DESPITE the best of intentions, the Scottish Land Commission’s paper on capping the size of landholdings could easily lead the land reform debate down a blind alley ("Land ownership cap to boost equality", The Herald, March 23). Now published on the commission’s website, the paper is admittedly honest enough to acknowledge the difficulty of imposing an arbitrary limit on new acquisitions and admits that dealing with existing large landholdings will be straying into “much less certain legal territory”.

Once again, the land reform debate seems to be focusing on rural land where acreages are large and values low. Scottish Government figures show that only 18 per cent of Scotland’s population live in rural areas; agriculture and forestry account for one per cent of GDP and 2.4 per cent of employment. With a primarily rural approach to land reform, the vast majority of the population will regard it of little relevance to their own lives. At the same time, it is hard to see how limits such as those quoted for Hungary and Lithuania, 300 and 500 hectares respectively, can ever be enforced in rural Scotland where estates currently run into tens of thousands of hectares, and using such figures in an urban context would be meaningless.