The missed opportunity on crofting reform

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For some, the Shucksmith inquiry was the last, best hope for the defence of crofting as a system of regulated tenure, capable of keeping the money market at bay and allowing the young to remain in their home communities.

Others, for much the same reason, hated it. The lawyers and estate agents had no wish to see obstructions placed in the way of a burgeoning market in croft tenancies, the more scenic the better. And some crofters, nominal or otherwise, agreed with them.

This was the minefield into which the Committee of Inquiry on Crofting, chaired by Professor Mark Shucksmith stepped when it was appointed in September 2006 by the Labour-LibDem administration at Holyrood.

The membership was broadly based, both politically and professionally. It included the historian, James Hunter; Agnes Rennie and Norman A. Macdonald from Lewis, as well as others with knowledge of crofting from varying perpectives. During 2007, they conducted a very extensive programme of consultation around the Crofting Counties, which strongly influenced their report.

When it appeared in May 2008, the report was clearly written, radical in its conclusions and unanimous, with three key themes. The first was to tie croft tenancies to the “burden” of residence (with room for exemptions) and use of the land. The second was to decentralise regulation, in order to deploy local knowledge, with the Crofters Commission largely replaced by Local Crofting Boards under a federal structure.

The third priority, and key to addressing depopulation issues, involved housing. As well as the “residence” issue, the committee recommended extension of the Crofter Housing Grant and Loan scheme and a change in legislation to make it easier to borrow from banks. (The committee membership included a senior banker, Professor Donald Macrae).

In retrospect, the Shucksmith Report still reads like a blueprint for what needed to be done to protect crofting communities from most of what has happened since, particularly in areas where land and property values have soared far beyond local reach. The days of croft tenancies being sold for £200,000 to people with no crofting interest or intent still lay in the future.

At first, the reception was very positive, notwithstanding the fact that before its recommendations were published, the political landscape had changed and the SNP were in charge at Holyrood. Whatever might have happened otherwise in the hands of those who had established the committee, that proved to be the death-knell for the radical proposals which emerged.

Initially, there was no indication of this. In May 2008, an event was arranged at An Lanntair in Stornoway for the committee to hand over its report to the Minister for the Environment, one Michael Russell MSP. He enthused: “The committee was asked to consult widely and to report back to Government with radical ideas on shaping the future of crofting. This is precisely what they have done and I congratulate them for it”.

Three days later, the Shucksmith Report was debated at Holyrood. MSPs from all parties queued to praise its vision and give general approval to its principal recommendations. Mr Russell went into overdrive. He quoted the Scottish Crofting Foundation which had welcomed the report as “the authentic voice of Scottish crofters” and added: “That is true. The report is a testament to the consultation that was undertaken when the report was being produced”.

The Minister then declared: “In future, a history of crofting will regard the work of the Napier Commission, the Taylor Commission and the Shucksmith Committee as three pillars in the building of the crofting system”.

There was nothing to suggest that, behind the scenes, civil servants in the Scottish Government were already engaged in ensuring that the Shucksmith Committee “pillar” would crumble before it was built, rather than support a reinvigorated crofting system.

Mark Shucksmith believes that Mr Russell was personally supportive of the report’s recommendations and recalls that he called together representatives of various departments to discuss how they could be implemented. At the same time however, however, the civil servants were hard at work on rubbishing each key aspect of the Shucksmith report.

The private advice that went from civil servants to Ministers in September 2008 and has now been published paid lip-service to the report’s objectives while putting the knife into the basic premise on which it was founded – that crofting tenure is a system worth defending.

For example, it stated: “There has been considerable and sometimes heated debate in the crofting counties on the Shucksmith proposals. Whilst there is support for the vision espoused by Shucksmith, some individual crofters are concerned about devolving regulatory decisions to local level and about the restriction of their ability to maximise development gain from selling the land they rent or own for housing in the more desirable parts of the Highlands and Islands”.

Apart from anything else, this crucial passage ignored (or was ignorant of) the fact that all crofters – including those who are described as ‘owners” – are tenants in terms of crofting status and the duties this entails. Allowing them to “maximise development gain” was the antithesis of crofting principles.

The civil service advice continued: “There is a range of views as to whether sustainable growth in crofting areas is better achieved by freeing up the market in croft land and housing or by intervening in the market to ensure that assets are exploited principally for community rather than personal gain”.

