Former MSP and land rights campaigner, Andy Wightman has expressed his disappointment at Scottish Government's consultation for a new Land Reform Bill, published on July 4, saying, “that the opportunity has been missed to enact more fundamental change”.

“The proposals,” he wrote in his blog, “appear to be designed merely to introduce more accountability and transparency to the land market rather than enact structural reform.”

In a bid to inspire the changes he believes is needed he plans to publish his own Land for the People Bill, and, in an interview for the Herald Magazine, he described some of the things he would like to see change – many of which will be in his bill.

READ FULL MAGAZINE INTERVIEW HERE: Andy Wightman's journey out of Holyrood back to the land

Wightman said, “Scotland doesn’t have a comprehensive, well thought-through land policy that's deciding what we want to do with our land, how it should be owned and used. What we should be trying to do is democratise land. It’s about making sure that more people have got more control over how land is owned and used. That’s a big topic. It’s about tenure, it’s about tax, it’s about ownership, it’s about regulation, it’s about environmental policy, it’s about housing. The government should have a defining mission about what it is they are trying to do. And everything else should slot into it.”

“Land reform is a bit like climate – climate policy has to be cross-cutting, and to a large extent government is failing on climate policy and it’s hard, but I think it has done a reasonably good job of making it cross-cutting. People are now thinking about it with regard to their own sectors. But that hasn’t happened with land”

Wightman's big ideas:

1.Bring all land, including agricultural land into the tax system. “Agricultural land was left out in the 19th century. Land worth millions is not in the rating system. You can have a farmer on the edge of Newton Stewart in Galloway with a multi-million pound enterprise paying no rates and you can have the fishmonger and butcher paying £20000 a year in the town.”

2. Make the atmosphere into a commons: “If you own land in Scotland you own it, in theory, from the centre of the earth to the heavens above. If you own a square hectare of land you own a pyramid – now it doesn’t actually go all the way to the centre of the earth or the heavens above, for example when civil aviation started they had to pass laws to say that a civil aviation plain didn’t have to get the permission of every landowner to fly from London to Edinburgh, so they nationalised the air space. One of the aspects of the bill is to change the atmosphere into a Commons. The air itself will be a commons. The landowner will own up to the limit of your development rights, the limit of the tallest tree or tallest building. But beyond that is common. And that means we can regulate the carbon market. Because people will either have to pay or be paid to take carbon from it. People will pay to pollute it. So that’s one aspect of the bill.”

3. Bring the foreshore into council ownership and transfer the seabed to Scottish Ministers. He says, “According to a 2003 report by the Scottish Law Commission, the Crown’s ownership of the foreshore is merely the most predominant modern theory – it's a theory. So what I want to do is amend their bill and say the foreshore belongs to the council and I also want to take the crown’s ownership for the seabed and transfer that to Scottish ministers.”

4. Reject the carbon offset market. “The government has got a target to increase by 50 percent the so-called woodland carbon market by 2025 but it hasn’t said why it wants to do that. There’s no logical reason why Scotland should be trying to boost the market for offsetting. We should be limiting offsetting as much as possible, so every hectare of wood here should be a net capture of carbon, not just offsetting some dirty cement factory.”. I’ve no idea why they want to do it and it’s just led to this boom. Which I think will collapse because a lot of this market is not regulated. It’s voluntary.”

Wightman has looked at the government-held register of carbon offsets, and says what he sees there doesn’t make complete sense. “People are saying they’re locking up woodland saying no fell, no thin for a hundred years. And you think okay that gets you a lot of carbon, but why don’t you fell it at fifty years, take it to the sawmill, make some wood, build a house out of wood and then that’s another 100 years locked up and then if they reuse the wood it will be another 100 years locked up. You’ve got wooden houses in Norway 800 years old. We should be locking up as much carbon as possible and then not just leaving it standing, we should be using the damn stuff.”

5. Set up a register of remnant land so that that can’t be “bought and snaffled” and “modernise common good law so local communities can get back control over their historic lands”.