FOI Release: Land Register Title Inaccuracies and Rectifications

Published: 26 September 2025
Freedom of information class: What we spend and how

Information request under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA).


FOI reference: CW-2025-509
Date received: 25 August 2025

Date clarified: 28 August 2025
Date responded: 8 September 2025

Information requested:

  1. How many cases of property or land misregistration or inaccuracy have been recorded since January 2020?
  1. Of these, how many have been resolved and how many remain ongoing?
  1. What is the average time taken to resolve a misregistration or inaccuracy case?
  1. Are there processes in place to review or audit misregistration or inaccuracy instances to prevent recurrence?

Response:

The answers to your questions have been set out below.

Please note the Title Inaccuracy Enquiry service (TIE) was established in September 2023 and statistics relating to title inaccuracy enquiries prior to this period are no longer held. The figures provided below report TIE submissions during the period 01 September 2023 to 31 August 2025.

  1. RoS completed 27,307 Title Inaccuracy Enquiries between 01 September 2023 and 31 August 2025. 76% were submitted by professionals (solicitors, private search firms, etc.), 17% were generated internally, and 7% were submitted directly by the public.

Of the completed enquiries, 18,147 resulted in title rectification. 64% of rectifications were due to Keeper error and 36% were due to non-Keeper error.

At the end of August 2025, there was a total of 2,051,173 registered titles on the Land Register. The number of Land Register applications received each year is also available to view on our website here but we have included the figures below for ease of reference.

Land Register Applications Received202020212022202320242025*
  302,253 380,204 356,712 335,538 339,174 226,791

* 01 January 2025 to 31 August 2025

  1. As of 11th September 2025, there were 1,121 open Title Inaccuracy Enquiries. Please note, we do not retain a historic record of this metric, so the figure provided reflects the position at the time of writing.
  1. The average time taken to resolve the Title Inaccuracy Enquiries completed between 01 September 2023 to 31 August 2025 was 17 working days.
  1. We have an established Lessons Learned process. This is used to capture and review instances of inaccuracy and identify the underlying issues that contributed to the error. For each issue identified, we document the mitigating actions taken to address the cause and prevent recurrence. This continuous improvement approach ensures that lessons learned are embedded into our operational practices.

Inaccuracy and Rectification

The Keeper has a duty to rectify the register where we become aware of a manifest inaccuracy and the rectification action we must take is also manifest.

The register may contain inaccuracies that are not apparent to us, for instance, where rights have been extinguished due to off-register events such as the dissolution of a company that owns land or property, but where no notification or corrective action has been taken.

Rectification can take place for any title registered since 1981 when the Land Register was introduced.

The 'manifest' test means that the keeper has power to rectify only if it is perfectly clear and not reasonably disputable that there is an inaccuracy in the land register. Both the inaccuracy and the rectification action need to meet this standard.

Further information on inaccuracy and rectification can be found on our website here.

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If you have a question or query about FOI requests, you can email the information governance team at: FOI.Requests@ros.gov.uk.