 Good morning, and welcome to the sixth meeting of 2022 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. Our first item of business is a decision to take items 5 and 6 in private. The committee will now take evidence on the digital government's Scottish bodies regulations 2022. I welcome to the meeting Tom Arthur, Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wells, who is joined by Albert King, chief data officer and Francesca Morton, lawyer with the Scottish Government. I invite the minister to make a short opening statement. Good morning and thank you, convener, and thank you to the committee for the opportunity to discuss these draft technical regulations, which add certain Scottish bodies to the debt and fraud schedules of the UK Digital Economy Act 2017. This provides the bodies with the potential to better identify and manage debt and fraud against the public sector through responsible sharing of information. I would like to start by setting them in context. Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act introduces new information sharing powers to reduce debt owed to or fraud against the public sector, while ensuring robust safeguards and protections are in place to prevent unlawful disclosure. To be able to use these information sharing powers, public authorities must be listed in the debt and fraud schedules of the act. That provides a legal means for them to share information with other listed public authorities for debt and fraud purposes. The act does not compel data sharing, so there is no requirement for the public bodies to use the powers and share data. We all want to be confident that our rights to privacy are protected and that there are adequate protections against exploitation of personal information, and that it is held securely and used effectively for public benefit. I would like to highlight three of the robust safeguards and protections that are in place to prevent unlawful disclosure of information. First, data protection law, which governs how personal data is processed and shared, continues to apply as does the Human Rights Act. Second, data can be shared only for the specific debt and fraud purposes that are set out in the act and not to achieve other objectives. Third, public bodies must also have regard to a code of practice that provides details on how the debt and fraud information sharing powers should operate. The code provides that all information sharing under the debt and fraud powers is run, initially, as a pilot before becoming business as usual. That allows for the benefit of the data share to be explored and to identify any potential impacts and ethical issues. There have been two public consultations seeking views on Scottish bodies to be included in the schedules. I am pleased to say that the responses were overwhelmingly positive for the proposals. I would like to conclude my remarks by saying that providing our public bodies with the potential to better identify and manage debt and fraud against the public sector could provide significant additional investment in our public services. I am happy to take any questions that the committee might have. Can I ask how long a typical pilot would last and whether the process for evaluation of each pilot is going to be consistent? Is it a similar approach to deciding whether something should continue in a longer term? I can speak to the duration of individual pilots, but with the review board mechanism, which will be analogous to the provisions that are in place in England, that will provide a means of assessing any pilot proposal. In the process of transitioning from a pilot to a business as usual, the independent review board will have a key role there in terms of the recommendations that it makes to ministers. Each individual proposal will have to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and a service that will be provided by the review board will help, obviously, to inform ministers' decisions. A couple of questions about the safeguards. You talked about safeguards to prevent unlawful sharing of data, and I have listed those quite clearly. I am interested, given what has been in the media recently about the post-office scandal and the incorrect data, the software malfunction that led to many convictions, what safeguards are they in place to ensure that the data that is stored and shared is actually correct in the first place? I suppose that an extension of the safeguards will be for debtors to know who has that data, when that data is shared, how long it is kept for and whether they can challenge that or not. What regulations do is to add public bodies to the respective schedules of the 2017 act. As such, they are situated within the broader context of existing data protection measures, such as the GDPR, the Data Protection Act and human rights, and they need to comply with ECHR. All of those provisions are within place, and public bodies of course have a duty and obligation to follow and adhere to those provisions. Perhaps to give a bit more depth to what the existing protections are, if your permission could bring in Albert King, who can set out the broader data protection landscape in which those measures are situated. In addition to the measures that exist in the data protection legislation, such as conducting the data protection impact assessment, in particular reference to the issues around quality, the pilot measures provide an opportunity for the bodies involved in the data sharing to assess the quality of the data and whether that enables them to meet the objectives of the pilot and to do so in ways that are ethical and do not affect people's privacy rights. The review board has a clear role in assessing the outcome of those pilots and making recommendations as to the transition to business as usual. Thank you. Do you have any other questions from members? I have two members who attend in hybrid today. Alexander Burnett. Thank you, convener. I have three brief questions. In section 4, the Scottish Government's appropriate national authority, which can amend the list of specified bodies that you are adding or removing, can you explain what scrutiny there is over any wishes of the Scottish Government to amend that list? Does that come before committee or before Parliament, or has it just made unilaterally by the Government? Mr Burnett has three questions. Mr Burnett, are there any on-sef issues that I would like to... I will ask them all together. The second one is in paragraphs 12 and 14 