Reform?

My house faces straight onto the street; as I sit here at my desk in my laboratory, strangers walk past less than two metres away. In summer, I can hear their conversations; when I speak on the phone they can hear mine. Summer and winter, they can look in and see me. That's the case for many homes in Scotland. It's fairly normal.

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003, chapter 2, paragraph 6(1)(b)(iv), grants me the right to exclude the public from land which:

...comprises, in relation to a house or any of the places mentioned in paragraph (a)(ii) above, sufficient adjacent land to enable persons living there to have reasonable measures of privacy in that house or place and to ensure that their enjoyment of that house or place is not unreasonably disturbed...

but the Act does not define how large an area this is. Fortunately for me, the Sheriff at Perth has now done so. He's decided that Ms Ann Gloag is within her rights to fence off an area enclosed by 'a mile' of fence. Now, I don't know the exact layout of this fence, but assuming it to be even roughly rectilinear it encloses an area of sixteen hectares or forty acres.And, of course, if this is so, the average distance from any part of the house to any part of the fence must be of the order of 200 metres.

Ah, you say, but she owns it. That, according to the act, makes no difference whatever. 'Paragraph (a)(ii)', mentioned above, says:

'...a caravan, tent or other place affording a person privacy or shelter...'

In other words, a person is entitled to exactly the same degree of privacy - neither more nor less - when wild camping up in the hills as when in their own home.

Which means I now have the right, thanks to this ruling, to exclude the public not merely from the pavement outside my house, not merely from the street outside my house, but from the houses and gardens across the street and well into the field beyond. Motorists wishing to travel between Dalbeattie and Kirkcudbright will have to divert via Castle Douglas. I have the right to exclude my neighbours from their homes, not merely on either side, but for the next twenty houses up both Main Street and Church Road. All the residents of Spout Row and Bakery Street will have to leave, and the bottom end of the village, from my house right down to the bridge, will have to be abandoned.

Thanks to the ruling of the learned sheriff, there is room now for only five dwelling houses in the whole of Edinburgh's New Town, dotted in splendid isolation along the ridge of George Street, and the whole of the rest of the New Town must be closed off to the public to allow them 'reasonable measures of privacy'.

Perhaps the sheriff didn't really mean that? Perhaps he meant that Ms Gloag is entitled to greater privacy than I am? If so, on what basis in law, and with what equity?

Let's be clear about this: if every farmer in Scotland is permitted to exclude the public from sixteen hectares surrounding his own house and surrounding each of his workers' cottages, then the 'right to roam' is dead, and the land reform act is not worth the paper it is printed on. And if a farm worker's cottage is not entitled to sixteen hectares, on what basis is Ms Gloag?

The alternative is for the law to say that the rich are entitled to greater privacy than the poor. Is that reform? Is that what we want, in Scotland, in the twenty-first century?