The bus pass (National Concessionary Travel) scheme has been of huge benefit to older people in Scotland, yet it is only of value where a suitable bus service is available.  Where it is not, people who are on low incomes, have mobility difficulties or health conditions – and sometimes all of these – can experience severe isolation and loneliness. 

This problem isn’t exclusive to rural areas; a lack of transport options can also blight urban communities, particularly in winter when steeply rising pavements can become iced and dangerous.

Age Scotland’s ‘Still Waiting’ campaign calls on the Scottish Government to adjust the Concessionary Travel Scheme so the bus pass can be used on Community Transport Services.  Across Scotland there are worrying signs of commercial bus operators withdrawing from routes on the grounds of cost, cutting off even more older people.  Community Transport Services, often run by local charities, are crucial for filling these gaps; from community mini-buses to door-to-door collection and drop off schemes.  Yet these are themselves vulnerable to dwindling funding.

By including Community Transport in the bus pass scheme, we can encourage growth in these services.  We’re also asking for full reimbursement to them of every fare as Community Transport providers, unlike commercial operators who receive 67% reimbursement, can’t cross-subsidise services from their profits.

Research
In August 2012 social research company The Lines Between was commissioned by Age Scotland to conduct research into community transport. This aimed to identify the role of community transport in sustaining the health and well-being of older people; the current and projected numbers of older people using community transport; and an estimate of savings to the public purse that an extension of the Concessionary Travel Pass to community transport options may result in.

David Ross, The Herald, 21st May

There will be those on both sides of the land reform debate who will have been disappointed by the interim report of the Land Reform Review Group, published this week.

Those looking for hints of a radical change to the pattern of land ownership will have read the report in vain. There is effectively nothing on tenant farmers, the Crown Estate, common good land, taxation and succession. The prospect of a Land Agency is mooted and will be further explored. There seems little appetite for legislation extending and strengthening the community right to buy established in the Land Reform Scotland Act 2003 –which in truth for all but crofting communities was only ever a right of first refusal.

Meanwhile landowners and their representatives who oppose further land reform measures will not be encouraged by the report’s tone. Their organisation, Scottish Land & Estates, “remains disappointed at the persisting view that the pattern of land ownership in Scotland is unfair and unjust”. Also: “Despite our members’ transparency, the report still refers to a need for greater scrutiny of private landowners. We feel this is totally unjustified.”

It will be another year before we see the group’s final report, but many are raising eyebrows that within a few weeks the two vice-chairs appointed to the three-strong group have gone. Last month Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter resigned for personal reasons. On Monday it was announced Dr Sarah Skerrat will also be going. 

A senior researcher and head of rural society research at Scotland’s Rural University College (SRUC), she led a study into community ownership in 2011. It found buyouts were contributing to the repopulation of rural Scotland. Dr Skerrat explained her resignation was due to her promotion to scientific and strategic lead of a 30-strong research group at SRUC.

Between them Prof Hunter and Dr Skerrat knew a lot about the review group’s area of study and although there are replacements and advisers, chairwoman Dr Alison Elliot, the first woman to be Church of Scotland Moderator, will miss them.

Already there are those convinced that, despite the reasons given, a matter of principle must have been at issue behind one or both resignations. 

A narrative was gaining currency that there had been more to Prof Hunter’s departure. While many were surprised by the wide-ranging remit given to the group by ministers, described as “deliberately biased against landowners”, they were equally surprised by his appointment. He had been an outspoken critic of the Scottish Government’s apparent lack of commitment to land reform during the SNP’s first term of office. He was seen by many, particularly in the Highlands and Islands, as giving the review group credibility.

The fact he had personal reasons for standing down will count for little as Dr Skerrat’s departure will add force to that more interesting narrative. This will hold they went because they were frustrated in their efforts to take the group in a more radical direction.

Attention will be paid to Alex Salmond’s address to Community Land Scotland’s conference on Skye next month to see what prominence land reform will be afforded in the remaining three years of this administration.

Kevin Curley, Third Sector, 7 May 2013 

On Friday 22 March, the worst storm to hit the Isle of Arran in living memory blew in from the Kintyre peninsula, bringing heavy snow and so much ice that power lines were brought down and the lights went off for five days.