of a policy document where it says that the Scottish Government will similarly establish its own structures for the oversight and in 14, where a similar register will be established. Can the minister maybe just give a bit of insight into the cost of setting up these registers and these other structures? How they might look if they have done what work they have done on setting those up? What transparency over those registers and the structures there will be? And just finally, final question, what overlap structures there are with other parts of the UK to avoid unnecessary duplication and cost. Thank you very much. Let me just pick up on the last point with regards to overlap. There is, of course, a UK provision that has regard to relevant bodies in England, but also bodies in reserved areas, so there isn't any overlap or duplication in that. That refers specifically to Scottish bodies. With regard to the review board and their register, they will be said once we are in a position to start seeing what pilots come forward. There is a pipeline of pilots up and down the process of how we set up the review board. We will obviously seek to ensure that that is independent and look to secure voices from relevant specialisms, such as academia, for example. I would anticipate that the review board and the register would broadly reflect the approach that has been taken in England. As Mr Burnett will appreciate, the decision of what we have with regards to what bodies have been included in these regulations has been informed by consultation. If I could perhaps just invite Mr King to comment on the specific process for amending any bodies in future. The process for adding bodies to the regulations would involve bringing further affirmative instruments before Parliament. I invite my colleague, perhaps, from the Scottish Government's legal directorate to add to that if she has anything to add to Francesca. If Francesca Morton would you want to come in please? Do we have Francesca on the call? I'm afraid you won't have yourself, Mr King, at the moment. It's perhaps a matter you can maybe... Hi, morning. Yes, we can see you now if you would like to go ahead. Yes, so if the Scottish ministers wanted to add further bodies to the digital economy act schedules, in a similar way to the process that we've gone through in taking forward these regulations, there are various conditions set out in the digital economy act, which we would have to take into account, which set out that the person must be a public authority in matters that the person requires information from a public authority for the purposes of recovery of debt. So there are various conditions in the regs, as well as the Scottish ministers having to have regard to the secure handling processes in which such bodies have. It would really essentially be a similar process that we've gone through in specifying the bodies in the current draft. I hope that that assures Mr Burnett that being a similar process and, of course, with it being an affirmative process will be an opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny just as it is this morning. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from members? Nope, I think that we can move to agenda item three. I remind the committee that only members and the minister may take part in the debate if we decide to have a further discussion. So I invite the minister to speak and move the motion. Thank you. Do any members wish to speak in the debate? Nope. So I'll now move to the question and the question is that motion S6M-03050 be approved. Are we all agreed? Thank you. Thank you. We're all agreed. The motion is therefore approved. The clerks will produce a short factual report arranged how it published. I thank the minister and his officials for joining us this morning. I will now have a brief suspension while we change witnesses. So our next item of business this morning is an evidence session with the register of Scotland's activities and performance. The registers of Scotland is a non-ministerial office and part of the Scottish administration, directly accountable to the Scottish Parliament and responsibility for scrutiny falls within the remit of this committee. So I welcome Jennifer Henderson, keeper of the register of Scotland and thank her for joining us this morning. As always, members and witnesses, it would be appreciated if people could keep their questions and answers as concise as possible. I invite the keeper to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much convener and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to give an update on Ross's progress and for the opportunity to give a brief opening statement to outline our recent performance. I'd like to start by describing our move to digital. The pandemic has been a watershed moment for many of us. One of the most important impacts for Ross was a swift transition to a digital way of working. We rapidly launched an award winning secure digital submission service to support Scotland's housing market. That's good news for citizens, businesses and the economy. Our digital solutions provide the basis for a quicker, safer and more customer friendly conveyancing process. Although at the time they were a temporary solution to meet the problems of the pandemic, they have proved so popular with our customers that we are now in the process of hopefully making them a permanent solution subject to the wishes of Parliament. The ability for us to make this transition is thanks in part to Ross's robust IT systems and agile smart working culture. We've adapted quickly to remote working and we'll be rolling out hybrid working for our colleagues. Delivering a high quality service to customers is always our first priority and I'm very pleased to be able to tell the committee that throughout this challenging period we have exceeded our customer service key performance indicator, which is currently sitting at 92 per cent against a target of 80 per cent. We're also committed to the wellbeing and development of colleagues, and again during the pandemic period this has been recognised through our achievement of a gold investors in people status given to us in 2021. We're committed to a quality diversity and inclusion. We've updated our strategy during the pandemic period and a number of our staff networks have gained external recognition for the work that they do. For example, we've received a carer positive accreditation for the work that we do at Ross to support