16: Permission to land: ownership and net zero
What is the current state of UK land ownership, and how can this be overhauled to better meet the needs of both climate and communities? The team are joined by Malcolm Combe, senior law lecturer at the University of Strathclyde , Kate Swade from Shared Assets CIC, and Magnus Davidson from Community Land Scotland.
Episode Transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello, I’m Dr Matt Hannon.
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford and welcome to Local Zero...
[Music flourish]
...otherwise known as The Times Scotland ‘Podcast of the Week.’
Matt: This episode is the first in a two-parter on land. Today, we cover land ownership and explore how democratic it is, what this means for net zero and a just transition and finally, what can be done to democratise land ownership.
Rebecca: Land ownership strongly influences how we manage our land and our buildings. This is what we’ll pick up on in the next episode, asking how we could reimagine land to better tackle the multiple, overlapping social, economic and environmental crises of our times. A pretty tall order, eh, Matt?
Matt: Absolutely and later in today’s show, we’ll have with us Malcolm Combe who is a Senior Lecturer of Law here at Strathclyde University.
Malcolm: There’s no denying that ownership of land is a huge agenda-setting tool when it comes to crucial decisions about building a local bit of energy apparatus.
Rebecca: We’ll also be joined by Kate Swade who is a Director at Shared Assets, a community interest company that is developing and promoting new models of land use.
Kate: It does all go back to land. If you have land, whether you’re a church, or a doctor’s surgery, or a hospital, or a local authority, you do have the power to do stuff with that land which can have a huge impact.
Rebecca: And Fraser chats with Magnus Davidson from the Environmental Research Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Magnus: Regulate the land system. We’ve got an unregulated land system. If you go to buy a piece of land, it should automatically trigger what’s called a public interest test where you are judged on your plans for that piece of land to make sure it’s in the public interest.
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Rebecca: So we’ve got a heap of new stuff to tell people about today don’t we team? So first off, remember our new Twitter handle. Loads of people have been getting into conversations and most of them have been quite polite. Hopefully, this is just the beginning but do come and find us. We’re @LocalZeroPod on Twitter.
Matt: We also have a new website. We’re just putting the finishing touches to it and we hope it will be live by the time we’ve published this episode. You can find us at www.LocalZeroPod.com. All episodes will be embedded and links to the source material, wider reading and some blogs when we get the time.
Rebecca: [Laughter] Yeah, time is always important and finally, we know that some of you don’t like to reach out via Twitter, so we’ve also got a new email address set up. You can contact us using the email address LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. So do get in touch with us using more than your 280 characters that Twitter allows you.
[Music flourish]
Right, so we’ve got loads to get into today but first of all, let’s bring in Fraser because we’ve got a lot of self-congratulations to do, don’t we? Fraser, welcome.
Fraser: We certainly do. We certainly do. Becky and Matt, tell me how it feels to be the host of The Times’ ‘Podcast of the Week’?
Rebecca: Woohoo!
Matt: Very happy with that and absolutely thrilled to have it profiled. A big thank you to Ashley Davis from The Times Scotland for profiling us.
Rebecca: Yeah, brilliant and Matt, you must have had a good chat with her about the pod.
Matt: Yeah, we did. We were able to explore exactly what the pod does and I had to kind of boil it down into a few words.
Rebecca: Yeah, those words – geeky, hey, Matt?
Matt: Geeky. Yes, who is it for? It’s the geeks out there and I’m trying to lay ownership to the word a little bit more and I think that’s a good thing. We’re all, hopefully, a bit geeky about what we can do to tackle climate change to make for a fairer, greener, happier society. So this is for you guys, the geeks out there, and that’s a good thing.
Fraser: I’d like to immediately, immediately distance myself from geeky [laughter]. I have nothing to do with it.
Matt: That’s because we had a vote earlier, Fraser, and we decided you were the coolest and I was easily the geekiest [laughter]. I contest that result, obviously.
Rebecca: So where do we sit with ‘nerdy’? How does that interplay with all of this?
Matt: I think it’s slightly better than ‘geek’ but I don’t know the rules.
Fraser: I’m still not taking it. I’m still not taking it [laughter].
Matt: But listen, it’s good. We need to be geeky about this. It’s a big subject and we really need to boil it down and understand what to do. I’m absolutely thrilled that it was profiled and hopefully, we can grow the audience a bit more and bring in people who haven’t heard of us previous to that.
Rebecca: Absolutely and where better to start than with an episode that really focuses on something that we interact with every single day? Land.
Matt: Yeah.
Rebecca: I don’t know about you guys but I hadn’t really ever thought about land ownership until I bought my house here in Scotland. Along with the plans of the house, you also see the land that you own. According to the house plans, I own half the road that goes around in front of me. I mean I’m not really sure what I can do with that but it’s a really interesting subject and probably one that a lot of people might not have really thought about.
Matt: So I did a bit of background research on this around how affordable houses are. It’s been in the news very much of late and we’ve seen house prices rocket with lockdowns and lots of economic seismic movements around why this is the case. But if I was to ask you today how much the average house price is as a multiplier of the average wage?
Rebecca: Ten times.
Matt: Ten times. Fraser?
Fraser: About ten times more, yeah.
Matt: It is not far off. It’s about eight times. If you were to go back to the 1970s, what would you say?
Rebecca: Oh, I reckon far less.
Fraser: Yeah.
Rebecca: Four or five?
Matt: Fraser?
Fraser: I don’t even know if I’d go as high as that. I’d say three. I’d say triple.
Matt: It’s about five. So we see now why affordability is such an issue and I think the issue and the topic of land begins when people start to ask how affordable a house is to buy and how affordable a house is to rent but then it starts to bleed beyond that. So, for me, land became the big issue for net zero being involved with community energy. Fraser, I’m going to ask you a question about this in a minute. The big issue around community energy is that if you didn’t have access to the land or the buildings, you were pretty limited in what you could do. So this goes neatly, Fraser, on to your experience of the community energy solar project that Glasgow Community Energy is doing and how easy that was. Obviously, you’re engaging with the council, I think it is, and the schools there and so you’re accessing that land through them.
