Community right to buy under part 5 of Land Reform act 2016: EIR release

Information requested

Information regarding how many community right to buys there have been under Part 5 of the Land Reform (S) Act 2016 since the Act came into force. I would also like to know how many acres of land in Scotland are currently in community ownership.

Response

Since Part 5 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 came into force in April 2020 there have been zero applications. Should we receive a Right to Buy application under Part 5 of the Act this would be available to view on the Register of Applications by Community Bodies to Buy Land.

https://roacbl.ros.gov.uk/

The register includes both applications submitted under Part 5 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 and Part 3A of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. To date, there has been three Part 3A applications submitted. These are shown on the Register with an ‘AB’ prefix. Should we receive a Part 5 application, this would be shown on the register with a ‘SD’ prefix.

The National Performance Framework includes an indicator for the number of assets in community ownership. The indicator has consistently trended positively: in 2020 (the most recent year for which data is available) the number of assets had increased by 2.5% (from 597 to 612) since 2019. These holdings have a total area of 191,261 hectares (472,616 acres) – 2.5% of the total land area of Scotland.

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The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.