working carers. I'll briefly mention our finances if I may. When managing the events of the last two years, I think we've demonstrated flexibility and expertise. We've faced a pause in the housing market at the start of the pandemic but also a very rapid return where house sales have exceeded expectations. I'm pleased to be able to say that the high volume of activity in the market has led to a high intake of case work for Ross which has had a positive impact on our income and we now anticipate that we will be able to deliver all our corporate objectives without the need to draw down on Scottish Government funds. Briefly, if I may, on climate change, Ross is on target to deliver net zero emissions as part of the Government's climate change agenda and this is a key element of our sustainability and climate change strategy. I'm going to mention briefly our two main targets in relation to delivery. In terms of land register completion, we're confident that we will be able to deliver the benefits of a completed land register by the end of 2024. That will provide quick and smooth transitions for our customers and increased insight and ability to answer the question who owns Scotland and I'd be happy to cover our refreshed plans for how we will achieve this in more detail. I'll end with mentioning our major challenge. Clearly delivering our work to service standard is a very important priority for us. In terms of the current backlog of work that we have, we have not made the progress that we expected to make during the last two years. We were on schedule to clear our backlog up until March 2020 but at this point, as I hope the committee will appreciate, we had to pivot quickly to remote working and sustaining the property market, which we achieved, but that did mean that we had an impact on the ability to make progress with clearing the backlog. However, we've revised our key performance indicators in relation to this and we have a plan in place to tackle it going forward, which I'll be pleased to cover in more detail during this session. I'd like to end by acknowledging the support that we've received. None of what we've managed to achieve in the last two years would be possible without the close working relationships and support that we've received from our customers and stakeholders, in particular organisations such as the Law Society of Scotland. We're also grateful to Parliament for giving consideration to the digital legislation required to progress our digital agenda. I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you, Ms Anderson. That was very helpful. Members have a number of questions this morning. Can I start? You mentioned the issue of performance and backlog. We did—another target was missed and the amount of backlog has increased. I recognise that it's been a challenging period that the pandemic has put pressure on the services, but what are the challenges to reducing the backlog? You mentioned the shift to remote working had put additional pressures on the register, and what are the targets? What date—I think that you said that there's a new plan to deliver on, so what date are you hoping to get things back on track? I'm really happy to get a chance to talk about this. I always want to say that when starting to talk about our backlog is in practical terms for the vast majority of people who have cases in our backlog, it makes no practical difference. The number one service standard that we hit is taking 100 per cent of our applications onto the application record on the day we receive them, and we have achieved that right the way through the pandemic. That secures people's application on the register. It's then the updates to the register that take a bit of time. During that period when the register is being updated, people can transact on their property, they can remulgage, they can go and get planning permission and build an extension. It doesn't stop them doing anything. There are a very small number of cases where it does present a problem, and for that reason we've introduced an expedite service, where if someone is facing personal or financial hardship as a result of the case in the backlog, they come to us, they explain what's going on and we expedite their case. We're mitigating the impact of having a backlog in that way, but obviously we don't want to keep mitigating it, we want to clear it. The three things that we're doing to clear the backlog go together as a trio. We've recruited some extra staff, so we have more hands on the pump working the problem. The thing that is worth explaining is that new colleagues joining us can't immediately start working on backlog cases. Our backlog cases are almost complex cases, so it works in a process where new colleagues come and join us, they get trained up on our simpler cases. That allows us to release colleagues who already have that experience to be retrained to work on the more complex cases, so there's a bit of a chain there. For the colleagues who are already working on the backlog cases, we are looking at and have been looking right the way through at process improvements, so different ways of working, so that the same number of people can get through more cases. The final thing that's going to really help is the introduction of technology. Our ability to digitise some of our more simple cases will mean that we can free up even more people to get on to the backlog. That's the strategy. In terms of the targets, we've got two separate sets of targets. The first is a straightforward taking cases out of the backlog target, and we set that every quarter. I'm really pleased to say that throughout the whole of the last financial year, we've exceeded the targets we've set for ourselves, so just to put that in context for the committee, our target for the last quarter was 2,000 cases out of the backlog. We took over 3,800 out. I think that illustrates the strategies working that we are getting rid of more cases from the backlog than we planned to or expected to. However, the other important targets we've set are the targets for dealing with new cases coming in, because if we can't keep pace with new cases coming in, then the backlog will be here forever. Things will just keep flowing through, not getting quite done in service standard. For our three types of applications that come in, we've set service standards to turn more new cases around very quickly, and we're exceeding all of those, which again means we're cutting off, to call it turning off the