Fraser: Originally, the plan for Glasgow Community Energy was to use derelict land which was absentee ownership and we were trying to take that and put it to good use but it was such a labyrinth legally to try and get around. It was just impossible to do. So we were kind of forced into a partnership with the council. Now we’re happy to do that and it’s a great and effective way to do it but there’s so much more that we’d hoped to do. The way that land is owned and managed in Scotland and across the UK, and I know it differs, can make it really, really tricky. We also have not just community energy but from out of the back window of my flat, you can see a big piece of land that’s been absent since I moved into this flat four years ago where we’ve had various efforts to set up community projects, community growing and different things like that but because it’s owned by an absentee owner or developer, they come in every four or five years and they flatten the projects that are happening there and so the cycle continues. I think that’s an important thing. It’s not even just home ownership and it’s not even just when we think about the Highlands and what’s getting done with that but there’s land around the corner from your house. There’s land at the back of your flat which is also tied up in all of this.
Matt: Absolutely and so you’re back to the landlord. Luckily, I’ve got a few more quiz questions here [laughter].
Rebecca: Now I see why you described this as geeky [laughter].
Matt: This is data. It’s a good word [laughter]. So the data I’m referring to comes from a book from Guy Shrubsole who we hope is going to be a guest on our next podcast. Here are some questions about who owns England. The first thing is that he finds that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. That’s 25,000 landowners but of the 82% of the land that they could pinpoint to certain landlords (as they actually didn’t know who the remaining 18% were), how much of land do you think, in England, is owned by homeowners?
Fraser: I mean it’s got to be small.
Rebecca: Yeah, a small amount. I’d say less than 10% of that.
Matt: Okay, Fraser?
Fraser: Ballpark, yeah, I’m going to go with 8%.
Matt: 5%.
Rebecca: Wow!
Fraser: Wow!
Rebecca: I know, Fraser, you were just talking about what you could do with the land that you can see out the back of your window but in previous episodes, we’ve been talking about the need for things like reforestation and so on. Presumably, there’s the fact that this land might be owned by people who don’t necessarily have those common good interests at the heart of their decision-making.
Matt: This is the point. He breaks it down into different landowners and I think I’m going to get right back to that point but before we do, let’s talk about the Queen, the Royal Family and other aristocracy and gentry. With regard to the aristocracy and gentry, which doesn’t include the Crown Estate and we’ll come on to that, what share of England do they own?
Fraser: Well, if homeowners were 5%, I’d say 15%?
Rebecca: I’m going to go a bit higher actually. I reckon 25%.
Matt: 30%.
Rebecca: Wow!
Fraser: Whoaa!
Matt: I’ll rattle off some of the others so it gives us a sense of who can do what. Companies own 18%. The public sector owns 9%. The Crown owns 1.4%. I could go on and on here but the point is that land ownership is concentrated in just a handful of individuals and companies. So the decisions that need to be made around net zero and a just transition and those decisions about what we do with our land don’t rest with all of us. They rest with the few and not the many.
Fraser: Absolutely.
Rebecca: I mean that’s really fascinating and then you look at things like where the real drive to net zero is coming from. Certainly, across the UK, we see it from the local councils which is a massive driver but even looking at things like the race to net zero and the number of businesses and universities that have signed up for that. But you’ve got to think that even if you took all of those groups now and everything that you’ve just told us, Matt, and put it together, collectively, they probably only account for a very small percentage of what we can actually do.
Matt: Let’s just take some of the key actors here. Local authorities own about 1.5 million acres and so we’re talking a not insignificant percentage of the total amount.
Rebecca: But presumably, there’s a lot of housing on that. Presumably, that’s for council homes and so on.
Matt: There’s a lot but the Forestry Commission owns 2 million acres, the National Trust owns 600,000 acres and RSPB owns nearly 330,000 acres. The good news that I’m trying to crowbar in here is that there are some actors who do have a broader remit beyond pure financial interest and gain that could do something really positive with this land. So I think maybe starting there could be a really exciting point.
Rebecca: I think what I’d really like to dig into today is what are the frameworks that we have. What do our policy and regulation say about control around how that land could be used and how it could be used for public good?
Matt: I think Scotland is a really exciting place for some landmark cases where communities have got together and brought the funding together to buy out land from a handful of landowners. One of the most recent examples would be the Langholm Initiative with the Duke of Buccleuch last October from raising a sum of about £3.8 million for just over 5,000 acres of land and six properties. The incredible thing was – I think two things; first is just how supportive Scottish law was for this but also the funding and the Scottish Government put up about £1 million from the Land Fund there. The other thing was just how many other funders they had to pull together to get the other £2.8 million. By my reckoning, there were about 20 big funders and then a lot of crowdsourcing. This is what can be done. Really exciting stuff.
Fraser: Yeah, and in Scotland, it’s important to note the distinction between Scotland and England. Scotland is seen to be quite progressive and land reform is always very topical in Scottish politics and in the Scottish Parliament. We have ‘strong’ community empowerment legislation and we’re now looking at even more progressive land reform and supporting communities to do stuff like that. In the last ten years, the target under the Scottish Government by this time was to have one million acres of land in community ownership. They’ve fallen short of that by 400,000 acres. So even in Scotland, where there is government support for this and where there’s dedicated finance and legislation designed to make this more accessible and easier, there’s still a long, long way to go.
Rebecca: This sounds really cool to look at this increasing democratising of land in Scotland. Okay, it’s not without its problems but do we need that to reach net zero? Is it the issue of democratisation that’s so important if we’re talking about net zero? Are we saying that by changing who owns the land will change what happens on the land and we’ll see progress towards net zero or do we just need stronger policy frameworks provided by the state? What is it about the democratisation of land that is such an important aspect?
Matt: Okay, so I think there’s a simple answer to that which is that people will start doing different things with the land. So if it isn’t purely generating a maximum economic return on that land within the current context of what constitutes something which is financially beneficial, then you start doing other things which can generate environmental and social benefits. If you take the example of Langholm, what they’re wanting to do with that land is develop a nature reserve in part and that will focus on a whole, wide range of other benefits like biodiversity, carbon sequestration, tourism and local jobs for managing that land. If you put it in the community’s hands, you can do something other than pure economic gain but also you put the power back into the community’s hands and you help them decide what they do with the land.
Rebecca: So what we’re saying then is that when it’s owned by the few, it tends to be used mainly to deliver maximum economic returns and these other outcomes that are so critical, particularly for local communities, might get neglected.
Matt: It services the needs of that individual landlord but it doesn’t service the needs of the entire community.
Fraser: I think this is an interesting question, not just in the Scottish context but everywhere, especially in relation to offsetting as well. When we talk about carbon offsetting, with a lot of the land, it’s not necessarily that landowners are reluctant to do green things with their land but a lot of the land has been sold for offset which can be questionable in a lot of ways with accusations of greenwashing, etcetera, but again, it’s who gets to benefit from the transition. So there’s a justice element here and it’s just one of the big questions that I’m really looking forward to chatting with our guests about today.
