward some of the recommendations of the Land Reform Review Group, which was set up by the Scottish Government in 2012 to consider ways to strengthen the relationship between communities and land ownership. If passed in its current form, the Bill would give communities the right to buy land in order to "further sustainable development", allow communities and individuals to access better information about the ownership of land through the Land Register and end rates exemptions for shooting and deerstalking estates, among other changes.

One of the group's more controversial proposals would have prevented companies, trusts and partnerships from owning land in Scotland unless they were registered within the EU. It had also been suggested that it would be in the public interest to place limits on the amount of land that could be held by any one owner. These proposals were not included in the draft legislation.

Aileen McLeod said that greater transparency over who controls land in Scotland could "benefit our country, particularly communities who wish to have more of a say over how land in their area is used and managed".

"More work is required on complex legal issues, such as what information should be disclosed and how to protect the privacy of individuals," she said. "So I will put in place the necessary powers to allow further work to be done and ensure that this Bill delivers a framework that gives, subject to parliamentary scrutiny, detailed information about who controls land in Scotland."

The proposed legislative amendment would give the Scottish Government the power to create a new register by means of regulations.