tap and emptying out the bath, to stop things going into the backlog while we get rid of what the backlog is. That's all working really well, and we're starting to get to the point where more things are going out the door each week from Ross than are coming in. In answer to the question, when is the whole thing going to be gone, it's going to take us at least three years to get the whole backlog gone, probably a little bit longer, but what will happen during that period is the age of the backlog and the number of cases in the backlog will shrink and shrink and shrink. While we have the expedite process in place, anybody who does have a case can come to us and say, it's urgent, please can you do it, and our typical turnaround time for an expedite is two weeks. Sorry, that was a lengthy explanation, but I think it's always important to set out the whole thing, so I hope that that was helpful. That was helpful. You did say that you're making good progress in going beyond the target. The corporate plan does say that the target would need to be a revised target of 80 to 90 per cent of new cases. This is the first time that you've appeared before the committee. This is probably one of those silly girl questions, but why did we end up with such a big backlog? What was the why are we in this situation? The origins of the backlog go back to 2014, so the legislation change in 2014 with everything having to start moving to the land register meant that, very simply, we did not have enough people to keep pace with the complex cases. While we trained people, it's one of those things, the backlog builds up, you're training people as fast as you can, but the backlog is building up. I came into post in 2018, I observed the fact that we had a number of cases outside service standard. I think committee, the other thing I should emphasise is although we do have a backlog, the vast, vast majority of cases get complete within service standards. 500,000 cases a year that we deal with, 95 per cent of them are dispatched within their service standards, so I absolutely accept any number of cases not being done within service standard is not acceptable, but I wouldn't want anyone listening to this thinking that we're talking about all the cases we deal with. We're absolutely not, but as you will appreciate, even a small percentage of 500,000 cases a year not being done within service standard builds up. I came in in 2018, we had at that point a backlog of about 50,000 cases, so I said, what are we going to do to get this sorted? We set up the strategy that we were running and it was running well up until March 2020, but then the hiatus that we had to face in the six months while we put all our effort into keeping the housing market functioning meant that it got a lot worse during that period. It's like anything. Once a problem's got worse, it takes extra effort to get it back again, but I think we are now getting there. In terms of the up-front cases, I can give you the numbers on that, our very latest numbers, so our dealings, which makes up most of our cases, 91 per cent of them are being done within 35 days. Our first registrations, which is the hard stuff, that's new cases coming into the land. We're just 72 per cent being done within 35 days and our transfers are part, which is where you sell off a bit of land or you're creating a housing estate, 69 per cent being done within 35 days, and we're ratcheting that up all the time. Our ambition to get to that point where, across the board, we're turning all cases around within that 35-day target is within sight. Thank you. I'll move on to the other members. Colin Smyth, to be followed by Michelle Thomson. Thank you very much, convener. Did you just follow on from the convener's question? Nobody could prepare for the impact of the pandemic, but in many ways, because you're very much a paper-based regime, you may have been caught out that a lot of the work that you're now doing to digitalise everything, you know, you didn't have a lot of that in place when the pandemic hit, and that's caused huge challenges. It's a great question. We had done a lot of work prior to the pandemic to digitise a lot of our internal systems. If I describe how things used to come to us prior to the pandemic, we absolutely took paper in at the front so our solicitor customers would post us paper, but the very first thing that would happen when that paper came through the door is that it would be scanned and digitised. Colleagues inside Ros were always working from digital versions of things. The thing that we hadn't done prior to the pandemic was to equip most colleagues to work remotely. We were still very much an office-based organisation, so people would expect to come into the office, log in to a fixed machine on a desk and then work digitally. The two things that held us up at the beginning of the pandemic from being able to continue to make the progress were getting 600 colleagues equipped to work from home. We built laptops, we rolled them out, we got everybody established to work from home, and I think that held us up in terms of having enough people working. The other thing that held us up was needing to build the digital submission system so that customers could submit to us digitally because customers were no longer able to send us paper because they weren't in their offices either. I didn't think that it would be remotely responsible to have a team of people in a building scanning paper during a public health emergency, so doing those two things delayed us, but it has now got us much further forward in relation to trying to digitise the whole end-to-end process. You highlighted the phenomenal work that your staff have done during incredibly challenging times, and continue to do, obviously, as you change some of those processes and deal with the backlog. I know that your corporate plan suggests that there will be a 25 per cent reduction in staff numbers over the next five years at a time that you are talking about still having this major backlog to try to deal with in your change in your processes. Can you tell us what the basis for that plan reduction is and how that will be achieved in a way that is not going to impact on the huge amount of work that you have to do? We are in the process of revising our corporate plan every year, so every year we look at where we are at, where we would hope to be, and we look at the people numbers that we will need going forward. When we published our corporate plan a year