Rebecca: Well, I guess we’d better bring them on then, hadn’t we?
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Kate: Hi, I am Kate Swade. I am one of the Co-Executive Directors of Shared Assets, a social enterprise think-and-do tank that works to reimagine what we can do with land together.
Malcolm: My name is Malcolm Combe and I’m a Senior Lecturer in Scottish Private Law at the University of Strathclyde and I’ve been writing about Scottish land law and land reform for far too long.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Kate and Malcolm, welcome to Local Zero. It’s absolutely fabulous to get you on. We’ve been very excited about this episode for some time. I think the context we were setting before is that land ownership seems to be at the root of many of the issues relating to net zero and a just transition. So to fundamentally rewire our energy system means rewiring our economy which requires rewiring the ownership of land and assets. The first question to you both is how democratic is land ownership in the UK today? I think I kind of know the answer [laughter].
Kate: Is it a trick question? [Laughter]
Malcolm: I’ll let you handle that hot potato first, Kate.
Kate: [Laughter] I would say that even the statistics say it’s not at all democratic and 5% of the land in England is owned by householders. I think more land is used for golf courses than for houses, certainly in an English context. The vast majority of land, over 70%, we reckon is owned by less than 1% of the population but it’s very, very hard to know because even information on land ownership isn’t democratically available. So my answer would be it’s not at all a democratically accountable system, let alone a democratically controlled one.
Malcolm: I suppose I’ll respond with a repost and say, ‘Who said it was going to be democratic? Who promised it was going to be democratic?’ [Laughter] But from a Scottish context, I think it’s fair to say that it’s generally accepted that Scotland has one of the most concentrated patterns of private land ownership in the developed world. The most modern commentary on that probably comes from Andy Wightman, the Scottish land reform campaigner and recent MSP actually. He noted that less than 500 individuals or corporate entities owned something like 50% of the privately owned rural land in Scotland. You’ve got about 87 estates of more than 10,000 hectares in Scotland (hectares and not acres) and 67 of those are in the Highlands.
Matt: Is it fair to summarise it by saying it’s not very democratic in England and it’s even worse in Scotland?
Malcolm: I wouldn’t want to take issue with what you’ve said there, Matt [laughter]
Rebecca: Just to clarify, when we talk about land, if you look at Google Maps or something, you’re looking at the green bits. We’re not talking about the sea. We’re only talking about the actual land that we would traditionally conceptualise. The reason that I ask this is that this is a podcast focusing on net zero and a big part of that is around how we generate and use energy. Of course, there are lots of other factors as well and increasingly, we’re talking onshore and offshore generation. I guess, in my mind, I’m just trying to make some of the connections between the sort of land we’re talking about and the sorts of ways in which it can or can’t be used to help drive net zero.
Malcolm: I was thinking about terra firma, the stuff that we stand on, but there are obviously inland waters that the ownership of those or the right to use those tend to be very much bound out with who owns the land around those features, so the people who abut a river, for example. There is also the extent of the Scottish maritime zone within the 12 kilometres of the coast but I’m not really focusing on that. I’m more talking about things that people will be able to trade and get registered on the Scottish Land Register to show us the owner of that. In terms of the boundaries to a community scheme, there’s no denying that ownership of land is a huge agenda-setting tool. If you are the owner of land, then you get quite a lot of say when it comes to crucial decisions about building a local bit of energy apparatus and yet the actual proactive decision to do something is often the land owners. There might be public involvement in terms of the planning process, thereafter, once they’ve made a decision because, in the UK, essentially since the ‘40s, we’ve nationalised the right to develop because of the planning system and Town and Country Planning can step in at that stage but that’s reactive. So it’s hugely important and it gives you the weapons to act in a certain way and to decide who you’re going to give use rights to, whether it’s a lease or whatever.
Kate: There’s something really interesting about rivers and coastal areas as being those bits that are... at Shared Assets, we think of them as common goods and we think of land as a common good but as Malcolm said at the very beginning, that isn’t an assumption that everybody shares. You can have an entire conversation about land and then suddenly realise you’re talking at completely cross purposes because one of you thinks that land is a simple input into the economy that the owner should be able to do whatever they like with and one of you thinks that it’s a common good that actually has impacts on the community surrounding it which may be a bit of an exaggeration. Often, you can find these two things and so I think one of the big boundaries for thinking more expansively about this stuff actually is around language and the way that we talk about land as an asset or as a resource. Thinking about rivers in England, 90% of the land is not open access and you don’t have the right to roam over it. I think 99% of rivers, people do not have rights over, even for kayaking, swimming or fishing, let alone a community trying to say, ‘Actually, we’d really like to put a hydro scheme in there.’ Unless you have the luck of the riparian landowners being sympathetic or you happen to be the riparian landowner, you’ve got a really big hill to climb potentially.
Matt: Kate, you’ve mentioned assets and also Malcolm, you mentioned what is democratic and so there are two parts to this discussion that we’re having which probably need a bit of framing. We’ve talked a bit about what kind of land we’re referring to but what does democratic ownership and management of that land look like?
Kate: We’re interested in models of land use that enhance and support the common good. We obviously have, in the government as a landowner and in local authorities, in particular, democratically accountable bodies that own land. There are lots of interesting models where you could have community land trusts and other types of less formal governance models where people are invited to have a say about how land should be used. I would love to see a world where private landowners are in more open conversation with their local communities about what should be done to a piece of land. I’m particularly thinking about large-scale landowners rather than individuals with their own private gardens. Yeah, with democracy and thinking one member one vote and every vote counts, we do have a model of democratic land ownership and that’s local authorities. Certainly in England, they have been subject to austerity and into passing on/selling a whole amount of their assets. We’re seeing even that part of the democratic bit of land ownership being shrunk.
Matt: Absolutely. Malcolm?
