成人快手

A tentative foray into the thorny issue of crofting reform.

The current situation eats at the very root of the institution of crofting. Back in 1886, legislation was put into place to safeguard security of tenure for crofters. Following an uprising in Skye, where the people of Braes turned on police officers and the estate factor, the Napier Commission concluded that great injustice was being inflicted on the crofters of Skye and elsewhere in Scotland. Up to the mid 1880s, tenants could be evicted at the whim of a landlord, and no consideration was being given to economic and / or financial hardship.

Crofters are principally tenants on an estate, but with unlimited tenure. A croft is an agricultural unit, but not by definition with a house on it. If a bareland croft is purchased or rented, the crofter can build a house on it (an "improvement"), and a grant of about 拢22,000 is available towards the cost. These days, the cost of building a house from scratch approaches the 拢80,000 mark.

A croft is not by definition to be USED for agriculture, although it is commonly associated with sheep- and cattle farming. Quite often, the ground is so poor that the crofter is unable to make a full-time living out of it, and/or the area is too small. The average Lewis croft measure about 5 acres. I have seen crofts where the width can be measured in feet, but the length is sometimes as much as a mile.

On the Stornoway Trust estate, crofters pay an annual rent of about 拢18. No, I haven't missed off any zeroes. The land is available for purchase for 15 times the annual rent. The cost of buying a croft is connected with the improvements on it. What some do is to decroft part of the croft and build a house on that section of land. As I indicated above, people can do with their crofts what they like. They can sell it, and that's where the problems arise at the moment.

Land prices in the Western Isles have started to catch up with the rest of the UK. One of the complaints aired at the Environment and Rural Development Committee Meeting (ERDC) yesterday was that this placed crofts beyond the reach of young starters. Some owners leave the croft unused, neglected, or use it inappropriately. Recently, a crofter in Taynuilt (Argyll) built a string of houses on his land, which was infamously approved by the courts.

The Crofters Commission is supposed to be the regulatory body, but one of the most strident complaints in the ERDC meeting at Stornoway was that it does not regulate strongly enough. A Bill is currently in front of the Scottish Parliament which is supposed to address some of the issues that have surfaced following the introduction of the Land Reform Act 2003.

The general fear is, echoed by quite a few speakers at yesterday's meeting, was that crofting as we know it is under threat. Not only is the land sliding beyond the financial reach of those for whom it was intended, but with that the culture and language (Gaelic) associated with it.