The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

Feedback for us

If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

Follow Us

LWA Responds to the Scottish Land Reform Bill Consultation

LWA Responds to the Scottish Land Reform Bill Consultation
20/10/2022 Yali Banton Heath

The Scottish Government are currently consulting on the next Land Reform Bill , “Land Reform in a Net Zero Nation which is looking at ways to address what is the most concentrated land ownership pattern in Europe.

Secure access to land is one of the most significant challenges for our members.  Very few farms come up for sale in Scotland, and there is high demand for land from investors as well as farmers and new entrants.  This has driven up the value of farmland in Scotland by over 30% in 2021, which is a significantly higher increase than the rest of the UK.  At the same time, farm tenancy availability has been in decline for decades, and recent moves by the Scottish Government to address this trend do not seem to have had a significant effect.

These dynamics are seriously limiting the transition to agroecological farming in Scotland and must be addressed.  Many people who would like to access land for agroecological farming are unable to do so. Those that do have land access often have insecure tenure which means they are constrained in developing long-term relations with the land and local community that are so integral to agroecology.  Many people work on much smaller plots of land and so are constrained in their ability to take a holistic approach to land management and building healthy soil through long-term rotations and space for biodiversity.  There is no social justice in this system, where we are limiting access to land to those that can afford to buy land.

The proposals in the Land Reform Bill do seem, on the face of it, to be quite radical. They propose to introduce a public interest test on the acquisition and transfer of significant areas of land, as well as increased responsibilities for landowners. There are currently no constraints on who can own land, how much land they can own, so, if this Bill passes, this will be a significant step.

However, we believe that the proposals in the Bill should be much stronger, and are concerned that this will be a missed opportunity to address some of the most significant land access struggles faced by our members. The Bill proposes that the public interest test applies to landholdings over 3,000Ha or a proportion of an inhabited island or data zone.  We argue that this is far too large and that there should be a more sophisticated approach to assessing whether the sale of land is in the public interest, including land price, a more localised approach to establishing this criteria, and a stronger emphasis on the protection of agricultural land.

The Bill also proposes that all family farms be exempted from the public interest test. While we support family farms, it’s important to understand that family farming is a very broad concept and can include very large-scale farms carrying out agriculture in a way that doesn’t necessarily benefit to the environment or communities, and that some family farms in Scotland are built on a historical wealth built on colonialism.

In our consultation response we argue for stronger public intervention in the sale of agricultural land, more support for increasing the number of tenancies available to new entrants, and an alignment with the current consultation on the Agricultural Bill to support the agroecological transition that Scotland desperately needs.

We welcome feedback from our members on this response, and we encourage anyone to respond to the consultation, closing on 30th October.

Landworkers' Alliance Newsletter

Please subscribe to our e-newsletter. You can unsubscribe at anytime in your preferences.

This information will never be shared with a third party