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The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on the work of the Scottish Government in modernising the Scottish compulsory purchase system by publishing two fresh circulars to guide acquiring authorities and a number of other measures short of legislation. It is anticipated that this will be the first stage in a programme which will be followed by an examination of primary legislation by the Scottish Law Commission in its eighth programme of law reform.

The paper explains the current Scottish system with a brief historical review, comments on the new circulars and the intentions and aspirations that lie behind them.

The Scottish compulsory purchase system has not had the revisions of 1965 and 2004 implemented by its English neighbour. It still relies on the original 1845 legislation and circulars issued in 1976 and 1992. The new circulars are helpful to acquiring authorities, particularly those who use the system infrequently and are a useful updating and reference source for professional practitioners.

This is a professional paper designed to draw attention to two new circulars and the policy thinking and aspirations underpinning them.

Compulsory purchase processes strike the delicate balance between the private property rights of individuals and corporations, and the needs of the community to obtain and use land that may lie in private ownership. The paper introduces two circulars that affect that balance.

The paper introduces the new compulsory purchase circulars to practitioners undertaking compulsory purchase work and to those academics involved in this discipline.

It is now three decades since the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (the NLL) began operations at Boston Spa. It was only after I had prepared my story of the NLL that it became clear to me that chance had played a major part in the establishment of that library.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise and analyse the new compensation provisions brought in by the government for Phase 1 of the HS2 high-speed train line.

To summarise each of the proposals and provide a critical assessment of each of them.

For the most part, and the Homeowner Payment Scheme (HPS) is a marked exception, the new HS2 compensation provisions set out a logical approach to reducing the impact of the scheme on the people most directly affected by its blighting affect. There are, however, a number of concerns as to whether there are more urgent reforms that have not been considered.

The proposals were announced in April and in respect of some of them, particularly the HPS, very little information is available as yet.

The paper should provide factual information on a very new set of compensation provisions and a critical appraisal of their value.

As the compensation provisions have been published only recently there will be few other similar commentaries available.

The paper aims to explain the way the Scottish Executive, Scotland's devolved administration, transfers surplus property between its Departments, agencies and non‐departmental public bodies, which differs from the approach in England.

The paper draws on government documents and professional standards to explain the revised administrative mechanism and the reasons for the way in which it is designed.

The paper explains the benefits the system is designed to bring about and its limitations.

The paper is a professional practice paper designed to help practitioners who may be involved in such transfers of property, and to inform researchers in the field of public sector asset management of a new development designed to improve the efficiency of property transfer in the Scottish Executive's part of the public sector.

The paper will be of interest to practitioners involved in the transfer of public sector assets in Scotland, and those applied researchers with an interest in public sector asset management.

The study focusses on explaining why advocates for reform to state audit in the United Kingdom (UK) in the early 1980s, focussed on improving the links between the new National Audit Office (NAO) and Parliament, rather than on traditional notions of audit independence. The study shows how this focus on the auditor's link to Parliament depends on a particular concept of liberty and relates this to the wider literature on the place of audit in democratic society.

Understanding the issue of independence of audit in protecting the liberties and rights of citizens needs addressed. In this article, the authors investigate the creation of audit independence in the UK in the National Audit Act (1983). To do so, the authors employ a neo-Roman concept of liberty to historical archives ranging from the late 1960s to 1983.

The study shows that advocates for audit reform in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s were arguing for an extension to Parliament's power to hold the executive to account and that their focus was influential on the way that the new NAO was established. Using a neo-Roman concept of liberty, the authors show that they believed Parliamentary surveillance of the executive was necessary to secure liberty within the UK.

The neo-Roman republican concept of liberty extends previous studies in considering the importance of audit for public accountability, the preservation of liberty and democracy.

Public sector audit can be a fundamentally democratic activity. Auditors should be alert to the constitutional importance of their work and see parliamentary accountability as a key objective.

The neo-Roman concept of liberty extends previous studies in considering the importance of audit for public accountability, preservation of liberty and democracy.

The compulsory purchase of land forms the subject of much legal and urban regeneration research. However, there has been little examination of the contractual arrangements between local authorities and private sector property developers that often underpin the compulsory purchase process. This paper aims to examine local authority/private developer contractual behaviour in this context.

An empirical examination of property development contracts made for the “Silver Hill” project in Winchester, a small city in southern England, and the Brent Cross shopping centre extension in north London. Drawing on Macneil’s (1983) relational contract theory, the paper analyses key contract terms and reviews local authority documentation related to the implementation of those terms.

The contracts had two purposes as follows: to provide a development and investment opportunity through the compulsory purchase and redistribution of private land; and to grant the private developers participating in the projects freedom to choose if they wished to take up that opportunity. While the contracts look highly “relational”, the scope for flexibility and reciprocity is both carefully planned and tightly controlled. This exposes an asymmetric power imbalance that emerges in and is rearticulated by this type of contractual arrangement.

The empirical analysis of contract terms and contractual behaviour provides a rare opportunity to scrutinise the local authority-private developer relationship underpinning both property development practice and compulsory purchase.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the powers under which compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) are made, including the “well‐being powers” of local authorities, the procedural and policy requirements which must be met for a CPO to be confirmed and how all of those fare in terms of meeting democratic and human rights.

The paper outlines the key CPO policy tests and process formalities and discusses what the acquiring authority needs to show to be successful, where the balance of power lies and how aspects of the process may be fair or unfair for landowners, particularly those without significant fighting funds. The research moves on to look at the wider issues of how democracy and human rights are represented and held up in the CPO process, concluding that while there are rights to property and a home, the qualifications to these mean that the public interest can often quite easily override these “basic” rights.

After briefly looking at the related issue of the “privatisation” of city centre road networks, such as in Liverpool, the paper finishes by comparing CPOs under the new nationally significant infrastructure projects regime, suggesting the concept of a new “national well‐being” test in which the national interest in the scheme will be weighed against local impacts. The paper concludes that the lack of clarity around procedure for that regime raises the risk for all involved of delay and further uncertainty from legal challenges.

The paper contains an analysis of the place of democracy in the compulsory purchase of land for well‐being purposes, including a consideration of the balance between national well being and democracy in the Planning Act 2008.