Malcolm: Yeah, lots of interesting stuff there and I was almost cursing you there, Matt, as you asked your question. I was going to say something intelligent but [laughter] you framed the question in the way that I was about to run in and say because, yes, there are a few ways you can consider how to democratise land ownership. It could be about the right of ownership itself and making more people owners or it could be about the entitlements that are attached to land that is short of ownership. It’s a bit like land reform being something that you can pursue as a means to an end or it can be an end in itself. In terms of democratising land ownership, if you were to give me three acres of land to farm, I probably wouldn’t know where to start at the moment. I’d need to think quite hard about it but if it was to get to the right people, whether it’s the right itself or if people were able to input into a process... the Right to Roam was mentioned earlier as something that we generally enjoy up in Scotland. For some people, the ability to go for a hill walk or to kayak will be all they’ll want to do with that particular asset and that will be fine for them but then also you’ve got to think about how to control that. There have been problems of late in particular beauty spots of Scotland where people have been going to areas and setting up camp and it’s about whether that should be allowed and that sort of thing.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: That’s a good point to interrupt the chat and bring in a conversation that I had with Magnus Davidson from the Environmental Research Institute at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He’s been telling me why land ownership is central to a just net-zero transition.
Magnus: My research looks at the interactions between the environment, the economy and society.
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Obviously, there’s really concentrated land ownership in Scotland. Here, we know that something less than 500 people own half of the private land. When you take into account the government and publically-owned land as well, they own a huge amount of land. Again, that’s still under the control or ownership of the government, one organisation effectively. We have a huge resource which is incredibly valuable in the fight for net zero controlled by a very small number of people. It’s private as well and so very often, they’ve got their own interests and quite often as well, these landholdings are not held for the reason of trying to fight towards net zero, although increasingly they are. We’ll maybe get on to that in a bit but they’re often held as trophy pieces of land. For example, hunting estates for deer or grouse are quite often not conducive to net zero as well because of the practices that go on there in terms of overgrazing, burning and such. We have to try and take this resource that we’ve got and as a country, we generally have the resource in terms of our boundary but what we want to do with it is limited by that small number of people which creates this huge barrier in terms of what we want to do for net zero. So let’s take a practical example; we want to plant a whole bunch of trees to sequester carbon. Say we’ve got a big estate where we can plant trees; the guy that owns that estate, and it’s usually quite often a guy [laughter], they don’t want to plant trees because they prefer to shoot grouse and shoot deer on it. They fly in from abroad for their summer holidays and take all their pals and go shooting. We’ve just straightaway removed a big area of land which could be used for us to meet net zero. It’s absolutely typical. You want to be able to do something with it and somebody says no because they want to do something else with it. The way that the land market is right now, it’s really exclusive. You and I can’t go out and buy a couple of acres or a couple of hectares. The land market is incredibly inflated and it’s only going to get worse as the net zero comes in. We’ve been using this terminology around net-zero land rush or net-zero land grab where Scotland is really well-suited for an investor. If you want to come in and buy what are called ‘green assets’, effectively the land, you can then exploit them for carbon credits, for example. Scotland, we’re told by the likes of, say, Savills, is one of the last places in the world where you can come in and get this land relatively cheaply that is totally out of my price range and totally out of most people’s price range. That’s going to just keep driving up the price and take it even further away from individuals or communities as well.
Fraser: As I’m standing here talking to you, if I look over my laptop out of my window, there’s a bit of land in the middle of Glasgow just over the wall from my back garden where the community have been trying to do as little as set up a wee community garden. They’ve done it twice and twice, the developers have come in the last eight years and bulldozed it, even though they can’t get the building permissions that they need because there are issues with the width of the road that comes into the little space. So there are things that could be done but there’s definitely so much experience, whether that’s in the middle of Glasgow or particularly across the Highlands, of it just not happening. On the other side of it, and I don’t want to play devil’s advocate too much, my partner is a solicitor and she works in this space. She works around land and she appreciates the inequality of it but there are examples of landowners who do want to try and do some good. Is there a way other than the redistribution of land, you think, that can stimulate that fight towards net zero?
Magnus: Absolutely. It’s a really interesting question and let’s not pretend that there aren’t really big landowners out there moving in the completely right direction towards net zero. Let’s take Scotland’s largest landowner, for example. I’m quite often quite highly critical of their approach to land management but in terms of environmental considerations... there’s Wildland Limited owned by Anders Povlsen who is a major stakeholder in ASOS, the clothing brand. He’s from Denmark and he’s Scotland’s biggest landowner. He came across when he was a kid, fell in love with the country and ended up buying over 220,000 hectares. What they did in Glenfeshie was drastically cut the deer numbers. Their factor there, Thomas MacDonald, was the guy behind just cutting the deer numbers and what’s happened in that glen is just utterly amazing from an ecological point of view. There’s been a natural regeneration of native pine which is just really, really cool. They’re in the process of reducing deer numbers in their northern Highland estates as well. It’s really interesting from an environmental perspective. However, if we want to judge that from a just transition point of view, for example, one of the just transition principles is around redistribution of wealth. They’ve been concentrating land even more and even more. So let’s take the North Sutherland example. They’ve been buying all the neighbouring estates and concentrating in a huge area which used to be owned by quite a number of different fairly benevolent landowners under this one guy who now owns a massive area of land and has come in with quite drastic, new management practices which are quite often not well received by the people that actually live there. It’s costing a lot of money. Where does that money come from, for example? It’s still presiding over an area with serious depopulation and demographic issues. So if we look at that from the perspective of the three pillars of sustainability, what’s happening environmentally might be really nice but from the social and economic perspectives, does it hold true to sustainability there? If we take other examples, one of the new ones is Jeremy Leggett, the solar innovator, and he’s recently bought an estate just near Loch Ness, Bunloit Estate, and he’s going to be rewilding that as well. Again, from a private perspective, what he wants to do is have a self-imposed tax of 10% of his profits going to a local community. He wants to put people back on the land and create new homes. So it’s not to say that private landlords aren’t doing good. There are guys out there, and it guys again in this case, doing some pretty interesting things but they are still exploiting an unregulated and unjust land market. Could I go elsewhere in the world and say, ‘Right, I made a couple of million quid from my business. Can I just go and buy a big estate and do what I want with that estate, even if it’s altruistic?’
Fraser: From your perspective then, in terms of accepting that some landlords can do really, really great work and do have the best intentions at heart, accepting also that there’s some amazing community stuff going on and that there is a need for some redistribution, what do you think the next steps are or the pressing things that we have to address to make land and land ownership work for a just transition going forward?