It noted with disapproval that: “After extensive consultation with crofters over a period of a year, Shucksmith has come out firmly in favour of community benefit and reinforced regulation. The proposed Government response accepts the broad thrust of Shuckmith’s vision, and therefore favours more effective and appropriate regulation. At the same time it rejects the more draconian proposals for local regulators to intervene in crofters’ pursuit of their own businesses”.

In another key passage, the civil servants advised: “The proposed (Government) response rules out an occupancy burden for housing on crofts. This will allow the crofter to control the use to which his assets are put for as long as they are in crofting tenure, including for holiday letting. We see no reason for more intrusive regulation, which would militate against economic growth based on tourism”.

Having driven a coach and horses through the “free market versus regulated tenure” dividing line, the civil servants turned their attention to the second big Shucksmith Committee theme – the governance of crofting. If regulation was to work effectively, they had concluded, it should be implemented at a reasonably local level rather than by a centralised bureaucracy in Inverness.

The Shucksmith recommendations were backed up by views expressed by crofters in the consultation process with 80 per cent wanting regulatory decisions to be taken at either community or local level while the Crofters Commission was seen as “out of touch with crofters and lacking in credibility”. The recommendation to replace the Commission with a Federation of between seven and ten Local Crofting Boards was therefore in line with the evidence gathered.

In retrospect, it was arguably a target for those who were opposed to the whole Shucksmith package to aim at. The civil servants certainly saw it that way. Their advice to Ministers was to reject “abolition” of the Commission while promising that it would be “radically reformed to make it more accountable and effective”. They added darkly: “It is important to ensure that power is not devolved down to a very local level in order to avoid creating conflicts within communities”.

While this undoubtedly tapped into a branch of crofting opinion, it was particularly dismissive of the ability of community-owned crofting estates to deal with local crofting issues. They might be grown-up enough to own the land but a bureaucracy in Inverness – and civil servants in Edinburgh – still had to protect them from the risk of “creating conflicts” by taking tough local decisions in defence of crofting regulation.

Instead, what eventually emerged was an even more centralised bureaucracy in Inverness. There would, for some mysterious reason, be a name change from Crofters Commission to Crofting Commission. Otherwise, it was business as usual. Far from becoming “more accountable and effective”, the Commission has grown even more “lacking in credibility” with little presence in crofting communities and exercising minimal regulatory control over the market.

Shucksmith’s third big theme was that “access to affordable housing is essential for population retention in crofting communities”. The committee’s report put forward a range of proposals, most of which fell foul of the civil servants’ insistence that imposing “burdens” on the market’s ability to operate freely would inhibit the right of individuals to maximise the benefits from “their assets”.

For example, the idea of holiday homes being a growing problem in crofting communities was given particularly short shrift with the remarkable assertion that “the number buying second homes is not sufficient to have a sizeable effect on the market”.

There were strong and innovative recommendations on ways to revive the historic success of the Crofter Housing Grant and Loan Scheme which had already been pared back with the loan element removed. The committee wanted this restored. The civil servants told Ministers to rule out restoration of the “loan” element because that was a matter for the banks and only undertake to “review” the working of the scheme. In practice, it has been systematically diluted ever since.

Nobody doubts that the Shucksmith Report contained elements which would have proved difficult for any Government to legislate on without resistance. Equally, however, nobody can doubt that crofting and crofting communities would be in a much healthier condition today if the principles of the report had been accepted and acted upon, rather than retreated from at the first whiff of grapeshot. That would have required political leadership which simply did not exist.

Edinburgh civil servants have never had any love of crofting and its complexities. With a change in Government, leaving the Shucksmith Report without its original political parentage, they took the opportunity to neuter its central principle – that enhanced regulation should prevail over market forces. Everything which has happened since flows from the continuous erosion of that principle.

With another Crofting Bill promised but still distant, it seems unlikely that the civil servants will have any more enthusiasm for defending the system from market forces than they did in 2008 and even less likely that there will be any political leadership to challenge them.

Yet, as Mark Shucksmith said this week: “Our Committee in 2008 offered a vision of a bright future for crofting, given the right support, and we proposed a set of measures to help provide that.

"There was cross-party support for that vision but not for all of our recommendations, so some of the more controversial proposals were never implemented despite strong evidence to support them. The result is that some core problems endure – the market in crofts, the shortage of affordable housing, the lack of opportunities for new entrants”.

It could all have been very different if Shucksmith had indeed become the third pillar in crofting history.

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