Scotland’s rural areas are facing an unprecedented depopulation crisis. Scottish Land and Estates’ (SLE) report on the issues and possible solutions for the depopulation crisis are on one level very welcome.(1) They have identified some of the drivers behind how rural communities are being hollowed out and the need to act decisively and quickly to reverse depopulation. Yet the SLE report does not mention landownership once. 

For the main organisation representing private landowners to not engage with the role of private ownership in fostering and exacerbating depopulation is a glaring omission. Private landowners own 83% of rural Scotland.(2) They have a huge role to play in both providing land for housing and building housing themselves.  

SLE’s own research shows that collectively rural estates are only providing homes for 12,950 people, including agricultural tenants.(3) Surely private landowners who own so much of our country should be providing housing, or land for housing, for a greater proportion of our rural communities? 

Scotland’s rural depopulation is driven by a lack of available and affordable homes and is worsened by lack of critical services, and issues around connectivity and secure high-quality employment. This issue must be at the heart of the Programme for Government in the next Parliament, with a clear plan for how intersecting policies around housing, land reform, rural development, education, health and other services, and community wealth building can repopulate our more fragile rural areas. 

Private landownership in Scotland has been and continues to be overwhelmingly focused on the development of private profit and private interests not the wider vitality of the local community. This has only increased with the rise of absentee investor ownership and green lairds. If we fail to look structurally at the landownership drivers of the rural depopulation crisis, we will not meaningfully tackle the problem.