Community Rights to Buy: consultation analysis

2: Consultation overview

2.1 Introduction

This report presents an analysis of the consultation on community rights to buy that took place between July and October 2025. Community right to buy was first introduced in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and has been extended several times since then.

Community rights to buy (CRtB) were first introduced in 2003, with further rights added over the years, and have made a significant contribution to the Scottish Government’s aims of increasing community ownership. The national performance indicator for community ownership shows a steady increase since then, from 107 in 2003 to 853 in 2024. Use of the compulsory purchase rights to buy has, however, been limited. In response to this, and to stakeholder feedback, the Scottish Government announced a review of all community rights to buy in the 2024–25 Programme for Government, with the aim of strengthening and simplifying these rights and their impact in support of community ownership.

2.2 The consultation process

The formal consultation between July and October 2025 was preceded by informal consultations with key stakeholders and community groups between July 2024 and May 2025. This helped inform the structure of the formal consultation.

The consultation itself took the form of 19 questions on citizen space, with one question being broken down into 3 parts for a total of 21 separate questions. The questions covered eight separate topics and there was one open question for comments on anything not covered by the other questions.

The Scottish Government’s Community Land Team oversaw the consultation and contributed to several stakeholder-led consultation events. The Community Land Team also held two open events online for community groups and worked with the Scottish Islands Federation to hold an online event specifically aimed at community groups on the islands.

2.3 Consultation format and structure

Most of the consultation consisted of questions with “yes” or “no” voting options or, in one case (Q2), options were set out in terms specific to that particular question. One question (Q6) invited comments in place of voting options, and one question (Q19) was a free text box for any issues not covered elsewhere in the consultation.

There were no mandatory questions and respondents were also offered the additional voting option of “unsure” for most questions that had voting options (the exception was again Q2 where the additional option was “other”). All the questions had a free text box for respondents to expand on or explain their response if they so wished.

‘Standard’ responses were submitted by respondents either:

• inputting their responses directly into Citizen Space; or
• manually completing the offline response form and returning this to the Scottish Government for manual input into Citizen Space

A small number of ‘non-standard’ responses were submitted by respondents using their own format rather than using Citizen Space or the offline response form. These have been included in this analysis of responses but because the format of the response did not follow the consultation format either in whole or in part, they do not form part of the voting summaries for relevant questions.

2.4 Questions and voting results

As no questions were mandatory, respondents in many cases chose not to answer certain questions or not to provide any additional comments in the free text boxes. The percentage figures in the tables therefore reflect the numbers of standard responses where the respondent chose an option. All comments have been included in the analysis even if no voting option was chosen.

Note that in the tables in part 3 of this analysis, the percentage figures may not always equal 100 due to rounding.

Throughout the analysis in part 3 selected respondent quotes have been included in the sections marked ‘Themes’, along with the type of respondent, including organisation names where permission to disclose that has been given. For the sake of brevity, in some cases the respondent’s quote is a partial one taken from a longer version of their comment but other than that the wording remains that of the respondent.

2.5 Number of responses

Of the 62 valid responses, 37 (60%) were from organisations and 25 (40%) were from individuals. Where permission was given to publish responses, they have been published on citizen space at: https://consult.gov.scot/agriculture-and-rural-economy/community-right-to-buy-review/consultation/published_select_respondent

2.6 Next steps

This analysis aims to set out the results and themes of the consultation and will contribute to the Scottish Government’s review of community rights to buy. For the avoidance of doubt, all responses will continue to contribute to that, whether or not they are quoted in this analysis.