It's a nice bright morning, which stays sunny in spite of cloud bubbling up as temperatures rise. It's the usual quiet Sunday. A man comes to stay with an Italian companion; they head off to Tolsta for the afternoon. Down in London, the Marathon is underway in drizzly conditions. Spend the afternoon getting up to speed with the Crofting Reform Bill. Tomorrow, a meeting by the Environment and Rural Development Committee of the Scottish Parliament will take place in Stornoway. I download and print a 40 page PDF with submissions from about 14 representatives from crofting, housing, local government and development agencies as well as landowners. It's a complex and wide-ranging issue. A croft is a small scale agricultural unit (5 acres) which is commonly let to a crofter by a landowner for a low fee, about £18 per annum. I'm not omitting any zeroes. At the moment, crofters can buy their own crofts at the rate of 15 times the annual rent. A croft does not automatically include a house. Grants are available of about £22k, which helps a little towards the £80k cost of building a house. There is currently an open market in crofts, which has led to spiralling prices, putting crofts beyond the means of young folk in the island. Problems have also arisen on a larger scale with the Community Right-to-Buy, enshrined in the 2003 Land Reform Act (Scotland). The people on an estate are able to buy the land from its owner, against the wishes of said owner. So far, the only real hostile take-over is taking place in the Pairc District, South Lochs. And the current owner does not want to cooperate with the take-over at all, putting ownership of the land in the hands of a subsidiary company (effectively the same people) and creating a legal morass. The Scottish Executive have, as per normal, been hovering around this hot pie for ages. The reason why landowner Barry Lomas doesn't want to sell is that he stands to earn millions from a proposed windfarm on his land.
Mrs B serves me dinner at 7pm, chilli con carne, very spicy. The Cuma is still on the slipway, some 7 weeks after it went up.
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