I was sheltering on the eastern side of the island, keeping warm with a log fire and cooking on an anthracite stove in the village of Kildonan, where little snow fell. Most people were not so lucky, having long ago become completely dependent on electricity.

Life for a week without electricity in freezing temperatures tests individuals, families and communities. On Arran, the village halls and the villagers who run them proved a crucial part of the response. It was the members of village hall committees who identified people at severe risk and got them evacuated to the mainland. It was to the village hall that people went in search of information and the chance to get warm in a room heated by a mobile gas heater and to have a hot drink prepared on a camping gas stove. On the west side of the island, where the snow drifts closed the roads for three days, the Mountain Rescue team took donated food in and village hall volunteers distributed it to people stuck in their houses.

The villages were connected, one by one, to mobile generators brought from the mainland. As this happened, it was these same volunteers who ensured that people in urgent need of power in their homes, such as those with chronic health conditions, were treated as priorities and that healthy neighbours were persuaded to keep their washing machines off.

I have been to Arran many times in the past 20 years but, as a hill walker, I had never really been aware of village halls before. I live in a large Derbyshire village where there are many meeting places – church halls, cafes, a library, youth centres – and no village hall. But in many parts of England, the village hall is a vital part of local infrastructure. Deborah Clarke, the rural community buildings officer at Action With Communities in Rural England, tells me there are just short of 10,000 halls in England, worth more than £3bn, run almost entirely by volunteers, and used, on average, for 36 hours each week. The activities they host are as varied as life itself, with particular emphases on families with young children, clubs for older people and leisure and fitness classes.

 Cuts to public funding have not hurt the revenue budgets of most halls, which are sustained by room lettings and fundraising. But most local authorities – Derbyshire is one exception – have cut their capital grants.

As a result, more than 1,000 halls now need urgent repairs, and some are closing. If the great Arran storm of 2013 teaches us anything, it’s that we should sustain our village hall infrastructure. Those living in rural communities could find themselves grateful for it if a major storm or natural disaster strikes.

Kevin Curley is a voluntary sector adviser

Saviours of Glasgow’s last wild place – Douglas Peacock and Emily Cutts, Glasgow

Is North Kelvin Meadow and Childrens’ Wood the last wild green space in the West End of Glasgow? Douglas and Emily have fought tooth and nail to save this formerly neglected space for the local community. Working on the assumption that in order to protect a space the community has to value it, they have organised many events that have attracted hundreds of families. Those who benefit from it tell us ‘the land is now rich with wildlife, free from litter and an antidote to manicured spaces around the city’. It is an important wild space for children to explore safely and learn about nature and has its very own forest school. Glasgow City Council has suggested it will sell the land. Residents are highly critical of the planning process. ‘A deprived area of Glasgow would lose a beautiful and natural place for future generations and one that Emily and Douglas have worked tirelessly to protect,’ says our source. 

• A short film about North Kelvin Meadow

• The website: The Childrens Wood

Vote now – voting closes 24 May

http://www.guardian.co.uk/observer-ethical-awards/unsung-local-hero-shortlist

Douglas Dickie, Rutherglen Reformer 

A COMMUNITY group has claimed that Castlemilk could be missing out on millions of pounds of investment if Glasgow City Council build a windpark on Cathkin Braes.

The Castlemilk and Carmunnock Windpark Trust (CCWT) say that their plans for a wind farm on the site could generate up to £8million over the next 20 years for the scheme.

But they claim they have been frozen out of the process by the council, who want to lease the land to an energy company instead.

The CCWT was set up eight years ago to look at sites in and around the Braes area that would be suitable for renewable energy projects. The group received planning permission in 2009, but the council refused to grant a land lease.

The group has spent up to £400,000 carrying out surveys, reports and consultations, and even has access to the national grid. The plan was to sell electricity generated on the site and reinvest the money in community projects in the Castlemilk and Carmunnock areas.

However, the group claims Glasgow City Council want to lease the land to Scottish Southern. The council recently won a court battle to build the turbine on what had previously been common good land.