ago, what will start to happen over the next few years is that the number of new first registrations will start to decrease as we move towards getting everything on the land register that is going to transact. We will not be dealing with as many first registrations, so we will need fewer people to do new stuff, but we will obviously still need people to do the backlog. The other thing that is really going to drive our reduction or our anticipated reduction in staff numbers is automating all our upfront cases. Dealings make up most of our work, so that is a property that is already on the land register and it is just being sold, so it just moves on the land register to the new owner. A reasonable number of our registration colleagues at the moment, that is what they do, that is their day job, and about 80 per cent of that work we expect to be able to automate, so we simply will not need as many people to deliver that work. The first thing we will be doing is retraining those people to work on backlog cases so that they can keep going on the backlog, but the other thing that we have just launched in the last year is recognising that we are going to need more digital and more data people. We have been running a reskilling programme so that colleagues who currently have registration expertise, we are retraining them to have digital expertise because that is what we are going to need going forward, but in our forward staff projections what we recognise is that a number of those colleagues that we retrain are probably going to want to take their skills out into other organisations move elsewhere in the public sector, so we are not necessarily thinking that we are going to retain all of them, but we think that we will be delivering a service for the wider public sector if we are developing digital and data people. That is the essential plan in terms of our sort of expected staff movement, but when we publish our corporate plan that we are just about to publish, we publish it on 1 April, we are being a little bit more cautious about our trajectory down because bluntly I want to hang on to everybody for as long as I can until the backlog is absolutely gone, so we are being a little bit more cautious about whether we do think that we will be able to release people as early. Your current plan is that you have 1,174 staff at the moment. The aim is to have that reduced to quite a substantial reduction of 894 by 2025-26. Are you saying that that may be revised because of the backlog? Yes. That is just a final quick point. There is still quite a substantial reduction. What guarantees will staff who have given huge commitment in this difficult time that there will be no compulsory redundancies, that you will make sure that people are obviously found alternative employment across the public sector to make sure that we can hold on to the skills that your team obviously has? Absolutely. No compulsory redundancies has been our policy for a long time and that is why we are working very hard on looking at reskilling. The other thing that I would just highlight in relation to the staff numbers in our current corporate plan is a reasonably large number of our digital staff currently are contractor staff, so they are not permanent staff and part of our plan going forward and part of why we are retraining people is because what we would like to do is have more permanent people in our digital skills. Some of the staff number reduction that you see is our expectation that we will not need as many contractor staff and we will be replacing them with permanent staff, which again is part of how we will ensure that we keep permanent people with jobs in the civil service. I want to explore a wee bit more about the IT contractors. It says in your annual accounts that costs relating primarily to the digital requirements of updating your legacy IT systems and evolving your estate on a long-term sustainable basis give costs of about £132,000 a year, which roughly looks like 11 months a year working for a folk in a day rate of £600 a day to me. I want to explore a wee bit more about how specifically you plan to do that and to get as you allude to there, get that kind of crossover in building the skills of the permanent staff while starting to move these fairly high numbers for contractors. Can you tell me a wee bit more about that, thanks? It's always nice, isn't it, when you had it managed to half answer one question? Absolutely. We have digital contractors that do a brilliant job for us, so I would emphasise that, but they're fundamentally doing two things. We're building lots of new systems, so that means we need extra people, but we won't need them in the long term, so we've got a sort of particularly high level of digital staff at the moment, because with all the replatforming we're doing, that is a huge amount of work, five years' worth of work to completely transform our digital estate, so then we'll be able to release quite a number of those contractors because their job will be done. The other half of our contractor base are fulfilling what we call the kind of enabling, keeping the lights on, bit of IT, and we will clearly need that going forward because sustaining, one of the biggest things we're doing with our digital estate, is making sure that going forward it's really sustainable, so we can just keep on top of all that kind of keeping it current. That's where we're training and developing our existing permanent colleagues to get the digital skills to be able to move into those roles, and the specific programme we've set up for that is what we've called Grow Our Own, so we ran a campaign internally, we invited people to apply to be reskilled, and that reskilling process, they've done 16 weeks with Code Clan being taught how to do all the kind of digital stuff, and then they come into a digital role within ROS in a sort of almost like an apprenticeship role where they're shadowing our experienced colleagues and developing the skills on the job, and the plan then over the next two or three years is they get really embedded in that to the point where we're confident we can start releasing some of our contractor colleagues because we'll have permanent people who can backfill. It's been really successful and really popular, and so we're going to keep rolling every year, we will roll a new sort of cohort of Grow Our Own colleagues through so that we are building that digital skill set for the future. I can see what you're saying about that