Land reform campaigners have gathered outside the Scottish parliament to protest against the threatened eviction of a tenant farmer, in a case that has galvanised activists and focused public attention on a legislative mire that affects farming families across the country.
To comply with a Scottish land court ruling last year, Andrew Stoddart and his family must quit Coulston Mains farm, East Lothian, by the end of the month. Despite tending the land for 22 years and investing more than £500,000 in improvements, Stoddart will be evicted with minimal compensation along with his wife, three children and two staff, one of whom has a family of four.
Seven other tenant farmers currently share the same fate, in the latest round of a tortuous legal battle dating back to 2003 and prompted initially by land-owner greed and government incompetence. They are victims of “legal error, lawyers and an inflexible government process” that has become “Scotland’s shame”, said Angus McCall, director of the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association.
Michelle Wood, a family friend of the Stoddarts who was waiting outside Holyrood to deliver a petition that had gathered nearly 20,000 signatures in the space of a week, said of the eviction: “This might be legal but it is morally repugnant.”
She said: “This is not only a personal story, but it has touched a nerve throughout Scotland. I can’t begin to tell you what this support has meant to him. He has been feeling so alone in the face of this.”
A similar sense of desperation is thought to have affected Alistair Riddell, a neighbour and close friend of Stoddart who killed himself in 2013 after losing an extended legal battle against the millionaire landowner Alastair Salvesen.
It is understood that Riddell had completed his final harvest as tenant on the land farmed by his family for more than a century, and that Salvesen’s machinery had just arrived to establish the next season’s crop, when Riddell shot himself.
Experts believe that the simplest solution is to create a right to buy for tenant farmers, akin to that which resolved Ireland’s longstanding land problems more than a century ago. Indeed, this was recommended by the Land Reform Review Group, set up by the Scottish government, in 2014.
But Lesley Riddoch, of the campaign group of Our Land, claimed that the Scottish government dropped this proposal from its current land reform bill because it feared further legal challenge.
In 2003 the then Liberal Democrat-Labour administration tried to strengthen tenant farmers’ rights. The Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act allowed limited partnership tenancies, which benefited landowners, to be upgraded to secure tenancies.
Riddoch said: “Landowners took evasive action the night before legislation was due to be introduced, in what many farmers remember as ‘the night of the long knives’, when more than 300 eviction notices were issued by factors battling through snowdrifts to deliver them before midnight.”
A decade later, the Salvesen v Riddell case was resolved in the UK supreme court, the legislation was held to have breached landlords’ human rights and the retrospective protection was removed. Riddell’s eviction followed.
Our Land wants the Scottish government to introduce a right to buy for tenant farmers in the current bill or to include it in the SNP’s manifesto for next May’s Holyrood elections. “We also want the Scottish government to show the same courage that they did with minimum alcohol pricing when they took on the challenge from the alcohol industry all the way to the European court,” they said.
At last month’s conference, the SNP leadership suffered its only defeat over land reform, when grassroots members took on the party hierarchy and held them to their much-vaunted commitment to significant legislative change. Delegates called for measures to prevent tax avoidance, a cap on land ownership and security of tenure for tenant famers.
Jim Hunter, the land reform historian whose latest book examines the impact of the Sutherland clearances of the early 1800s, said this could be the most significant single change to land ownership in Scotland for centuries.
“Land reform across Europe has invariably consisted of just that transfer from owners to occupiers, sometimes by revolutionary means and sometimes constitutionally, but this has never been seen on the British mainland,” he said.
“When people talk about concentration of ownership, giving tenant farmers the right to buy would have a great effect. The Scottish government has all the powers it needs introduce a right to buy. The present bill is a step forward but could go much further.”
