Scotland: Green MSP calls for end to tax breaks for shooting estates
Ross Greer, MSP for West Scotland, says tax breaks given to 'some of the richest people in the world'.
In a well-aimed TikTok video published just last week, Ross Greer, the Greens MSP for Western Scotland, has called for an end to tax breaks for wealthy shooting estate owners, saying it’s time “they sold their estates to local communities who could use them for the good of people and the planet.”
The video points out that as well as receiving huge sums of public money, shooting estates are “effectively ecologically sterile” and take up an “unbelievable amount of rural land”.
Mr Greer’s office has given us permission to repost his video below:
This isn’t the first time the Greens or Ross Greer (who the Daily Mail described as a “windmill-worshipping eco-communist’, forever raising him to the highest levels in our estimation) has attacked the money doled out to shooting estates.
It’s way past time…
Back in May 2023 (so almost exactly two years before the video was posted) the Scottish Greens published an article titled “Time to end tax breaks for shooting estates” in which Mr Greer, then the Party’s finance spokesperson, wrote that analysis by the Scottish Parliament's Information Centre in 2020 found that shooting estates avoided millions of pounds a year in tax through their eligibility for the Scottish Government’s Small Business Bonus Scheme (SBBS).
He was quoted in the article as saying
“Shooting estates owned from offshore tax havens or by billionaires have absolutely no need for tax breaks. It will be staggering to most people that they are eligible for a scheme designed for small businesses. Our public services are missing out on millions of pounds of funding every year as a result of this.
“These huge estates are used by a tiny number of very wealthy people to sadistically kill animals for sport. That’s hardly the kind of business we want to promote.
“I am glad that the Minister has agreed to discuss the Scottish Greens’ proposals to disqualify shooting estates from this tax break and end this ridiculous and totally unnecessary handout.”
A report in The National newspaper in August that year stated that nine out of ten Scots shooting properties were exempt from business rates and that sites valued below £15000 (which often include deer forests) could apply for 100% rates relief via the SBBS. In 2019 another National report highlighted that the former Queen, the Duke of Buccleuch (one of the UK’s largest landowners), the Duke of Argyll and other ‘aristocratic landowners’ had all contested the tax bills for their estates.
As was pointed out at the time by a reader of The National, it was “curious” how a deer forest could be valued at £13,500 when it comes to (not) paying business rates but that an area of grouse moorland was valued at £6.4 million when being sold by the Duke of Buccleuch to the local community (the Langholm Initiative which went on to create the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve).
Land Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2
The concentration of land ownership ‘in the hands of a few’ has been a long-standing issue in Scotland.
Revive, the coalition for grouse moor reform based in Edinburgh, is working on a project they’ve titled “The Big Land Question”. In June 2025, Revive said that just over half (53%) of all Scotland’s landmass is made up of private estates and 78% of those operate what they term “country sports” - ie the killing of wildlife for profit.
Revive also wrote that most political parties in Scotland say they support land reform. That may be the case, but the shooting industry is hugely (and undeservedly) influential in Scotland because it owns so much land, and pushing that reform through Parliament is proving difficult (as it is, to be fair, in England). They are also adept at pushing the line that shooting is ‘important for the economy’ (routinely quoting figures that most analysts conclude are highly exaggerated) and that ‘it is lawful’ (hardly surprising given that almost all prior legislation on land ownership and shooting was historically passed by shoot operating landowners).
Mr Greer is pushing hard though.
In Holyrood on 17 June 2025 as part of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2 debate, he said the following as part of a discussion on a previous government strategy to use tax “as a lever to encourage positive behavioural change”.
My amendments 479 and 480 are intended to prevent shooting estates from receiving non-domestic rates relief through the small business bonus scheme. Amendment 479 would mandate that assessors categorise crofts separately from shootings and amendment 480 would prevent landholdings that are listed as shootings from being eligible for rates relief.
Views on the value of shooting estates will vary across the committee and the Parliament. I would say that they are some of the least economically productive ways to use land, that there are vanishingly few jobs for the amount of land that is used and that they are ecologically totally counterproductive. They effectively create sterile monocultures by eradicating native wildlife that does not suit the purpose of hunting for sport what is usually a single species.
The small business bonus scheme gives rates relief to businesses on the premises’ rateable value. It is a blunt tool and it does not meaningfully target small businesses. There are hundreds of shooting estates across Scotland that get the small business bonus scheme relief and that is subsidising the operating costs of blood sports that contribute to the biodiversity crisis and the degradation of too much of rural Scotland.
In a patronising response, the Conservative and Unionist Party's Sir Edward Mountain MSP, the debate Convenor [the chairperson of a parliamentary committee], decided that the amendments end tax breaks for estates were “because Mr Greer does not like them”. He trotted out the usual tropes defending shooting saying that “shooting is currently a respected and accepted form of business that is allowed by law in Scotland.” Mountain has a long track record of supporting shooting and was featured in a scathing Raptor Persecution UK post in August 2022 after disregarding sanctions on the Moy Estate for wildlife crime by attending and presenting prizes on behalf of BASC at the Moy Game Fair that summer.
Respected? No.
Shooting may be ‘respected’ within the circles that Sir Edward moves within, but it is well on the way to losing any shred of credibility outside of them.
The reality of what modern shooting entails - the killing of Red Grouse, the slaughter of innumerable foxes, stoats, weasels, and corvids, the illegal killing of birds of prey, the burning of internationally important upland peat, and a growing awareness of just what all this is costing the taxpayer - is slowly but surely undermining the rhetoric of an elite ‘hobby’ unfit for a world dominated by both biodiversity and climate crises.
Mr Greer’s efforts to stop already rich men (and it is usually men) from receiving taxpayer subsidies might seem relatively unimportant (in 2020 it was suggested that around £10m was handed out, a tiny amount relative to the Scottish economy) but it seems to us anyway to be what an end to tax breaks for this selfish and destructive industry represents that is really important.
Ross Greer is absolutely right. How on earth was this ever allowed. Honestly it's about time these rich morons were stopped from profiteering off the backs of animal cruelty.
he is of course right, that these murderous estates receive public money is a disgrace