transition and that sounds very clear. It'd be helpful for me to understand what sort of applications and coding skills you're talking about here, because I guess your ability to grow people at the level, particularly when you get into complex bug fixing, that's an essential part of keeping the show on the road, but is it a bespoke application? What's the sort of coding skills, do you know? Typical coding skills we're teaching people are things like Java, but we use a mixture, so I guess I can explain a little bit about the ROS digital estate, I suppose. So some of our digital platforms we buy as a service if it's out there and our case management system, we just buy that as a service from another organisation. We clearly maintain it and make sure it's working for us, but we haven't developed our own one of those because there are perfectly good systems out there. Our land register application is unique to us because it clearly needs to be bespoke, as is our mapping system, that needs to be bespoke to us, so we develop those, and actually one of the challenges we've had in terms of needing to re-platform and redevelop those is some of those systems are very, very old. I think our oldest land register system has been going since 1981, and I wouldn't better tell you what code that was written in, all I probably could tell you is there aren't very many people left who can still recode in it, so that's part of why we're doing all that upgrading, but I'd be very happy to come back in writing on a bit more detail around our, we have a sort of heat map of all of our kind of digital systems and which ones are being re-platformed and how complex that is and what we're ultimately aiming to, I'd be very happy to follow up in detail if you'd be interested. The reason I'm asking about types of skills, I mean I don't know if I'm right in that day rate, just that kind of quick calculation if it is Java as well, then they tend to be, you know, people such as that will be picked up and so therefore I think the detail of working out your plan in terms of getting your staff up to speed at that then, whilst it addresses a problem, also introduces a new organisational risk, that then they have skills that are sellable at a day rate of £600, which most people would consider useful, so can I assume that that kind of risk side from an IT perspective is in your kind of personnel planning as well? We're currently refining our strategic workforce plan, which is exactly that forward trajectory of what's going to happen with all the mix of skills, where do we rely on contractors, where do we want to replace with perms and exactly as you describe, where will we be having skills, where there's a much greater risk of people choosing to take their skills elsewhere. I mean for our registration colleagues that we have a very low turnover rate, it's a very specialist skill, there aren't very many places that people who have those skills would be able to go and ply their trade elsewhere, but yeah absolutely we recognise that once we've retrained people into digital they will have a very attractive skill, so we need to produce more of them than we need because we know we'll lose some of them. I think the thing we're also looking at though is what makes us an attractive employer, recognising that we can't necessarily compete on pay, there are other benefits, we've got some fantastic permanent digital colleagues who have a very good sort of public sector, public service ethos, that's why they choose to work for us, so we're just making sure we've got that real kind of employee offer so that people can see it's not all about being able to get a more attractive day rate, there are other things that they'll get. One of the interesting things if I may just share that we get from our digital contractors who work for us is why have they come to us as opposed to ply their trade anywhere else and it's because of the very interesting digital work we're doing, they recognise it's an opportunity to get unique digital skills working for us, so that makes us an attractive employer for a permanent person as well because they'll get skills they wouldn't get anywhere else. Just a last week quick question which hopefully you can answer quite quickly, how confident are you then in your ability to bring down the bill for contractors specifically thinking about your budgeting for keeping the show on the road? My experience in the previous life was that it's always extremely difficult because costs, IT, bought in costs are always going up and it's difficult to keep people, so just a quick answer is fine, thanks. I am confident we can do it. Thanks very much, convener, and thank you for that information. I'm building on Michelle's questions and she picked up exactly the same phrase, updating legacy IT systems and evolving the IT estate into a longer term sustainable basis. I'm interested in, you talked about the two sets of contractors that you currently have, those who are working on the new systems that you're developing that won't be needed long term, and then keeping the show on the road folk who you want to bring in-house as Ros employees. I understand that and I take on board your comments that you've made to Michelle. I suppose I'm interested in, firstly, the updating process from what you've said and from what I can read in the documentation that's been going on a while, and I suppose a question just around how you're managing that alongside the questions that Claire asked around the actual work of Ros and managing the areas and how you see the balances of risk and the balances of resource allocation between those, and I suppose thinking longer term, you talk about the average or bringing the cost of contractors down in future. Given certain things in mapping can change very quickly and are you certain that you've got the resources available for when you need the skills and expertise that you may not want in-house in future, that you will need future contractors for? How is that playing out in your mapping for future financing and resourcing? I'll deal first, if I may, with the kind of how are we balancing the driving forward of our digital with making sure we're putting the right resource into all the other work we do, and the two things are really quite closely linked. I will describe what we're doing with our digital estate because we have two goals, I suppose, with our digital estate. We've mapped it all out, we know how complicated everything is, it's like a sort of