Magnus: For me, it’s always reducing the concentration of ownership, maybe even putting maximum caps on how much land can be owned and maybe even just to take a step backwards as well, to go back to the last question, because there’s a point there that I think is useful to address. Most people perceive that large-scale and concentrated land ownership makes landscape restoration easier or more possible which kind of makes sense when you think about it. If I want to restore a landscape, as one landowner, it’s easier for me to do it than, say, four or five different landowners. Practically, it’s not actually quite true. The Scottish Land Commission did a report on this and found that the conclusion there is weak and although some efficiencies in terms of administration might actually be there, it’s less true than you might think. If you look at things like Cairngorms Connect in the Cairngorms National Park, again, another fantastic example of a multitude of landowners, private and public, and ENGOs working together for landscape scale and a truly great landscape in terms of restoration. So it was just to address that point that you don’t need to have one landowner owning the whole landscape to make it easier to restore.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah.
Magnus: In terms of what needs to happen, we need to first make more people own more land. It’s really funny actually because I’m friends with Rob Gibson, the old SNP MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross. He tells me a story where he was speaking with Scottish Land & Estates. Scottish Land & Estates is effectively the membership organisation that looks after the big landed estates. He effectively turned around and said, ‘Look, I don’t want to get rid of you as an organisation. I just want to increase your membership numbers drastically.’ [Laughter] I thought that summed it up brilliantly. So yeah, getting more people owning land, getting some of the bigger ones who own a huge amount of land to diversify and own less land, maybe put a cap on the maximum amount of land that’s owned and regulate the land system. That’s it. We’ve got an unregulated land system. What do I mean by that? I mean if you go to buy a piece of land, for example, it should automatically trigger what’s called a public interest test where you are judged on your plans for that piece of land to make sure it’s in the public interest. From an environmental perspective, a lot of environmentalists are putting faith in this. I should say that it made it through the SNP and the Greens’ manifestos and so there will likely be a new Land Reform Bill in the next parliamentary term. A lot of environmentalists are putting faith in this. It’s not just about the sale or acquisition of an estate that could trigger this; it’s a change to planning on the estate. So if I wanted to build a new farm building on the estate, it might trigger a public interest test for the whole estate and they would say, ‘What are you doing on that estate? Does it work in the public’s interest?’ So if I say, ‘I’m going to plough all the peatlands up and cut down all the trees,’ it’s not in the public’s interest because that’s going to increase greenhouse gas emissions. I’m putting a lot of faith in the fact that it’s going to cover social and economic considerations as well and that it needs to be done in favour of communities. Say you’re suffering from significant depopulations issues, as we do in a lot of the areas of the Northern Highlands, a public interest test, for example, could say, ‘Right, if you want to do that, you need to make land cheaply available for the community to build community housing.’ We need to regulate the land market that bit better as well to regulate for net zero. We need to also support landowners and this is where it kind of gets a bit difficult. We need to support landowners in the transition to manage the land better, so things like payments for ecosystem services. We’re seeing it with the likes of the Woodland Code and the Peatland Code where you’re getting paid to manage that land in terms of the wood and the peat for the sequestration of carbon. The challenge here is because so few people own so much land, we’re at risk of funnelling a lot of public funding into the pockets of a very small number of people, so there’s a tightrope here.
Fraser: So in your experience and from the work that you’ve done around Community Land Scotland, do you find that communities manage land differently?
Magnus: Excellent question. Just as an aside, I’m a Director of Community Land Scotland as well and we, as CLS, commissioned a piece of work looking at community landowners’ role in the fight against climate change and Inherit Institute did an absolutely brilliant piece of work that’s culminated in a report, a film and some case studies that can be found on the website. They effectively found that community landowners, in the fight against climate change, go well beyond what any other landowners do in terms of measures and in terms of doing good effectively. For example, whether it’s community energy, planting woodland or peatland restoration, most importantly, it’s about how it’s done; so it’s done in a holistic manner that delivers on a multitude of benefits and a multitude of aims. For example, it’s delivering environmental and climate benefits as well as the social and economic considerations alongside. It also builds capacity within the community that can then be used to deliver on other aims and not just climate change. It’s really this fight against climate change that’s inherent in the work that’s already done. It’s not deemed as being special. An example would be, say, community energy. Obviously, that’s fantastic in terms of renewable energy and in terms of reducing emissions but may actually just be done as a source of income for the community and so achieving these environmental aims without really thinking about it.
[Music flourish]
So yeah, it’s an amazing piece of work and I would recommend people go and have a look at it. It’s the perfect showcase for me, as an environmentalist and as a proponent of community land, to turn around and say, ‘Look, I’m saying that it can be done better and this proves it can be done better.’ So for me, put land in the community’s hands and they will achieve the environmental goals better than the likes of, say, the ENGOs or the rewilding billionaire landowners.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Massive, massive thanks to Magnus Davidson there. Properly fascinating stuff. Back now to the chat that the rest of the team is having and here is Becky to pick up.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Can we achieve a just transition to net zero without democratisation? Let’s put it as simply as that. Could we do that or is that off the cards completely?
Kate: I suppose I would ask back to you, what do you mean by democratisation in the context of that question?
Rebecca: You presented us with a few different ways in which that could look, right? So take your choice [laughter].
Kate: I would say I don’t think we can achieve the transition that we need to achieve without really seriously looking at the pattern of private land ownership; so not in any sense going and taking away the gardens of the 5% of the land that is taken up by private housing but looking at the massive inequalities and central concentration of land ownership. There are people doing lots of interesting thinking around, say, ‘What would reparations look like?’ It’s about recognising that communities of colour and Black people tend to hold far fewer assets and have far less access to land in this country. How do we actually look at land through a reparative lens to start to think about building a more just future for everybody? I think there’s the sticky thing of whether certain people are going to have to give up some stuff in order for everybody, in a more democratic way, to have a bit more each and then there’s the stuff around the potential role of both the public sector and then the broad commons sector, like community ownership, charitable ownership and all of the stuff that sits outside the purely private, profit-making sector and outside of the state and increasing local authorities and the state being more visionary and more forward-thinking landowners. That includes things like the Crown Estates, the Ministry of Defence, the Duchies of Cornwall, the Duchies of Lancaster and all these people who have huge power to really make a difference in terms of carbon emissions and in terms of energy transition because they own all of that land. In terms of financing and funding local authorities properly, we’ve been doing a lot of work recently around publically-owned farmland, so council-owned farms which have halved in the last 40 years. They were often one of the only ways for people to get on the farming ladder if they didn’t have family farming backgrounds and could be a huge part of this transition in terms of moving to much less carbon-intensive and much more agroecological farming methodologies. You have all these councils that are both declaring climate emergencies and selling off their council farm estates at the same time. I don’t blame them for that, in a way, because they’ve been put into a really impossible position. It’s about having a proper look at the way the public finances work and recognising that the state holding and stewarding land in trust for the future could be one of the key mechanisms for making sure that we do achieve that transition.
