Training | 2010.02.20
Yours for £1.4m – and you won't pay a penny
The people of Bute have bought a chunk of their island to boost prosperity. What\'s not to like?
The land question – who deserves to own it? – has always been asked more noisily in Scotland than England. Most of its resonance comes from the Highlands and Western Isles, where landlords often favoured sheep over people and wealthy Victorians bought up millions of acres – sometimes entire islands – to convert into summer retreats, where they would turn up every August with a rod and a gun. The history is well-known, as are the consequences: over the past 20 years, helped latterly by new legislation, people who live in such places have begun to "buy back" the land from its often negligent and absentee owners in a process known as the community buyout. In this way, so the thinking goes, local populations will take their destinies in their own hands and manage their own growth and prosperity.
There have been some notable successes. Long-term decline has been reversed on the islands of Gigha and Eigg; since Gigha was bought from its private landlord in 2002 the population has increased from 98 to 160 and the primary school now has 20 children rather than six. These examples have encouraged other schemes. Last month, a community trust composed of crofters in western Harris bought 16,000 acres of the Outer Hebrides for £70,000. This month, a sufficient number of people on Bute voted to buy 1,700 acres at the northern end of their island (pictured) for a price estimated at £1.4m.
Bute sets an interesting precedent. If its population can decide by referendum to buy a chunk of land to benefit local prosperity, then the same thing can happen anywhere in Scotland. The terms "island" and "islanders", with their suggestions of Celtic remoteness, obscure the reality of a place that can be reached from Glasgow in 90 minutes by frequent train and ferry, whose dairy farms, seaside villas, chip shops, pubs and hotels testify to its historic position in the Lowland economy. It had no absentee landlord – rather, in generations of Marquises of Bute, one who was sometimes regarded as too present. Come an Edwardian summer, the impoverished crofters of Hebridean islands may have had to endure the condescension of the proprietor up in his tweeds from London; in Bute, they were riding cheerily on electric trams to beaches and theatres and making money as steamer captains, ploughmen and boarding-house keepers.
Apart, that is, from the north of the island, the barest and most rugged part, where then as now very little human activity happened at all. Until the 1860s it had a small settlement – Balnakailly, really little more than a farm – but when that was abandoned the ancient oak forest and the bracken were disturbed only seasonally, first by bark strippers (when oak bark was used to tan hides), then in the first world war by gatherers of sphagnum moss (used to pack flesh wounds), and then, almost an irony, by girl guides collecting the hair moss that decorated the poppy wreaths made in Lady Haig\'s factory. For some time early in the last century a nine-hole golf course occupied the stretch nearest the shore – golfers from the country house across the narrows in Argyll reached it by boat. Otherwise, nobody. North Bute was so empty that planners in the second world war judged it to be a fine site to plant rows of street lights, to decoy German bombers from the naval bases elsewhere on the Clyde.
In more recent times Richard (Lord) Attenborough has been the person who lives closest to this wilderness, in a farmhouse he keeps as a summer home. He also owns the new forest of sitka spruces that was planted higher up from the oaks on the shore and now spreads across the hills and glen to the south. In August he decided to sell all 1,700 acres. Someone noticed the sale advertised in a country magazine and mentioned it to another holiday-home owner on Bute, John McGhee, a London QC who last year helped a few Bute residents fight off plans to establish a fish farm. Aware of the opportunities made available by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003, McGhee wondered if the Scottish government might be sympathetic to a community buyout.
A committee was set up – two boarding-house owners, a physiotherapist, and the director of the local social housing partnership, Peter McDonald, with McGhee in the chair. The first thing they had to prove was local support: in eight days they collected 1,713 signatures from a total Bute population of around 7,000. Then they set up the Bute Community Land Company, which formally registered an interest so that the Scottish government would stay Attenborough\'s sale for six months. In that time, a feasibility study and business plan needed to be written and a ballot organised; the Land Reform Act requires that more than half the electorate votes, and more than half of that half affirmatively, before a submission can go forward. Last week 2,739 people voted – a 52.5% turnout – and 93% of them said Yes.
A critic, of whom there are some on Bute, might point out that voting was helped by the £250 prize draw mentioned on the ballot paper. He might also point out that voting could be seen as a frivolous act. Right from the beginning, the Bute Community Land Company has stressed that nobody on Bute will have to pay a penny towards the purchase of the forest or the subsequent cost of managing it. As in all previous community buyouts, the £1.4m price will come in the form of grants and loans from half-a-dozen Scottish bodies funded by tax and the National Lottery. (So what\'s not to like?) The critic will wonder at this point about the wisdom of spending public money on private forests when Scottish governments, both local and national, are facing stiff reductions in their budgets over the next five years.
Peter McDonald of the land company puts the counter argument well, even though it depends to some extent on that great modern oxymoron "eco-tourism", suggesting a four-wheel drive hurrying north up the motorway with three mountain bikes bolted to the back. The forest will be opened up. There will be tracks and trails, a few wooden lodges with tiny carbon footprints, perhaps some electricity generation from the streams, a visitor centre, jobs created in timber management and tourism. Bute, which has never recovered from the annual flight of Glaswegians to the sun, needs visitors and, equally important, the sense of purpose manifested by McDonald and his colleagues that doesn\'t always prevail in an island that has grown accustomed to decline.
The idea, however, that Bute has bought itself, that the people via the state have bought they land they stand on, is misleading. This isn\'t Gigha. The Marquis of Bute will continue to own a great deal of his title – without, it has to be said, much complaint. What has been acquired is a beautiful, empty corner that with careful management could turn into an asset, though to those of us who walk there perhaps less of an asset the less empty it becomes.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/feb/20/islanders-buy-bute
