Collaboration can lead to success for everyone

Helping It Happen has been launched to underline the role landowners can play in helping the countryside to flourish. Picture: Robert Perry

Scotland has experienced a momentous year and there is little doubt that the appetite for change is significant in many walks life.

At the heart of all change is the desire to build positive and productive relationships for the future and that is something those of us who live and work in rural Scotland know only too well.

In short, more gets done if you work together.

That spirit of co-operation is at the heart of a new campaign by Scotland’s landowners and estates.

“Helping It Happen” has been launched by Scottish Land & Estates to underline the importance of partnership and the role landowners can play in helping the countryside to flourish.

At its core, the campaign will aspire to demonstrate how landowners and estates are ready and willing to do their bit to make rural Scotland a better place.

All too often estates are perceived as being remote and detached from communities. It would be absurd to suggest that a very small number of estates do not fall into this category. We must recognise that there are people – as there are in all sections of society – who will feel more comfortable keeping themselves to themselves.

However, I would suggest that the overwhelming majority of estates can – and are – very useful to everyone with an interest in promoting social, economic and environmental progress.

It is, however, up to landowners to send out a strong signal that we are ready to be willing partners and help break down some of the perceived barriers between them and communities.

We can help make a difference particularly in areas such as tourism and leisure, food and drink, energy, agriculture, housing and the environment.

Of course, estate businesses want to be – and need to be – successful in their own right. But while they can get it right for themselves, they can also enable and facilitate success for others. Supporting rural success is a key concept of our approach.

There are examples of this already happening. On Penicuik Estate, the restoration of Penicuik House has made a vital contribution to employment and training by partnering with the Scottish Lime Centre, developing a training facility for 600 people per year in traditional stone craft and helping to address the chronic decline in the number of skilled construction craftspeople within the conservation industry.

Ballindalloch Estate on Speyside, Banffshire, is putting the finishing touches to Scotland’s first single estate distillery.

The distillery will add to the tourism and food and drink offering in the heart of Scotland’s whisky country. The distillery now employs four local people full-time, in addition to the local tradesmen who have invested a huge amount of time and effort bringing the distillery into existence.

The estate has worked closely with the enterprise and other relevant agencies to help develop this project.

Recently, Scottish Land & Estates members published a landowners’ charter which has four main pillars – a clear undertaking to be open, inclusive, enabling and responsible.

The charter recognises that there is always scope for improvement in the way landowners operate in a modern Scotland.

We are responsive to constructive criticism and it is right we do everything we can to ensure land-based businesses and estates operate to the highest standards and in an open and transparent manner.

Equally, “Helping it Happen” should demonstrate that landowners and estates are worthwhile partners and are there to do business with.

We have seen, for example, positive results at the East Neuk Estates Group in Fife which has developed very constructive relationships with local authorities and decision-makers in the area, particularly on planning, which is pivotal to economic development.

At national level, we continually make the case that landowners are very well positioned to help deliver government policy on the ground.

Renewable energy is an obvious sector and we are seeing an increasing interest in projecting hydro projects.

Closer to home, I have been very glad, through Annandale Estates, to have been involved in the Johnstonebridge Centre and Community Development Trust which has brought four plots of local land into community ownership.

The estate worked with the trust providing guidance on purchasing the plots which are now to be used for allotments and affordable housing. As part of the project, the estate was also involved in providing land for the building of a new community hall and outdoor sports facilities.

In the immediate aftermath of the Scottish referendum, there was much comment on how divergent opinions in Scotland could be reconciled and people brought together.

“Helping it Happen” is an initiative to show the tremendous opportunities to deliver more benefit to rural Scotland. Perhaps more than ever before it is time to move on from adversarial standpoints to working in partnership and collaboratively.

• David Johnstone is chairman of Scottish Land & Estates www.scottishlandandestates.co.uk