Blog post by Fiona McKie, Head of Corporate Development at Registers of Scotland (RoS).
Last year we introduced a new approach to land register completion (LRC). The aim of this approach is to increase the speed at which we can deliver the benefits of LRC as well as to reduce the cost and impact on all those involved in the registration supply chain.
We have been working hard to be able to do two key things:
- Identify a process that would allow us to ‘unlock’ the information held in the General Register of Sasines and use this to help us answer the question ‘Who Own’s Scotland’.
- Establish the definition and characteristics of what we describe as a ‘functionally complete’ land register.
The next progress update in our series on unlocking Sasines will be available soon. In advance of this I would like to take the opportunity to explain a little more about functional completion.
What is it?
Functional completion is when property that transacts regularly is on the land register. It’s the term used to identify the stage of land register completion that will benefit the majority of the general public.
A quick re-cap on the benefits of a completed land register to the people of Scotland:
- Ability to transact more quickly and cost effectively on your land and property
- Replacement of the older, deeds based General Register of Sasines (in the interim we are also working hard to unlock this information to make it more accessible)
- Provision of a digital map-based record of land ownership, with boundaries that identify what you own
- Offer of a state-backed warranty
Our priority is to realise these benefits for as many people as possible, as soon as possible. To do this we have categorised the types of property that we think need to be on the land register to achieve this goal.
We have included property that transacts regularly and excluded any that won’t. Examples of properties that don’t transact regularly include social housing and addresses where mail can be delivered but no one resides, for example PO boxes.
This gives us a target to focus on by the end of 2024. To quantify it, we think that this is approximately 2.5 million addresses. We have registered about 83% of these addresses already and we plan to achieve the rest as soon as possible.
In addition to this figure, the work that our registration teams are currently doing to both process new registrations in a timely manner and to clear our backlog will add substantial volumes of addresses and land mass to the register (we currently have 46% of Scotland’s land mass registered, with another 6+% in the process of being registered).
We still have more scoping work to do to understand if there are additional tasks over and above what is anticipated in our current corporate plan.
Publishing progress
You will be used to us reporting against our KPI target for LRC (current target is for 50% of Scotland’s land mass to be on the register by March 2022) and showing maps to represent this in a more visual way, however we want to give you more.
A dashboard will be developed to provide a wider range of data including:
- progress towards functional completion at both a Scotland wide and local authority level
- land mass coverage on the land register both completed and in-progress
We want to do more at a local authority level to be able to:
- provide progress in terms of total address coverage in that area
- state at what point we will have achieved functional completion in that area
Our objective in providing this information is to show progress as well as celebrate success with our teams and be able to react quickly if we feel we are not making the progress we need to reach our goal in the timescales set for us.
It will also encourage us to be mindful of how we are doing, identify any opportunities to enhance our strategy, and to focus or re-focus activity on areas of importance. This activity will take place under the overarching ethos of realising the benefits of land register completion for all. We will aim to do this as quickly and as cost effectively as possible, while ensuring minimal impact on the other key business priorities.
As mentioned above, in addition to LRC updates we will also keep you informed on our approach to unlocking Sasines. We are keen to work not only with data holders who can share spatial data with us but to also consider new and innovative ways we can collaborate with partners such as Geovation Scotland.
Next
We are in the process of creating a more in-depth plan to take us up to December 2024. We will engage on this in the coming months and will publish this in full in our corporate plan 2022-2027. I will be setting up meetings with key stakeholders, as well as identifying speaking opportunities and relevant events and conferences. And of course, blogging more about our activities.
Please get in touch with me or one of the LRC team if you want to find out more about what we are doing or to help us shape our future plans.