amazing multi-colour diagram and we have a score for how currently challenging it is to sustain, and our goal with a lot of our digital development is to improve our product sustainability because that is where we will be able to say we know in the future it will cost us less to keep on top of keeping current. A good example of that has been that we've run a huge exercise over the last year to put quite a decent amount of our stuff into the cloud, and that is how we will be moving forward using the cloud. That takes out a massive amount of overhead of not needing people who understand how to operate all that kind of on-premise IT, so that kind of stuff is going along the background to make our whole IT estate much more sustainable, but on top of that a number of our applications that are being upgraded also are where we will be serving on things like getting automation into how things can be delivered, so when the IT folks who are thinking about that upgrade and are planning it, one of the questions they have to demonstrate to us when we're choosing to make that investment is and how does this help Ros do the day job. A really good example recently has been that our old land registry system presented this complex set of information to our settlers and they were looking at one screen and they were looking at another screen and they were having to retype things between different bits of the application. With everything we've done in the background to digitise, we've been able to build them a new interface where now they can just go check, check, check, yet that all match is up. I can see they've paid their LBTT press, settled, job done and so that has both, we've created a more sustainable system but we've also made it easier for the people to use so we get kind of both sides of the benefit. So that's how we're managing I guess getting the digital estate upgraded whilst making sure it supports us delivering. You're absolutely right though that going forward I wouldn't want to say we aren't going to need to use contractors in the future for bespoke projects where we need to build a new register, build a new system. Absolutely that for me is when it is appropriate to potentially use contractors because it's a temporary piece of work, you want to bring them in, get the work done and then release them but what we're trying to make sure is that also we have the right in-house skills to commission that work effectively and so that we aren't completely reliant on contractors to do that we would like blended teams in the future I guess and that's how we work at the moment when you know most of our product development teams then all contractors they will have a number of permanent staff part of them as well okay hopefully that addresses the question. Thank you for coming in and providing that evidence. I want to ask about how you track customer satisfaction and the committee understands that register of Scotland customer satisfaction services and surveys traditionally focus on larger business customers understand you do a quarterly of 100 of your top business customers and annually of up to 400 of your top business customers but how does register of Scotland engage with smaller firms and so legal practitioners and members of the public to understand the issues they face and customer satisfaction. Thank you for the question so you were absolutely right we survey our top 100 and our top 400 and what we also do though in terms of engaging with smaller firms we have a small team of customer relationship managers who have relationships with all of our solicitor firms so every single firm has the opportunity to pick up the phone to a customer services person and talk about their particular issues. We run regular engagement activity in fact we've got one coming up in a couple of weeks time that all solicitor firms are invited to in the last year I think we've had 3000 participants coming along to those online events so that's a great I support them it's a great opportunity to have those one-to-one conversations with firms of all different sizes about the problems they're experiencing all the things that are working for them. We have a user experience panel so when we're developing new systems we have solicitor firms of all sizes represented on that so we're making sure we're not building systems that just will work well for big firms with lots of support that work equally well for a sole practitioner. We have a robust complaints process so if something's gone wrong obviously firms can come to us and raise an issue that way I get a number of letters from firms which I engage with them so that I guess we have a pretty route I think we have a pretty rounded way of understanding how all of our customers think of us the other thing on all of our systems is there's a feedback button so if anyone is using any of our systems and just thinks this isn't quite working they can press feedback and we take that on board and get it updated. I'm really pleased you asked about citizens so we have had a number of events for citizens we had good citizen attendance at our annual report and accounts event which I was pleased to see but we've just changed provider for how we're doing our customer service satisfaction survey and that also now will run a survey with citizens so we will take I think it's 100 I might be wrong we will take the 100 most recent citizens who've had any contact with us and they will be surveyed as part of that independent customer satisfaction survey so they'll get asked about their experience of dealing with us etc etc so for the first time we're going to be able to get a citizen satisfaction score as well as a kind of solicitor satisfaction score. So clearly much of your relationships are with solicitor and solicitor firms and MSPs if we were approached about register of Scotland by and large because much of the issues many of the issues that are being dealt with are legal we were not allowed to provide we're not qualified or allowed to provide legal advice so we would refer them to solicitor so therefore MSPs would tend to deal with processes and public bodies and injustices and those kind of issues and of course from a member of the public's point of view when something goes wrong it can be in this area title deeds etc it could be extremely distressing and I have a current case I'm not going to go into the individual detail of it but I am concerned about how register of Scotland has dealt with it because after many many years