Tenants’ time limited for award

COMPENSATION: Amnesty to claim for improvements will run out

Tenant farmers across Scotland are being slow to react to the special amnesty they have been given in order to notify their landlord about improvements made to land or buildings for which they may wish to claim compensation at the end of their tenancy term.

Set to run until June 12 2020, the Tenant’s Amnesty was designed to enable tenants to rectify any outstanding issues around past improvements, despite missing notices or consents in certain cases. According to the latest assessment by the Scottish Land Commission, however, tenant take-up of the amnesty opportunity remains low.

“We are still promoting the amnesty,” said a commission spokeswoman, adding that the organisation was continuing to push out the message that tenants really need to get moving to start the notification process.

There is also an explanatory commission leaflet going the rounds which details the amnesty deal, alongside five case study examples of questions which a tenant might well wish to ask a landlord over the remaining months of the amnesty period.

Example 5, for instance, begins with the Tenant Farming Commissioner (TFC) being contacted by both parties about the procedures and handling of the amnesty agreement. It is recorded that the tenants of an estate have submitted a long list of claimed improvements to the landlord without supporting evidence and, because of recent estate staff changes, it is not possible to accept the claims without searching the estate files.

The TFC’s amnesty-based response is that both parties should play their part in assembling the necessary information, ideally with a meeting to agree the majority of the improvements, leaving only the disputed ones to be subject to production of further evidence.

“The onus is on the tenant to make the claim and to provide a degree of justification,” said the TFC, before adding that, under the amnesty, the landlord would be expected to also play his part in providing information.

Example 2, meanwhile, concerns a landlord’s agent who is negotiating an amnesty agreement with a tenant and wants advice regarding a shed, put up by the tenant but for which the landowner allowed a period of reduced rent. Nothing was put in writing and the tenant now wants full recognition for the shed as an improvement.

The TFC response is that the shed should be recognised as a tenant’s improvement but with an apportionment of ownership to the landlord in recognition of the rent reduction. In addition, while suggesting a negotiated agreement is reached, the TFC adds that the legal ‘backstop’, in the event of the tenant disputing the rent reduction argument, is that it may be necessary to accept the shed is 100% tenant owned. That is in the absence of any other evidence.

The advice from TFC’s Bob McIntosh is that tenants who want to make use of the amnesty should not leave it too late.

The amnesty relates to tenants’ improvements to land or buildings.