CCWT claim that the council intend on using all the information they gathered but have only offered 100 per cent of the council’s profits from Scottish Southern for one year, and a further 10 per cent cut for the four years after.

Margo Smith, the Project Development Manager for CCWT, reckons that could be a total of just £250,000.

She said: “It is the local community that will be losing out. The trust could have generated between six and £8million a year. We have tried to negotiate but the council have made it clear they don’t want us involved. We have done basically everything for them but we won’t even make back what we have spent doing surveys and reports.”

Chair of the trust board, Ken McCready, said they may have accepted an offer of £750,000, which was what an independent review valued the initial project at, but that no concrete offer was on the table.

He added: “I wouldn’t want to put a figure on what this might be worth, but it would certainly be an worthwhile income for the local community. We are now waiting on the council to come back and make a factual offer.”

Mr McCready confirmed that CCWT had identified potential other sites for their windfarm, but new projects were at a very early stage.

A spokesperson for Glasgow City Council said they couldn’t comment on the individual points raised.

They said: “At this stage, the council does not have a deal on a lease – so it is impossible for it to make a final cash offer to the trust, which is what it has asked for. We intend to take the income over the first five years of the project and have offered the trust 100 per cent of that value in the first year and 10 per cent in each of the next four.”

Ninian Stuart,  Reforesting Scotland and the Centre for Stewardship

To see a flyer for this book click here

It came in the night and transformed the landscape. It took a while to take it in – one neighbour’s chimney had fallen through their kitchen skylight and another neighbour had two rows of pan-tiles ripped off their roof. Gradually the true extent of the storm became clear. Nearby Markinch station was closed for three days, with 900 trees down along the line. Falkland Estate lost an estimated 10,000 trees, and those living in the heart of the estate spent three days without power. 

Devastating, transforming, invigorating…The devastation showed the power of nature, if not an act of God. Whilst it is impossible to prove whether or not the hand of man caused this particular storm, scientific evidence is clear and strong that human carbon emissions are contributing to a rise in extreme weather events from high winds to rising tides and melting glaciers. And certainly Falkland, Fife, Scotland, Europe and most of the world experienced more than normal extreme weather events in 2012.

Back to reality on the ground, the capricious wind of 3rd January transformed our landscape, tearing out trees of all sizes and driving a wedge through whole plantations. A young plantation of young Sitka spruce was taken out whilst some great cedars next to it were left untouched. A few old oaks in the policy woodlands were lost whilst a battalion of Scots pine on the black hill was wiped out. It seemed like annihilation – but as time passed and the shock wore off, the storm opened up possibilities for new growth and helped change the way we do business on the estate, learning a lesson or two from nature. 

We brought in some big kit contractors to deal with the storm’s mass demolition but also turned the crisis into an opportunity to manage the process directly – our new forester and five young unemployed lads on a Community Jobs Scheme were worth more than their weight in gold. By early spring, our new team had begun to open up paths and restore the landscape through the generosity of new volunteers and contributions of money from those keen to help. In a real sense, the storm not only transformed the physical landscape but also provided the conditions for us to experiment with a new economics of the forest – which involved working with nature and with community.  

In fact 2012 started out and ended up being an invigorating year. The pace of change was rapid and the inspiration humbling – from those who rolled up their sleeves as volunteers to the couple that sponsored the “After the Storm” installation. This book tells the story in the context of the forest and the community that love it:

• the small acts of heroism and solidarity in the aftermath of the storm;

• the volunteers and trainees who stepped up to the plate;

• the potential of the forest to provide a therapeutic and inspiring landscape;

• and the ways people rallied around to build huts and create art from the devastation.

It is also a story of a community rediscovering the power and beauty of a woodland and realising the transformative power of forest culture and creative teamwork. Without a doubt, 2012 will long be remembered at Falkland as the Year of the Storm.

Extract from Land Matters – The Blog and Website of Andy Wightman

Scottish Ministers are 220 days late in making a decision as to whether to register an interest submitted by a community group Durness in relation to the Cape Wrath lighthouse.

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 contains provision in Part 2 for communities to apply to Scottish Ministers to register an interest in land in rural Scotland (any land outwith settlements of over 10,000 population). Once registered in the Register of Community Interests in Land, the land cannot be sold by the owner without the community having a prior right to buy it at an independent valuation. The Act lays down the procedures to be followed.

