Our Corporate Plan 2022-2027 is now available. I am encouraged by the progress that we have made against last year’s plan and excited to tackle the challenges ahead.

One of the things that you may notice within this plan is that we have updated our objective on land register completion to read “deliver the benefits of a completed land register”.

I’d like to take this opportunity to explain our thinking behind the change.

In 2014, Scottish Ministers invited RoS and the public sector to accelerate completion of the land register with a target date of 2024. The intention behind a completed land register is to deliver two key benefits:

1. Quick and efficient land and property transactions
2. Data and insight to improve transparency and better answer the question ‘who owns Scotland?’

I am always a fan of an ambitious target. It motivates people, focuses priorities, and promotes change. Since 2014 we have:

• added 22.6% of Scotland’s land mass to the land register.
• engaged in a proactive programme of voluntary registration stakeholder engagement, which contributed to over 29,000 voluntary registrations being received.
• completed Keeper Induced Registration (KIR) on over 124,000 addresses, including 89,439 local authority properties.
• Registered approximately 87% of all addresses which are likely to transact in Scotland. This equates to over 48% of Scotland’s land mass, with around another 6% of land mass in the process of being registered.

I am hugely proud of my RoS colleagues and our stakeholders who have made these numbers possible.

To achieve this progress, we relied on

1. Properties being bought and sold (market churn)
2. Keeper Induced Registration (KIR) (where I use my capacity as Keeper to add land and property to the register directly)
3. Voluntary Registration (VR) (where people and organisations, such as large landowners or the public sector, proactively apply to move their property from the Sasine to the Land Register)

This has had good results and helped us make significant progress against our goals. However, each mechanism has its limits. The number of properties sold will depend on the rate of housing market activity. KIR only works on specific types of properties (mostly urban where we know a lot of information about the surrounding properties, their boundaries and extents). While VR depends on having the time, money, resource, and inclination to apply. Looking ahead, projections suggest that we cannot expect all land and property in Scotland to transact before 2024 using these methods alone.

We need to ask ourselves; if land is unlikely to change hands, does it represent good value for money and the most effective use of RoS resources to attempt to accelerate registration so we can tick a box which says 100%?

I believe the answer to that question is no. Let me tell you why…

As I outlined above, there are two intended benefits of a completed land register, and we are confident that we can deliver both by the 2024 target. This means our customers and stakeholders will enjoy fast and efficient transactions and have easy access to enhanced data – without having to wait for all land and property in Scotland to transact. To me this represents a far better return on investment for public money.

To deliver the benefits of land register completion, we are now focusing on three complementary approaches:

Improving turnaround times and visibility of ‘work in progress’

Our aim is to stabilise then reduce the volume of stock through despatching the majority of new applications within a reliable and consistent timeframe, this is currently set at 35 days to match our Advance Notice period.

We will continue to complete registration of older cases as quickly as possible, prioritising those cases where customers request that they be expedited.

We will also publish more information about our work in progress showing greater transparency and how close we are to reaching our targets. This will include what we have in stock as well as what is in the land register.

Functional Completion

Most properties likely to transact will be on the Land Register by the end of 2024.

Any applications that come in after that date will be completed within a 35-day turnaround, unless a bespoke timeframe is agreed with the customer for the few remaining complex cases.

This will provide a comparable service for customers, regardless of whether the land or property is already on the Land Register.

Unlocking Sasines

The information held within Sasines is not as accessible or map based, and it requires skilled Searchers to interpret. With this in mind, we will continue with our work to provide information on land and property which is unlikely to transact through matching spatial data to Sasines records.

This supports greater accessibility, transparency and help to answer the question ‘who owns Scotland?’.

Find out more about progress on Land Register completion including detail on Functional Completion and Unlocking Sasines.

RoS will also continue to offer a comprehensive search service for any piece of land or property.

While the longer-term goal will continue to be 100% land register completion our approach to completing Scotland’s land register, will mean that we can continue to meet customer needs now.

We have set out our thinking to key interest groups and we are pleased to say that they are supportive of our approach.

I believe that our new approach offers a pragmatic solution. I also hope that our reframed objective will give you the confidence that we always have our customers in mind and that we are committed to delivering tangible, real-world benefits for our service users.

You can hear more about what else is in our Corporate Plan at our upcoming launch event. This will be an opportunity to ask questions and find out more about our plans for the future. Register your place on our website.

You can also listen to our upcoming podcast which goes into more detail on functional completion and unlocking sasines. This podcast will be available on all major podcast streaming platforms, subscribe to be notified of new episodes. Listen to our previous episodes.