The Devil and the Detail
It was a more jovial occasion than it might have been, considering the subject matter.
The Cross Party Group on crofting met ten days or so ago at Great Glen House in Inverness, the headquarters of (amongst others) the Crofting Commission and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). The Group usually meets in Holyrood, but occasionally elsewhere too, and hopefully the good attendance in Inverness will encourage further meetings here.
SNH’s Biodiversity Strategy was presented to us by Maria de la Torre, and thereafter we heard an update on crofting law reform from Michael O’Neill, leader of the Scottish Government’s Crofting Bill Team.
I wrote last month about the progress of the process of reform, and before that on the subject of the Cabinet Secretary’s proposed two phase approach to the reform. It was useful now to be able to hear some more detail from the Bill Team. However, it also brought home to me that here it really is a case of the devil and the detail.
As I understood it, the Government intends (at this stage anyway) to progress phase 1 (i.e. reform within this parliamentary term) by dealing with some of the ‘urgent’ issues which have been identified.
These have been divided in to 3 sections:-
Simple Issues
Repeal / amendment of s.40 – annual notification or ‘the census’ as it has become known.
Repeal / amendment of s.49A – the duty to report (which was very badly received and is not, and never has been, enforced by the Commission.
Amendment to incorporate the purchase of a croft from one’s croft landlord as a factor triggering the requirement to register a croft in the Crofting Register.
Issues of some complexity.
Amendment of decrofting provisions
Confer on the Crofting Commission the power to grant owner-occupier status
Confer power on the Crofting Commission to undertake minor boundary changes.
Issues of serious complexity.
Deemed crofts
Ability to have a croft lease considered for securities.
Issues in section A ought to be fairly straightforward to address. They were all introduced by the 2010 Act, and are not cross referenced widely across the various acts. I am less confident about the likelihood of dealing successfully, at such short notice, with the matters in sections B and C, and I am a little concerned that some of the phase 1 amendments are overly ambitious given the timescale.
More accurately, my concern is that the phase 1 amendments will simply add a further layer of complexity to an already messy mass of legislation. The 1993 Act has been amended 3 times already, and is generally acknowledged to be overly and unnecessarily complex. What we do not need at this point is a further raft of hurried reforms.
While the phase 1 proposals are of interest in an immediate sense, phase 2 is a far more engaging and exciting project – and is also a story for another day.
You can find the lists of phase 1 and phase 2 issues here.