Rebecca: Is that what we’re seeing at the moment? So land that is generally owned by either these cooperatives, charities or local authorities tends to be used in more, I guess, climate-friendly ways than land that is owned by individual trusts. Do we see a difference there in the implications of how that land is used and what it is trying to achieve?
Kate: I don’t have the stats to back that up. I don’t have firm evidence to back this up. I know there are a lot of private landowners and you look at places like the Knepp Estate that is rewilding and is going the extra mile in terms of stewarding their land. One example in England is the Ecological Land Cooperative which buys agricultural land and gets planning permission to convert it into small holdings. On each of their sites, and I think they’ve now got five different sites across England, all of the people who are going to be farming that land voluntarily sign up to binding agreements around ecological management of the sites and almost all of the land that they’re taking on is degraded mono-crop agricultural land. I think you could certainly say that the default position for the broad social sector would be that people are interested in land because they’re interested in the environment; whereas, I think there’s a lot of the private sector that maybe isn’t but then the private sector is huge. You can’t generalise overly about it.
Rebecca: But that’s really interesting because what you also introduced there was this concept of the governance and accountability of the land that is sold and adding in an additional governance structure that means that that land has to be used in certain ways. I know, Malcolm, you are very focused on the broader legal aspects around land. Is this something that you could see happening outside of these individual negotiations? Is this a consideration of something that could help deliver net zero in terms of the role that land use could play in that?
Malcolm: That’s a good question. Context is everything he said, trying to hide a multitude of sins there but I can think of a few private initiatives for renewable schemes in Scotland. I can think of some more community-oriented schemes. I was involved in one in my time when I was up living in Aberdeen. There was a micro-hydro project on the River Don but then there are also micro-hydro projects in big estates like Ardtronish over on the West Coast. These are all making a difference in that way but also, the way the community is involved can really determine whether these schemes are viable and have the support of the people who live near them. So the people who live on the island of Gigha are much more in favour of their wind turbines when it’s the community’s trust that it’s built on and they know that the money is staying on the island. When you compare that to maybe some of the reaction, and it’s not a universal reaction – I’ve written about this a little bit but up in somewhere like the Isle of Lewis, where there are various plans for wind turbines and depending on how the community is involved, there’s a nice legal point about the crofters possibly having rights and the common grazings versus what the ultimate landowner wants to happen on the land... goodness! [Laughter] There’s a whole lot you could look at. I will come back to a discussion point from earlier in terms of democratisation. I remember, a few years ago, I was part of a team that was looking at interventions in land markets across different nations for policy reasons, essentially. Nation states might have tried to control who could get a hold of land and I was discussing this proposal with one of my then colleagues who was an economist up at the University of Aberdeen and talking about the concentration of land ownership. His question was where’s the market failure? That’s a sort of hard-nosed analysis of it but it’s something that you do need to think about before you go away and tinker with settled property rights because having settled property rights, to sound like a boring law and economics person for a moment... you wouldn’t invest in a market if it’s a fickle situation and things are going to get reformed away from you. You need to be careful in that regard and also, again, in a Scottish context, you’ve got a lot of land. Complete sweeping statements coming up. You’ve got some land in Scotland and not much of it is arable and you’re probably just going to be farming that to its fullest extent, irrespective of who owns it. That’s going to be in the public interest. You’ve then got a lot of land which actually who owns it isn’t going to make that much difference. I’m thinking of the Cairngorm Plateau or something like the Southern Uplands. Sure, there might be some decisions that can be made but the person who actually owns it won’t necessarily make a huge difference but then, you’ve got land that is maybe strategic land where the decisions that an owner can make can have a huge impact on the local community.
Matt: So in that sense, not all land is equal?
Malcolm: Correct.
Matt: And it can have a different role to play. So I just wanted to take you back and maybe humour the economists for the moment around market failures. Of course, I think many could argue that, with the house prices and the affordability, as just one example, we clearly do have a market failure playing out in terms of land in the UK. In that context and in the context that you laid out before that Scotland possibly has some of the least fair distribution of land in the UK, Scotland has taken steps forward to address this in ways that maybe England and Westminster haven’t. What steps have the Scottish Government taken to try and improve the democratisation or distribution of land? I’m speaking of various community Rights to Buy and the Scottish Land Fund. Malcolm, I know you’re close to this. So I wonder whether you could just briefly highlight what’s out there and how successful it’s been.
Malcolm: Sure. Since devolution and the Scottish Parliament was established by the Scotland Act 1998, there have been a few waves of land reform, essentially. The first wave followed on from the Land Reform Policy Group that was set up by the then Labour Government chaired by Lord Sewel and their work led to the first Scottish land reform act, the Land Reform Scotland Act 2003, which brought in the Right to Roam that we mentioned earlier, incidentally, which gave you right of responsible access to a lot of Scotland. Also, in Part Two of that legislation, a Community Right to Buy, a right of first refusal or a preemptive Right to Buy that essentially allows a community that is locally accountable and has got a legal form to target land that is local to them, register an interest in a public register that’s maintained by Registers of Scotland. You can check online for free. When you have this registered interest, it means that should the landowner decide to put the land on the market, then the community is, for a set time period, the only show in town. They must sell to the community if the community is ready and willing to buy. You’ve got about eight months to mobilise and find the funds.
Matt: But the community can also force the hand, can they not, more recently?
Malcolm: This is more recently, yeah. I’ll get to that, if I may because in the 2003 Act, some communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland where there was crofting tenure which I could talk about that for absolutely ages but essentially, that was a 19th-century reform. Irish and Highland land politics dictated that the UK state, which at that point included Ireland, had to make a reform which essentially guaranteed these – I’ll use the word advisably but some people might not like – peasant farmers were able to have security of tenure, so a right to stay on this land even though they didn’t own it and the right for compensation for improvements and fair rents. This was really sticky. It was passed down through generations and it doesn’t apply to the whole of Scotland by any manner or means. It’s only the traditional crofting counties and in those areas, land that is a small croft holding and the common grazings that a crofting township would have and shared use rights can be bought by the local community on a forced basis, on an absolute basis. There are still various tests and both of those Rights to Buy I’ve mentioned have got to be in the public interest and have got to be compatible with sustainable development.
