In terms of our progressive-localist agenda, we are obviously interested in questions of land ownership - so often the basis of people feeling they can be in command of their own existence and fate, for the first time.

So it’s welcome news from The Scottish Government’s own statistics department that community ownership is increasing across Scotland:

As at December 2018 there were 593 assets in community ownership, owned by 429 community groups and with a total area of 209,810 hectares, 2.7% of the total land area of Scotland.

In 2018, 37 assets came into community ownership, an increase of 7% from 556 in 2017, comprising an additional 3,223 hectares. There were 27 community groups which took ownership of assets for the first time in 2018.

Community ownership is widespread across Scotland, however there is a large difference between the distribution of assets, the community groups that own them and their corresponding land area. Over a third (38%) of assets and a similar proportion (39%) of community groups are located in two local authorities: Highland (142 assets owned by 111 groups) and Argyll and Bute (84 assets owned by 54 groups).

Considering the land area of community owned assets, Na h-Eileanan Siar and Highland together contain 96.4% (202,174 hectares) of the land area in community ownership in Scotland: 60,042 hectares for Highland; and 142,132 hectares for Na h‑Eileanan Siar.

A few things to say here. 2.7% of the total land area in Scotland being in community ownership doesn’t seem like very much. And it’s notable that most of that land in is Highland and Northern communities - where there’s land to grab, and where (as our post said a year ago) the cultural and historical pressures to reclaim land from "the clearances” of the 19th century are still strong.

Lesley Riddoch, the journalist and veteran land campaigner, writing about what looks like an economic and population boom in the Highlands, warns that it’s still rooted in patterns of land ownership that favour the wealthy and powerful. And it depends how global your comparison of progress is:

The 1850s saw the Highlands on its collective knees after seventy years of clearance and widespread starvation as a result of the potato famine. Is this a suitable benchmark for the carrying capacity of the scenic, energy-rich, culturally-vibrant region today?

We should be comparing and contrasting the Highlands and Islands not with the region’s own broken past but with the thriving present of its neighbours - like Tromso, the capital of Arctic Norway.

Situated on an island amidst barren fjords, it lies more than a thousand miles north of Inverness. Yet the population of this truly remote city matches the Highland capital with 77,000 folk. Arctic Bodø has 30.000 residents, Alta 20,000 and sub-Arctic Trondheim a whopping 196,000 residents.

The relatively high population base of remote Northern Norway has been achieved not by the actions of specific quangos, but by the fact Norway escaped feudalism, therefore has the largest and most diverse number of individual landowners in Europe and land prices that are a fraction of those demanded for the tiny parcels available in Highland Scotland. Folk in Northern Norway were also aided by the abolition of nobility in 1821, the nationalisation of rivers for hydro power straight after independence and a long tradition of ultra-local democratic control which prompted investment in light industry.

Let’s be clear. Scotland’s community buyouts have boosted highland and island populations and provided jobs with secure, affordable and properly insulated homes in remote areas where private owners miserably failed.

The problem is that rural Scotland cannot be fixed, acre by acre, or buyout by buyout. Community control delivers speedy relief for the communities able to jump hurdles and take over control, but places a strain on volunteers and leaves Scotland’s highly dysfunctional systems of land ownership and distant democratic control unchanged and intact.

So, let’s imagine what the Highlands might look like if Holyrood and Westminster politicians were as bold as community activists, delivering the modern equivalent of the Crofting Acts, or the high rates of taxation that prompted one-fifth of Scottish land to be sold in the 1920s or Tom Johnston’s hydro-electric revolution in the 1940s.

The Highlands urgently needs release from outdated feudal structures to grow sustainably. Governments not quangos can deliver.

More here. (And a thoughtful Editorial from the Herald). We wouldn’t wait too long on governments or quangos to change the regulatory structure… however, we do recall this paragraph from the Scottish land ownership blog above:

The UKGov's recent Civil Society Strategy document has a section on "empowerment and investment for local communities". It talks positively about the possibility of "ensuring community-led enterprises which take over public assets or services are able to secure the funding they need. It is recognised that these initiatives must acquire a genuine asset, not simply a liability, and that they often need non-repayable finance in the form of equity or grants to get going." As ever, with Westminster, we'll see.

Communities owning land is on the increase in Scotland - but it's Norway we should all be looking towards