Land reform campaigners were alarmed by the increased use of a legal loophole that allowed landowners to hide the price paid for highland estates from the public register.
Andy Whitman, a land reform analyst, said the loophole did not reveal prices paid in Highland property transactions worth more than £300m in the register.
Discovery Land Company, an Arizona-based luxury resort operator Highland resort is being built In Taymouth, Perthshire, the mechanism was used when £21.4m was paid in 2022 for the adjacent Glenlyon estate, popular for hill walks and deer hunting.
Wightman’s latest sales survey reports that Oxygen Conservation, a “capitalist” rewilding company Aiming to be the UK’s largest private landownerused the mechanism to withhold the fact that it had paid £42.75m for two of its Scottish estates from the Public Land Register.
To the surprise of land reformers, one of the UK’s best-known wildland charities, the John Muir Trust (JMT), used this strategy, paying £1.73m for a holiday chalet park and £75,000 for 166 hectares of adjoining land at Kylesku, near Assynt in the North-West. Scotland.
The organizations involved insisted the strategy was legal, but Wightman, the Scottish Land Commission and Community Land Scotland urged ministers to tighten the law, arguing it would undermine efforts to make the land market more transparent.
The commission, set up by Scottish ministers to reform the country’s highly centralized land market, said it “does not demonstrate good practice in responsible ownership” because it obscures prices, yet is widely used.
“Transparency in land market data – including accurate sales values - is vital to provide a strong evidence base to inform good policy and effective legislation,” the commission said.
“Land is a shared natural asset,” said Josh Doble of Community Land Scotland. “It is unacceptable for the largest land grabbers to obfuscate the details of the transactions when any homeowner is required to make that information public for comparatively minor property transactions.”
The loophole involves buyers choosing not to put the price paid for the land in the box marked “financial consideration” on the registration form given to Registers of Scotland, the agency that records property transactions.
Instead they inserted the legal term “execution of missives” in the box marked “non-monetary consideration”. This means that the purchase price does not appear in the title deeds of the property and therefore does not appear in the Public Land Register.
People should write to Registers Scotland to ask specifically for the application form used to find out the price paid, register the sale and pay the £25 plus VAT fee.
Whitman, who used crowdfunding to pay for the application forms used in his report, said he was writing to Scottish ministers to change the law to make it compulsory to put a sale price on title deeds.
He said landlords and agents were using the loophole to “consciously” hide the price paid. “Scottish ministers should amend the Act to make it clear that where a price is paid, that price is disclosed on the title sheet,” he said.
The Scottish Government said it was considering options to change the rules. A spokesman said Jennifer Henderson, Keeper of Scotland’s Registers, had no authority to instruct anyone to put a price on title deeds at this time.
“The Scottish Government is currently working with Keeper to identify the potential scope for improving transparency in these cases,” they said.
Oxygen protection It said it supports full transparency, but confidentiality on sale prices is often requested by land sellers. “Oxygen Conservation is fully committed to the existing legal framework and does not believe it is appropriate to classify the statutory registration practices as covert,” it said.
JMT said it believes this approach is standard practice, but will now consider whether sales prices can be made publicly available at the Land Register. “The John Muir Trust is committed to transparency and openness in all areas of its operations and governance,” it said.
The Discovery Land Company did not respond to requests for comment. Par Equity, which paid £35.3m for Glen Die Grouse Moor in 2021, did not put it in the “monetary consideration” box: “Sometimes the purchase or sale price is subject to a confidentiality agreement at the behest of the seller.”
