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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.

The paper aims to examine the investment in Scotland's further education (FE) estate as an example of public sector capital investment. It looks at the sector's modernization, which has previously suffered from under‐investment, to provide a built environment that meets the educational requirements against a background of constrained resources.

The paper examines the historic legacy of the estate, the program to address the problem, issues arisen, solutions devised, assesses progress, and future development.

In 1999 the FE Estate in Scotland reflected decades of under‐investment. Local authority owners in the face of competing priorities allowed many buildings to deteriorate, often failing to meet modern health and safety requirements, wrongly configured, and sometimes incorrectly located. The investment program of the Scottish Funding Council has successfully started to arrest the deterioration in the estate, and in many places has achieved significant improvement through highly focused funding levering in substantial resources by way of commercial loans and recycled property receipts which have multiplied the impact of the SFC investment.

The paper raises issues of how the public sector attempts to resolve competing policy objectives, with constrained resources and imperfect knowledge of future demands. Paper is descriptive with some analysis of problems and potential resolution. It highlights an opportunity for future quantitative work by researchers interested in optimizing capital allocation decisions under multiple constraints and imperfect knowledge by drawing attention to under researched source material in Scottish Government documents.

The paper presents fresh material on public sector capital investment. Primarily drawing on Scottish Government information sources, recent developments in the Scottish FE Sector are explained. Shows how the Scottish Government, its predecessor the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Funding Council have used modern tools of capital planning and estate management to improve the property legacy of a sector that has been short of investment for some decades.