Filed for The Guardian, 9 May 1991
A fierce row between the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland and the Crown Estate Commissioners is jeopardising the chances of the magnificent Highland estate of Mar Lodge being bought for the nation.
Since Prince Charles persuaded the owner, American billionaire, John Kluge, to offer the 77,000-acre heart of the Cairngorms to conservationists for £10 million - £3-5 million less than it was expected to fetch on the open market - the Crown Estate has said that it is keen to buy and rent it on a 50-year lease to the NCCS.
That would ensure that the property, which contains three of Britain’s five highest mountains (Ben Macdui, Cairn Toul and Braeriach) and valuable fragments of ancient Caledonian forest under threat from deer, was owned and managed in the interests of nature conservation.
Unfortunately, the NCCS and the Crown Estate have been engaged in an increasingly bitter argument over the annual rent. The Crown Estate has been accused of demanding a “ludicrous” 8 per cent rate of return (an annual rent of £800,000) - a figure which has been furiously denied.
Relations between Lord Mansfield, the Crown Estate’s First Commissioner, and NCCS chairman, Magnus Magnusson, are understood to have deteriorated to the point where the prospect of an agreement is under threat. Magnusson, who unlike Lord Mansfield has not talked publicly about the negotiations, is now much more interested in the prospect of the estate being bought by a consortium of voluntary organisations.
The only real hope is that the World Wide Fund for Nature will succeed in its bid to find a corporate sponsor willing to contribute £5 million. This would have to be matched by £5 million from the government and a management arrangement involving voluntary organisations that suited WWF.
WWF spokesman Martin Mathers indicated that he was optimistic that a sponsor could be found. “But we are operating in a complete vacuum and some guidance from the government would help. If they said they were interested in a pound for pound deal, it would help enormously”, he said.
A spokesman for the Scottish Office said that the Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Lang MP, was considering a number of options but that no decisions had been made.