Findings from Community Land Scotland's Community Ownership Hub

A forthcoming review of progress with re-use of Vacant and Derelict Land has found steady progress in land re-use.  Published by the Scottish Land Commission and based on research by Ryden, the review also highlights positive initiatives to support land re-use and a supportive policy environment.

There are, however, challenges.  Our research highlighted four areas that requiring further focus.  One was support for community ownership and re-use of vacant sites.  While the Scottish Land Commission and the Development Trust Association ran a successful programme to support communities to repurpose land and buildings, the approach has not been mainstreamed.

In this blog, Linsay Chalmers of Community Land Scotland analyses the key learning from a project supporting urban communities interested in land re-use and makes some bold proposals to support urban communities to bring empty buildings and unused sites back into productive use. - David Stewart, Policy & Practice Lead

Community Land Scotland, the representative body for community landowners, recently reported on the findings from its pilot project, which was set up in 2021 to create an evidence base around urban community ownership. The Community Ownership Hub: Glasgow and Clyde Valley pilot, which concluded earlier this year, found there was a huge level of suppressed demand for community buyout support, particularly in resource-deprived urban areas. It also highlighted the need for urban issues to be reintegrated into Scotland’s land reform agenda, rather than further divided, as the current Land Reform Bill threatens to do.  

Scotland is unique in its highly democratic community landownership model, which requires organisations to be geographically based and have open membership to anyone living in that community. It’s also the only country to have such a wide range of assets in community ownership – from forests to harbours and business parks to renewables.

The success of those early buyouts such as Eigg and Gigha led to the Scottish Parliament introducing pioneering Community Rights to Buy for rural communities in 2003. Thirteen years later, the legislation and the Scottish Land Fund were extended to towns and cities. The expansion to urban areas wasn’t without its bumps in the road though.

Early urban buyouts were affected by low levels of knowledge about land issues in towns and cities and a range of policy and practical obstacles. As an organisation, Community Land Scotland works by taking the real, lived experience of our members and using it to build an evidence base so that we influence changes in policy and legislation. We felt that there was a need for a project that would work intensively with a small number of urban communities in one region and build up a stronger evidence base to inform policy and practice. Thanks to funding from the Scottish Government, the William Grant Foundation and the Tudor Trust, we were able to set up the Community Ownership Hub: Glasgow and Clyde Valley in 2021.

During the lifetime of the pilot, our Hub team worked with 113 communities. The team had two staff, Dr Carey Doyle who led on strategic work and research and Heather Yearwood, who provided hands on support to community groups.  

What we found was a huge amount of latent demand, particularly from resource deprived communities. Our estimate that we’d work with ten communities per year on average was quickly blown out of the water. Of the 113 communities we worked with, over 60% were from the two most deprived deciles using the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). Prior to the pilot, we already had some anecdotal evidence that there was a high drop off rate for deprived communities seeking to buy land and buildings and this project strongly reinforced that. To be successful in their buyout journey, communities are expected to interpret and communicate highly complex information, which requires considerable resources and technical skills which are not needed post buyout. By building confidence, filling in some skill gaps and providing the relatively small amounts of money for community engagement, which can be difficult to raise in deprived areas, the Hub was able to support some fantastic communities along the road to ownership. Communities suffering from resource deprivation in the Central Belt face a further challenge in that there is no enterprise body with a specific community remit, as there is in the Highlands and Islands and South of Scotland. We recommend that a new function is created for Scottish Enterprise - supporting deprived urban communities with capacity building and skills, building on Scottish Enterprise’s community wealth building work.

The research repeatedly found that the challenges faced by communities- including fragmented site ownership, difficulty accessing ownership data or high numbers of small vacant and derelict (VDL) sites that were not on the VDL register – showed the need for urban land reform. For example, of the sites we have researched in detail, 30% of these have been stalled by complex or fragmented ownership patterns (defined as more than two owners, or potentially ownerless). Sites are frequently on the older Sasine Register rather than the modern Land Register. If we are to tackle these issues, we need to see urban land reform integrated into the Land Reform Bill that is working its way through Parliament.

The Hub has fourteen recommendations that set out how land reform and community ownership could work better in urban areas. Community Land Scotland will continue to advocate for land reform that benefits those that most need it, from fragile rural communities to deprived urban areas and we hope that we will get broad support to help urban communities tackle the challenges set out in the report.

Read more about the findings from the Community Ownership Hub.

About the author:

Linsay Chalmers, Development Manager, Community Land Scotland

As Development Manager, Linsay’s role is to promote and encourage the take up of community land ownership across Scotland and support peer-to-peer learning and networking among community landowners. Linsay previously worked for Edinburgh Social Enterprise Network where she developed the Buy the Good Stuff social enterprise brand and ran Scotland’s first social enterprise festival. Prior to that, Linsay spent nine years working for the Community Resources Network Scotland supporting community reuse organisations across Scotland.