Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) role as stewards of the national forest and land estate involves the acquisition and disposal of land as part of an asset management approach.

Acquisition and disposals are undertaken for a variety of purposes aligned to FLS’ statutory remit to undertake sustainable forest management. Please refer to the facts and figures at the bottom of this page for an account of acquisitions and disposals undertaken to date. Since its establishment as an Agency in April 2019, FLS has acquired a total of 7,344 hectares and disposed on 5,868 hectares. In March 2025 approximately 630,000 hectares were under FLS management.

Disposals

The Forestry and Land Management (Scotland) Act 2018 grants FLS the “power to dispose of land.” Asset disposals generally fall into three categories:

• Surplus assets – the sale of redundant or vacant buildings, yard space and small areas of land to help resolve title and boundary anomalies.
• Portfolio management - the sale of productive land as part of a property portfolio management approach that helps to improve the efficiency and profitability of land management operations.
• Forced sales - disposals where FLS has no option to hold the property given legal provision in relation to utilities, transport, electricity infrastructure, crofting land or community asset transfer.  

Proceeds from the sale of these assets are held in reserves and allocated for reinvestment in line with approved business cases for estate investment, including in the form of land acquisitions.

Acquisitions

The Forestry and Land Management (Scotland) Act 2018 grants FLS the powers to enter into arrangements, acquire land by agreement and compulsory purchase land.

Recent years have seen an emphasis on acquisition of land for the purposes of woodland creation as set out in the FLS 2021 – 2026 Acquisition Strategy. This land is now subject to an ongoing planting and forest establishment programme.

Our teams are also actively working on forest restocking associated with our timber harvesting programme. This combines to mean that FLS is not looking to proactively make significant acquisitions of land for woodland creation or other purposes unless this would bring operational efficiencies, for example by resolving access issues or land disputes. Our policy and approach to land acquisitions will evolve, although the priority at present is for FLS’s limited resources to be focused on delivering benefits from public land already under management. 

At the same time, several national developments as set out in National Planning Framework 4 and various renewable energy generation projects are being enabled on public land in future years leading to a reduction in the productive capacity of the forest and land estate. FLS is open to exploring models of delivering compensatory planting with project developers to help offset this impact, including through the acquisition of land.

Facts and Figures

Table 1 provides a summary of the area and value of land bought and sold since 2005 (PDF)

Table 2 provides details, since the re-positioning programme began in 2005/06, of individual acquisitions (PDF) These figures have been extracted from centrally held files. Figures have been rounded.

Table 3 provides details, since the re-positioning programme began in 2005/06, of individual sales (PDF).These figures have been extracted from centrally held files. Figures have been rounded.