Matt: Malcolm, well done for a potted history [laughter] of all the Scottish land reform. That was no small feat. Kate, can England, Wales and Northern Ireland crib any of the homework from Scotland? Do you see any big, gaping holes in obvious land reform?
Kate: In England, we have a thing called the Localism Act which came in in 2011 which was very much in the era of Big Society and the idea that – ‘Oh, maybe the community can step up, do things themselves and take things onboard.’ The Localism Act does not give communities a right to buy but it does give people a right to bid. Community organisations, constituted in a similar way to what Malcolm was mentioning, can attempt to register an interest in what are called ‘assets of community value.’ So if there is something in your community whose current or recent past use makes it an asset of community value... that’s great if it’s, say, the last pub in the village, or the last garage, or shop in the village, or a community centre, or a community garden potentially. There have been lots of cases in London, say, of people registering really historic gay bars. So things that are of particular importance to a particular community, you can attempt to register that as an asset of community value. Regardless of who owns it, the local council get to say whether it is an asset of community value or not and then the things that are are held on an asset register. In a similar way to in Scotland, if the owner decides they want to sell, the community has a six-month moratorium to try and get the money together to buy. It doesn’t give you any discount on the price and the owner is not compelled to sell to you. So you could go through all of that work and actually, they could just say no and put it on the open market and so it’s not as strong as in Scotland. It doesn’t apply in Wales and it doesn’t apply in Northern Ireland. Also, in England, we have asset transfer legislation and I’m assuming that applies in Scotland as well where local authorities can transfer assets to community organisations at up to £2 million less than best consideration, so less than the price that they might have otherwise obtained on the open market. But what that does, some people would argue, is de-democratise land ownership because you’re taking it out of the public sector and putting it into the community sector. There are some great examples of people who’ve taken on assets that would have otherwise been sold off into the private sector and made them into real community hubs. We have often wondered whether we need a Right to Manage and so actually, not trying to take ownership away but recognising where there is land that is underused. We have a big problem with really undermanaged woodlands in England and actually, whether communities should be able to try and step in and take on the management of things themselves. There’s also a suite of rights around contesting the way councils have procured certain things but they don’t actually give you much power other than to put something back onto the open market and so make something be retendered. We’re a long way behind Scotland, both in terms of the way land is talked about politically and the way that it’s seen in terms of the funding and support that’s available to community organisations who want to buy or acquire land and yet, in terms of anything even halfway smelling of land reform getting into Westminster.
Rebecca: Kate, Shared Assets works closely with communities, so do you have any success stories you can share with us around where communities have taken ownership and have been able to transform the way that that land is used and helped start to deliver some of these really important environmental and social outcomes that are so important as we transition towards net zero?
Kate: Yeah, I mean there are some really wonderful examples out there and we can’t take credit for any of them. It’s not our work. We work alongside some of these people. I mentioned the Ecological Land Co-op earlier and they’re doing really amazing work in terms of bringing smallholder farmers getting roots into farming for people without farming backgrounds, reinventing the small farm and remediating land. One of the classic asset transfer examples is the folks who took over Hebden Bridge Town Hall which was an old council town hall and they have really revived that as the absolute heart of the community. You’ve got places like Hill Holt Wood in Lincolnshire which is a million-pound turnover social enterprise doing lots of work with young people around forestry, building new houses and all sorts of things. There’s Fordhall Farm which was a standard, tenanted, organic farm that was in real trouble and went out to its community and was the first community-owned farm in England.
Rebecca: What’s the secret sauce in all of this? Is it that there were really engaged people in the communities that drove that forward or was there something else that happened that helped that materialise?
Kate: What I was going to say was all of those are really different examples but what I think they all have in common is a huge amount of determination from, often, quite a small number of people who are able to galvanise a large amount of community support. One of the other examples I was going to mention was Coin Street Community Builders in London where the 13 acres of land on the Southbank in London, including the OXO Tower, are now owned by a not-for-profit community-controlled company. It took a seven-year campaign to make that happen. With almost all of these things, it took a huge determination and huge passion. I just heard about a community centre project that I worked on about ten years ago in Bungay in Suffolk which has finally just been built. Yeah, that cheesy, old quote about a small committed group of people can change the world. It might not be true about changing the world but it’s certainly necessary for community land projects. I think one of the really big problems that we have systemically is that we have these good examples and you can wave them like little flags but they’re not replicable because you can’t replicate that passion, that determination and that sheer pig-headedness sometimes of just not taking no for an answer. That’s why we do need systemic change and we need to create a land system that is much more focused on the common good all around so that you don’t just have to have certain people putting their entire lives into trying to get bits of land or certain buildings into more productive and generative use.
Rebecca: Malcolm, from the research that you’ve been doing, have you seen any particular key ingredients where this democratisation is opening up? It is obviously those people in the community that are actually driving this forward. Are there other elements that you’ve seen at play here as well?
Malcolm: Yeah, you do need a healthy resident community that’s willing to roll up their sleeves and also have the wherewithal to do that but also, I suppose the difference north of the border, and this is where I shoehorn rapidly back to what I was talking about before, is there are legislative tools that can make a big difference. The example that I’ve written about a little bit is the Bellfield Church in Portobello on the outskirts of Edinburgh. That was an old church that was going to be sold to a private developer. The community had already lost one old church to private development and they wanted to keep this. It was just at the time when there was a bit of legislation called the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 which expanded the Right of First Refusal across the whole of Scotland. That right used to just be in rural Scotland and it was just at the sweet spot of when this right was coming on stream. In Portobello, without wanting to sound flippant, there were some smart, well-to-do people there who were architects, lawyers and there was actually someone who was involved at the Development Trusts Association Scotland who were able to get involved and drive that forward. So luck, timing and the right people – all of these things can be crucial.
Matt: So I think just to wrap up, what should we be asking our listeners to consider in terms of supporting shared use and democratisation of land in a bid to tackle net zero? What could they be doing beyond maybe managing their gardens in a different way? Thinking of commons land, shared land and shared assets, what would you be recommending they do next?
Malcolm: In terms of the Scottish context, schemes always get looked on more favourably in the event of a challenge somewhere down the track, or funding, or whatever when people have been more proactive rather than reactive. If you’re reacting to what’s perceived as nimbyism or something like that, then whether it’s the local press, whether it’s potential funders, or whether it’s a legislative scheme, that will end up rubbing against what you’re trying to do. So if you’ve got something that is a thorn in the side of your local community, it’s better to do something sooner rather than later. I think that would be my key point. Now there will be times when you can’t but react and I can think of some community schemes, including some community energy schemes, that have reacted and been formed out of adversity but also if you can get ahead of the game... and admittedly, that does, as I say, rely on people being switched on to this, listening to podcasts like this one [laughter] and working out what options are available to them.
