Although the vast majority of Registers of Scotland's work is completed within our service standards, we have publicly recognised that this is not the case for all our work. We therefore have an arrear of cases which have fallen outside service standard. We think this is unacceptable.

Prior to the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic we were making strong progress towards completing our more complex work and returning to a position where all cases were completed within the service standard. The impact of lockdown has unfortunately slowed our progress on that front.

We continue to take steps to re-establish the momentum we have lost over the last 15 months so that we can clear the arrear completely and ensure that it does not return.

Our aim is to ring fence the current backlog and then begin to drive it down, placing a stronger emphasis on dealing with new cases more quickly to stem the flow of cases being added to the arrear.

To accomplish this, our objective is to maintain an average of 60% or above for new applications despatched within 35 days until the end September 2021.

In terms of driving down the backlog to date, we have achieved our target to eradicate the First Registration cases from 2017 in the arrear by March 2021.

We will soon be reporting on our next target to reduce all pre 2021 arrear cases by between 1000 and 1800 by June 2021, alongside the progress on all our other Key Performance Indicators,

To help us in this important work, we encourage everyone to continue to embrace the digital service roll out. The increasing digitalisation of our services will support us to achieve our targets as this will free up colleagues who will be able to focus on more complex cases.

In the meantime, we will continue to ensure that customers can get applications completed when they need them by targeting tranches of our oldest cases and through our expedite service. We will also retain our no rejections beyond three months policy.

Read the Corporate Plan, including information on tackling the arrear, in more detail.

If there is any other information you would find useful for us to publish about our service standards, stock levels and arrear please let us know via our Communications and Marketing mailbox.