I remain unimpressed with this piece of legislation. Having reviewed its operation in 2007, I came to the conclusion that it was not fit for purpose and discuss the problems at greater length in Chapter 27 of The Poor Had No Lawyers. One of the criticisms I have of the legislation is reflected in the title of Chapter 27 of the book Bureaucratic Nit-picking and Fine Legal Arguments. The Act is currently under review by the Land Reform Review Group.

The Act is excessively bureaucratic and legalistic. For example, Scottish Ministers are charged with numerous responsibilities. Ignoring their legal obligations (e.g making certain information available) and their administrative tasks (e.g. sending letters to people), Ministers have over 20 discretionary decisions to make in each individual case – decisions which will determine whether or not a community is successful in acquiring land. And one community in the north west of Scotland is currently exposed to one of the most inequitable aspects of the legislation.

In 2005 Durness Development Group Ltd. first registered an interest in a parcel of 45ha of land owned by the Northern Lighthouse Board – Cape Wrath lighthouse and surrounding land (Registration No. CB00028). As can be seen from the map below, the land is bounded to the south by  15,000 acres of land owned by the Secretary of State for Defence and the MoD has been keen to add this small but significant corner to their larger estate. The interest was registered in January 2006 and expired in January 2011 (registrations only last for 5 years before having to be re-registered).

In August 2012, the community applied to re-register the land once more (Registration No. CB00147). Following receipt of an application, Scottish Ministers first have to validate it to check that it is in order and that the correct documents have been completed. This takes not more than a day or two. The Durness application was received on 1 August 2012 and entered on the Register as “pending a decision” on 3 August 2012. And this is where matters get interesting.

Section 37(17) of the Act states that “Ministers shall, within 63 days of receiving an application“, notify a community body of their decision on whether to register an interest or not. The 63 day time limit expired on 12 October 2012. It is now 283 days since Scottish Ministers accepted the application from Durness Development Group Ltd. and no decision has been issued.

Now the legislation is very clear about the timetable within which community bodies must do the things they are obliged to do, such as hold ballots and submit offers. There is no room for any slippage and, if they fail to abide by the deadlines set for them, their application will fail. But Scottish Ministers, who also have to come to decisions under various sections of the Act (such as inform the community within 63 days of their decision) are protected from such failures. On the 63 day rule, Section 37(19) states that “Any failure to comply with the time limit specified in subsection (17) above does not affect the validity of anything done under this section.” And so Scottish Ministers can take as long as they like. As they can in respect of their powers under Sections 49(6), 51(7) and 59(2).

Of the 49 other applications that have been accepted, 41 have had decisions taken within the 63 day limit. A further 7 have been over the limit by up to 20 days, another by 22 days and the longest slippage has been 77 days in the case of application CB00127 from North West Mull Community Woodland Company Ltd.

An overshoot of 220 days is unprecedented.

There has been a lot of media attention devoted to the proposed acquisition of the land by the Secretary of State for Defence.

9 January 2013 Fears over Access to Cape Wrath

2 February 2013 Cape Wrath will not be closed to public, MP says

16 March 2013 Hands off Cape Wrath

But the MoD will not be able to buy this land from the Northern Lighthouse Board if Scottish Ministers grant the community a right to buy and yesterday it was reported that the MoD had withdrawn its bid to acquire the land. Cue much celebration from Ramblers Scotland, Durness Community Council and the local MSP, Rob Gibson.

But why has no-one sought to seek an explanation as to why Scottish Ministers have taken so long to reach their decision? The MoD are an irrelevance as a potential purchases if the right to buy is granted.

Ministers are now over 7 months late. What’s the problem?

A Scottish Government spokesman said:

“Durness Development Group Ltd has submitted an application to register a community interest in land at Cape Wrath that includes the Lloyd’s Buildings and some stables, which is currently being considered by Ministers (CB00147).  Ministers are continuing to consider the case and are having ongoing discussions with officials.

“Under section 51(7) of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, failure to comply with the time limit specified for the Ministers’ decision does not affect the validity of the Ministers’ decision to consent or refuse an application.”

