The Scottish Government have opened another public consultation on further amendments to the Scottish Land Reform Act, from which the Scottish Access Code draws it's authority.
https://consult.gov.scot/agriculture-and-rural-economy/land-reform-net-zero...
At the last amendment of the act, in 2016, we were told by the Scottish Government that they detected no demand for improvements to public access legislation, despite the glaring, coach and horses size, holes in Scottish Rights of Way legislation. These problems have been well rehearsed on loads of threads on here.
The Access Code allows land managers to shut areas of land for unspecified "management" reasons without notice and this is happening at increasing frequency. Shooting and forestry Estates, in particular, are taking that attitude. These tactics are often accompanied by a simple flat refusal to admit the existence of Core Paths, Rights of Way or permissive paths for which the Estate has been paid to provide by the public purse.
The "Core Paths" legislation, in particular, has turned out to be a bad joke. The main problem compared with England and Wales is the lack of legally accepted public maps of ancient Rights of Way and publicly subsidised permissive paths.
The route to producing a public, legally enforceable, map for Scotland would be to amend the “Core Paths” section of the 2003 Land Reform and Access Act to include all the routes in the National Catalogue of Rights of Way and all publicly subsidised permissive paths, and then require Ordnance Survey to publish as a duty (as the 1949 Act requires for England).
In this latest Consultation most of the questions are about land ownership and land taxation. Everyone probably has an opinion about the heavily subsidised upper classes evading tax, but Andy Wightman's blog has some reasoned argument. (https://andywightman.scot/archives/4845).
We don't need to answer every question in the Consultation. There is no direct request for Access opinions (they are trying to avoid the subject), but there are two open ended questions. Section 8 of the Consultation covers , "New conditions on those in receipt of public funding for land based activity". Question 28 is a free form box. I would have thought that any Estate in receipt of public subsidy should be able to demonstrate a high degree of compliance with the Scottish Access Code. Question 44 in section 12 is an open ended "Do you have any additional ideas or proposals for Land Reform in Scotland? "
If you have had any disconcerting access experiences in Scotland in the last 20 years please tell the Scottish Government that the current set up isn't working. If you live in Scotland tell your MSP. If you live elsewhere tell the MSP for the area where your trouble happened. You can trace MSP's on here; https://www.parliament.scot/msps .
If you are a member of MCofS, Ramblers Scotland or Scotways please badger them into responding to the Consultation instead of sitting on their hands like they did in 2016. If you don't ask you don't get.