Matt: Fantastic and Kate, you’ve got the final word.
Kate: The final word would probably be one of the things that are probably one of my first words normally which is it does all go back to land and actually if you have land, whether you’re a church, or a doctor’s surgery, or a hospital, or a local authority, or in a university, you do have the power to do stuff with that land that can have a huge impact. If you don’t have land, like most of us don’t have land... yet, as Malcolm says, being really aware of the land in your local area and thinking how that could be used more productively, more generatively... better for the common good and seeing if you can get together with some people to try and make that happen. Sometimes you’re pushing at an open door and if the people with land and the people without land are both thinking about it, then you’re much more likely to be able to meet in the middle.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Fantastic. Kate and Malcolm, thank you very much indeed. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Malcolm: No, thank you.
Kate: Thank you. Yeah, it was fun.
Matt: I hope you might both be able to stick around for just a few more minutes to play our favourite game which is Future or Fiction? If you’re willing, then I will hand over.
Malcolm: I’m willing but I’ve got absolutely no idea what I’ve agreed to [laughter].
Kate: Yeah [laughter].
Matt: Ready and willing. Okay, over to you, Fraser.
Fraser: Yes, yes, thanks very much, Matt. So Future or Fiction? for our esteemed guests and for the uninitiated, is a game where I present the panel with a brand new technology of some sort and you have to decide whether you think it’s real, i.e. you think it’s the future, or if you think it’s fiction, i.e. I’ve just pulled it out of my backside. So this technology in today’s episode is called Don’t Be a Grass.
[Music flourish and low, steady beat]
That’s Don’t Be a Grass. Rule number one. So lots of technologies mimicking or based on natural habitats have been designed in the effort to combat the climate emergency but how about this? Scientists have designed an artificial lawn grass that, rather than typical plastic grass, is made up of a special absorbent material that can capture CO2 from the air more efficiently than regular grass or leaves. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Who wants to open the batten?
Rebecca: So I have a clarifying question. I always have a clarifying question.
Matt: Yeah, you do, yeah [laughter].
Fraser: And I never have a clarifying answer [laughter].
Rebecca: So this is a synthetic material that you’re saying or it’s a natural material?
Fraser: Synthetic, yes.
Rebecca: A synthetic material that basically does what a tree does but it looks like grass and is more efficient?
Fraser: Yes, you get it.
Rebecca: Okay.
Matt: Eco-friendly Astroturf?
Fraser: Basically, yeah.
Rebecca: But more than eco-friendly.
Fraser: No maintenance. You just put it down and it works. What do the guests think?
Matt: We need to hand over to the guests, yeah. They’ll be far more informed than we are [laughter].
Rebecca: Yeah, we definitely do.
Fraser: Have you had any huge land buy-outs to plant some fake grass yet?
Malcolm: Not yet [laughter]. Just to get the conversation rolling, I’m going to go with fiction and also, I’m wondering in terms of the sum cost of making this treatment. I don’t know and so I’m going to go fiction.
Fraser: Okay, sharp and to the point. Thank you.
Kate: I was thinking maybe fact just because it feels like one of those things that... people love a technological solution to something that is actually relatively straightforward. I can imagine someone with a pitch deck making a case where actually, this is going to be really low maintenance.
Malcolm: I can too, actually [laughter].
Kate: You’ll have come up with this great thing. It’s much more efficient than grass. You never have to mow it. It’s really low maintenance and there are no leaves to rake.
Matt: It’s better than grass, yeah.
Kate: Yeah, and that actually, it feels like one of those steps into this potential dystopian future of being completely hermetically sealed off from the natural world. So I, unfortunately, think it’s fact.
Fraser: Fair do’s. A little bit of Elon Musk, no need to build this and so we’re going to build it, yeah.
Kate: Exactly [laughter].
Matt: You can imagine the pitch now.
Fraser: Matt and Becky, where are we with this?
Matt: Yeah, I’m split. I’m completely convinced by Kate’s argument there which [laughter] is just the kind of thing that Silicone Valley would have gobbled up five or ten years ago and thrown hundreds of millions of pounds into its development but is it technically possible? I’m going to go fiction. I’m going to sit in Malcolm’s camp even though I’m British or Kate could be right.
Rebecca: I’m also struggling this week because I think about our last episode where I was so convinced that it just wouldn’t exist because of the practical limitations and we realised very quickly that engineers don’t always design stuff that will be useful in the real world, even though it works in the lab. So part of me wants to think, okay, I could buy into that. On the other hand, do I think that people who are creating a synthetic replacement for grass care that much about carbon capture...
Matt: No.
Rebecca: ...as opposed to other features? So it’s a hard one this week. What did you go for, Matt?
Matt: Fiction.
Rebecca: Yeah, I’ll go future [laughter].
Matt: Split.
Fraser: Okay, so we’ve got two and two. We’ve got a gender divide on the panel today.
Matt: I’ve got a lot riding on this one now.
Fraser: Okay, so we’re locking that in. That’s Matt for fiction. Am I right?
Matt: Yeah.
Fraser: Matt and Malcolm for fiction. Becky and Kate for future. The answer is... fiction.
Matt: Yes!
Malcolm: Yay!
Fraser: Don’t Be a Grass is fiction, although scientists in the US did design fake plastic trees - #radiohead – a few years back which never really took off. Fake long grass as a more environmentally friendly carbon capture and alternative hasn’t caught on just yet. I think most people just plant grass.
[Music flourish]
Matt: I mean they could just make normal Astroturf but make it white to kind of reflect the heat but, anyway, it’s fiction. I don’t know why I’m critiquing it [laughter]... #Albinoeffect [laughter]. I got that one in [laughter].
Fraser: Good stuff.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Thanks to Kate and Malcolm for another fascinating discussion. I hope you both enjoyed it.
Kate: Yes, thank you very much for inviting me.
Malcolm: Yeah, absolutely brilliant. Thanks so much.
Matt: Just to remind you all, we’re at a new Twitter handle. We’re @LocalZeroPod and if you want to engage with the discussion from today or any other episodes, please do so by linking us in and we’d be more than happy to connect with you. Until then, it’s thank you for listening and goodbye.
Rebecca: Bye.
Kate: Bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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