David Leask, Evening Times, 8 May 2013

GLASGOW charities and voluntary groups could be forced to close after landlords increased rents by almost 300,000%.

City Property, The Evening Times can reveal, has just ordered one of the city’s most vibrant independent community centres to quit its base because it can’t pay the rent. It has told the Kinning Park Complex that payments, including insurance, will leap from £1 to almost £3000 a year – a 299,900% increase.

The community centre – the only one left in the South Side neighbourhood – fears its future is now in doubt. Lindsay Keenan, the not-for-profit facility’s manager, said: “We have been told to quit the building by May 27. City Property says the notice of removal is a formality. But it wants to raise our payments from a £1 a year to nearly £3000 a year.  That may not sound like much but we run on a shoestring.”

The threat to evict the Kinning Park Complex, which operates out of a Edwardian schoolhouse, comes after small businesses in Glasgow’s High Street formed an association to campaign against rent rises imposed by City Property. Many firms, especially small shops, have already shut as the cost of leasing from City Property rises. 

The Aleo – and arm’s length council organisation – was set up to raise income, mostly to cover the interest on a £120million mortgage it took out in 2010 to finance Glasgow City Council’s controversial early retirement pay-offs.

In 2011, City Property came under fire from charities – including Glasgow the Caring City – after it moved to hike rents for those enjoying symbolic peppercorn rents on council-owned premises. Charity and voluntary sector sources believe the landlord held off further efforts to commercialise rents ahead of last year’s council elections. Now – as leases are renewed – it is looking to raise more money.

The Kinning Park Complex was taken over by community volunteers in 1996 after the then newly created Glasgow City Council tried to shut it down.  The council stopped funding the facility but did agree a peppercorn rent, one of many non-commercial leases agreed on an ad-hoc basis over the last few decades. 

Effectively the complex – until now – has enjoyed a hidden subsidy from the council.  City Property is now trying to switch such leases to a commercial basis – leaving third-sector tenants to apply to the council and other sources for alternative funding.  The Kinning Park Complex has been trying to source such funding. But late last month it was issued – out of the blue, it says – with a notice of removal, something City Property describes as “standard documentation”.

Its board didn’t think this was standard. “Your notice of removal,” its members said in a furious joint letter to City Property boss Richard Rae, “came across as a heavy-handed threat to all of the people who use the Kinning Park Complex”.  They added: “We find that shocking, outrageous, irresponsible and completely unacceptable.”

The board said City Property had delayed talks on a long-term lease for six months.  They also claimed that the Aleo had refused to discuss community ownership, a move that could have unlocked the £400,000 the complex needs to fund essential repairs. Today it was claimed the council put the increase in rents on hold before the last local government elections.

SNP councillor Graeme Hendry said: “The issue of City Property squeezing tenants in the voluntary sector to the point of bankruptcy was well documented in 2011, and the Council was rightly criticised.  At a hustings meeting for the 2012 elections, Councillor Matheson [the city’s Labour leader] was heard to promise a review of the issue, but it would seem that now the election is out of the way this has been conveniently forgotten.”

The Kinning Park Complex said its future bookings had been put at risk by the threat to evict the voluntary group from the building.  It said it would hold City Building legally responsible for the loss of business or livelihoods that resulted from this. Mr Keenan reckons the complex needs £400,000 in repairs. “This building has served the community for a century and with a bit of investment it would last another 100 years.”

He added: “From our first look into City Property we have had serious concerns about the entire manner in which this Aleo was set up, the basic rationale for it and the effect of it throughout the city and on organisations such as ours. Our concerns have grown with experience.”

A source close to City Property insisted Kinning Park Complex was the only one of 70 tenants facing new leases to complain.  He insisted a long-term 25-year lease was still on the table for the centre. But he suggested this could be in doubt because the Kinning Park Complex’s funding problems were affecting its prospects of securing a lengthy tenancy. 

He said: “The onus is on the organisation to review the Business Plan thus providing City Property with sufficient comfort to allow the longer term lease to be concluded.” An official spokesman added: “The notice of removal letter sent to Kinning Park Complex CIC was purely an automatic, procedural document – there is no prospect of eviction.  The organisation, like all those on the Concessionary Lease Renewal Programme, was advised that this was standard practice when looking at the renewal of leases. No other organisations have raised this as a matter of concern.”

