THE OWNERSHIP OF COAL ROYALTIES IN SCOTLAND

Abstract

Prior to 1938, the ownership of coal royalties in the United Kingdom had been held by those who owned the surface of the land below which the coal was vertically situated. In general, the coal was owned separately from the mines that worked it. The Samuel Report1 of 1925 reckoned that only 12% of coal was held by the owners of the mines. The Coal Act of 1938 finally determined that the coal royalties should pass into state ownership on the 1st July 1942. Anticipating legislation had in 1937 obliged interested parties to register notice of royalty ownership. Before the evaluation of these claims, the total purchase price for the royalties was fixed at £66.45m. Compensation to be paid to individuals was determined by a two-stage process. First, the country was divided up into ten Regions each of which set up a Valuation Board. The total sum, itself already fixed, was then divided up into ten fixed parts, one allocated to each Region. For Scotland, for example, which formed one Regional Valuation Board, the sum allocated was £8,512,245. Secondly, each Valuation Board was required to value minerals on the basis of individual claims. When these were added up, they formed a sum for each Region that necessarily differed from that Region's allocation. For Scotland, this sum came to £9,134.609. Accordingly, compensation paid was scaled by a factor determined by the ratio between the sum allocated to the Region and the sum of assessed compensations. For Scotland, this resulted in compensation being paid at 18s. 73Ad in the pound.2 The valuation of individual claims was itself intended to be organised around colliery areas, although this was not strictly adhered to in practice.3 For each separate piece of land owned, the landowner submitted a claim for royalties and this was treated by the Valuation Board, along with all other claims that could be considered to be associated with the coal to be worked from a particular mine. In principle, the data for compensation paid upon nationalisation of the royalties should reveal the distribution of ownership by mine and by landowner. It is these data that have been collected in the course of research to investigate the effect of the royalty system on the development of the UK coal industry. Some aggregate statistical features of this data are reported below. In the interwar period, the Scottish coal industry was divided into four districts. Table 1 gives an indication of the distribution of ownership of royalties across these districts. The Coal Commission reported .2,091 claims for Scotland. Our data are for the unsealed claims for