As Spanish unemployment reaches another record high, the residents of rural Marinaleda could be forgiven for feeling a little smug.

In the small village in deepest Andalusia, the joblessness remains firmly – and almost certainly uniquely within Spain – at zero. With one set of traffic lights, two bars (one jammed with football paraphernalia for the First Division side Seville) and one central avenue lined with of low terraced houses, Marinaleda looks like many villages in western Andalusia.

But huge wall murals depicting the destruction of tanks and weaponry, the binning of Nazi symbols, and a column of workers marching through the fields, are far from the usual graffiti found in such places. Nor do many villages name their sports hall after Che Guevara, or have oversized placards of doves of peace dotted on streets named after left-wing heroes such as Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda.

Marinaleda is run along the lines of a communist Utopia and boasts collectivised lands (1,200 previously unused hectares, seized by a mass land-grab in 1990 from an aristocrat’s estate) which offer every villager the opportunity to work the fields, tending to root crops and olive groves. In Andalusia, where jobs are currently being lost at the rate of about 500 a day, any work is good work.

Marinaleda’s mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, has gained national notoriety and has even been dubbed the “Robin Hood of Spain” after he and a group of labourers refused to pay a supermarket for 10 shopping trolleys filled with food, which they distributed to the area’s food banks, sparking headlines in countries as far away as Iran.

“That was to draw attention to the fact there are so many people in Spain who have a hard time getting enough to eat right now,” says Mr Sánchez Gordillo. “We wanted to say, in the 21st century in Spain, ‘this problem exists’. Gandhi would have supported it.”

But the supermarket “raids” were just the tip of the iceberg for Mr Sánchez Gordillo, who has spent more than 30 years fighting for wealth redistribution via land occupations, cheap housing and co-operatives. In Marinaleda, he has promoted equal wages policies, scrapped the police force and offered mortgages on previously state-owned properties, which cannot be sold on for profit, of just €15 a month.

When asked about the gulf between Spain’s 27.2 per cent unemployment rate – the highest in the EU – and full employment in Marinaleda, the 57-year-old former history teacher and father-of-three, who works unpaid as mayor, says: “It fills me with hope and desperation, both at the same time.”

He says the village is not completely insulated from the country’s severe unemployment, which is only part of Spain’s financial crisis. He cites the cases of young villagers who had been working in the construction industry but were forced to return to Marinaleda after work dried up. But he says he believes Marinaleda is “beating the recession better than elsewhere, thanks to our co-operatives and industries”.

Andalusia’s history is peppered with occupations of latifundias – huge agricultural estates dating back to Roman times – by landless workers. Mr Sánchez Gordillo claims these estates make up about 50 per cent of the region’s land, but are owned by just 2 per cent of Andalusia’s population. He says Andalusia is also covered, now, with dozens of empty industrial estates that are mute testimony to the unemployment that blights the region – one sits just 12 miles away from Marinaleda, where the only visible “green shoots” belonged to weeds flourishing amid the patchwork of rusting streetlights, crumbling service roads and pedestrian crossings leading nowhere.

“It is true we form part of a tradition, but we’re doing something new here too: we’re insisting that natural resources should be at the service of people, that they have a natural right to the land, and that land is not something to be marketed,” says Mr Sánchez  Gordillo. “Food should not be speculated with either. It is a basic human right. We also believe in the [common] sovereignty of [food] as a way of profoundly changing agriculture in the world, not just one particular place.”

He laments that the village’s initiatives are not being adopted elsewhere in the country and even across the world. And it seems Mr Sánchez Gordillo may not be alone in seeing Marinaleda as spearheading a global change “towards a peaceful Utopia” – as the road signs leading into the village pronounce. Support for moderate to hard-left politics is certainly growing in Spain. The Communist-led coalition to which Mr Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT-BAI party belongs, Izquierda Unida (“United Left”), netted 15.6 per cent of the votes in a recent poll, more than double than at the 2011 elections.

With his bushy beard, preference for jeans and Palestinian scarf (which he says he will only remove when they have their own state), Mr Sánchez  Gordillo also cultivates a very different image to the majority of Spain’s politicians. A portrait of Che Guevara, rather than the standard picture of King Juan Carlos, hangs in pride of place in his mayor’s office.

Mr Sánchez  Gordillo believes Spain’s deep recession is the fault of its government. “Unfortunately, this [national] government’s policies have not been directed towards the people’s problems; they were directed towards the banks’ problems,” he says. “People are more important than banks, particularly when the profits are received by a handful of bankers who have speculated with basic human rights. The money they’ve provided doesn’t reach the base of the social pyramid, which is why the economy is paralysed. It’s the small property holders and businesses who have been hurt the most. [We have] six million unemployed and twice that number living in poverty.”

However, like Robin Hood, Mr Sánchez Gordillo’s politics has seen him fall foul of the law. The land appropriations he encourages are illegal, as are the supermarket raids. Imprisoned seven times, he has reportedly survived two assassination attempts by right-wing extremists. Recently he appeared in court over the occupation last summer of military terrain in the sierras south of Seville.

The right-wing newspaper La Razón has reported that Mr Sánchez Gordillo’s government is in debt to the tune of €2.83m (£2.4m), and also quotes sources close to the town as saying there are months of back payments owed to workers in the co-operatives. Other villagers claim, according to La Razón, that “if you don’t go to protest” – as happened recently at another land-grab in the military terrain of Las Turquillas – “then you don’t get a job”. There have been repeated assertions that Mr Sánchez  Gordillo does not share his power and has not held a full village council meeting for 13 months.

But his policies are clearly popular. He has been re-elected by massive majorities in each election since 1979.  “I wish our mayor was like him,” one woman in her forties from a nearby village said as she patiently waited for an audience with Mr Sánchez  Gordillo outside his office.

Though his methods are frequently debated in Spanish media, Mr Sánchez  Gordillo (with some financial support from the regional government) has been able to offer his village three things that much of Spain is desperately wanting: employment, affordable housing, and a greater say in  government. “The most important thing we’ve done here is to struggle and obtain land through peaceful means, and to ensure that housing is a right, not a business,” Mr Sánchez Gordillo concludes. “And as a village we work together, discuss and collaborate together: that’s fundamental for any society, too.”

Ian Cooke has been appointed as vice-chairperson on the Land Reform Review Group, following the decision of Professor James Hunter to step down for personal reasons.

The Review Group, chaired by Dr Alison Elliot, is overseeing a wide ranging review of land reform in Scotland with the key aim of delivering a more successful Scotland with stronger communities and economic growth.

Mr Cooke will bring to the group excellent knowledge and experience in community regeneration and development.

Dr Elliot said:

“It’s been a privilege working with Jim on the Land Reform Review Group. He’s kept our eyes firmly on the challenges of land reform and reminded us continually of our heritage. He has brought a unique kind of insight to our task and we are grateful for the abiding contribution he has made to our investigations.  

“We now look forward to carrying on our work with Ian, who has already made an impact as an adviser to the group and whose experience in community development in urban and rural contexts will enrich the scope of our review.”

Professor Hunter said:

“Due to personal reasons, I regret I am having to stand back from the land review group but wish it well with its deliberations given the importance of the land reform agenda to Scotland. I was pleased to be able to contribute to its work to date. 

“I very much welcome Ian’s appointment which will ensure the community sector’s voice is heard loud and clear in the context of providing the radical ideas the Scottish Government is looking to get from the Land Reform Review Group.”

Ian Cooke said:

“I am delighted to be asked to join the Land Reform Review Group and to be able to build on my role to date as an Advisor. The review presents an exciting opportunity to build on previous land reform, and the work of the LRRG can potentially make a crucial contribution to a future, successful Scotland.  I look forward to being part of the Land Reform Review Group and contributing to the challenge of getting land reform right.”

It is anticipated that the Land Reform Review Group will report in a series of stages to Scottish Ministers, providing consideration of what the outcomes of land reform should be and what reforms are required. By the end of 2013 the Scottish Government would expect a report on any legislative changes that are required to allow this to be taken forward.