we've now got a title deed that reflects the ordinance survey and we've had many and extended contacts with register of Scotland my constitution bought the downloaded the land register that appears on the website paid money for it and then only a few weeks ago I was told without notice that the register of Scotland was going to change it again after years and years and years now because that deals this is about processes is about how people dealt with and the mental distress that something that can be very dry because it's to do with legal contracts and registers etc it has a human face so in terms of MSPs I don't know how many letters or contacts you have with MSPs in terms of that process how if you haven't had up to date up until now you're saying you're now going to do citizens customer satisfaction so up until now there has been no means by which and apart from the complaints process which actually compared to other public bodies has not been as accessible as others and you can talk about the future and this is obviously part of our kind of feedback to you as to what matters how how do you think you can prove your processes so that you're more alert and particularly as as the keeper and the senior responsibility you hear in front of us that when things go wrong and there's an injustice that you're alert to those as opposed to that very generalised customer satisfaction I know it's very direct but it's it's pertinent and relevant to how our concessions come to us about your organisation yeah and if I may just I guess give you bit of numbers so I said I mean I I'd be interested to explore yeah if you have a view that our customer complaints process is not as accessible as it could be because I my personal view is I think we deal with our customer complaints very robustly we don't get very many we've had 61 so far this financial year we have a two-stage process if a customer wants to come and I'd say it's a mixture in terms of who does complain to us it will be a mixture of a solicitor or a citizen who's been impacted by feeling they haven't got good service from us so we have a two-stage process so the first stage we will respond within five days if we can fix the problem we do and obviously we apologise if it's our mistake and the vast majority of the customer complaints that come to us that way are fixed at that stage one process within five days if the customer isn't satisfied with the outcome of that stage one process they can come back and then we have 20 days to do a more detailed investigation into what's happened and we respond within 20 days and if we again at that point if the more senior investigating officer concludes that you know we we could have fixed it and they'll they'll arrange for it to be fixed and come back and then at that point if the customer still remains dissatisfied they would go to the public service ombudsman we haven't had any complaints referred to the public service ombudsman so far this year so I think that process works quite well I think one of the challenges we have as an organisation is that sometimes the thing the customer is unhappy about is not within our gift to fix you know we are not a judicial body so if it is about a boundary dispute with a neighbour and someone thinks their boundary should be here well their neighbour has a very clear view that that's not where it should be and if that becomes apparent to us it's not within my gift to resolve that problem I have to explain why it's not within my gift to resolve that problem and refer the unhappy customer to take it if necessary to you know I can give them what their options are open but I can't fix the problem in terms of and again I recognise not everyone will come to us through our complaints process we've had 75 MSPs come to us this year so far this year not always about customer complaint issues sometimes it's a kind of property ownership inquiry things like that but again if that's the route we find out that a customer has a problem we treat it in a very similar way to we would treat as if it had come in through our formal complaints process look at what we can do look at whether we can fix it make sure you and your colleagues have a very clear explanation about what we can and can't do I mean I'll hold my hands up at 500 000 transactions a year we are going to make a real mistake on a very small number of them but it is a very small number I'd like it to be zero but I think it's probably impossible that we're going to get things right every time but all I can say is that when we do make a mistake we do our very best to fix it if we can and if we can't fix it to explain why we can't fix it and what options would be open final thing I'd want to say on this though and I absolutely recognise that we are dealing with people who will be finding this situation very distressing my customers a number of my customer services operatives have had specific training about dealing with customers who may be very distressed in their conversations and you know trying to support people in explaining what's gone wrong explaining what can be done and we do that we always treat our customers with absolute respect and try and support them recognising that yeah it is it can be a very very distressing situation for them that's a very expansive and informative answer thank you can you do Jamie Halcro Johnson to be followed by Colin B2 thank you very much good morning I just wanted to go slightly on Fiona's point and then maybe another question as well you talk about a three-year three-year delays or three-year backlog what kind of organisations can make up the majority of that of those delays is it larger organisations is it the smaller organisations or businesses or or individuals and also in terms of that that backlog three years now where would you expect it to be in a year or where are you targeting that to be in a year's time thank you for the question in terms of what the makeup of the cases in the backlog are it will be a mixture of organisations I mean I'd be really happy to supply the committee with a breakdown of we've got it broken down by county we've got it broken down by msp constituency area and what the types of cases are I mean it will be everything from someone who's sold off the bottom of their garden to have something built on it to a potentially large complex commercial transaction and everything in between so I'd be very happy to supply a bit more detail on the breakdown but as I say what what we emphasise to everybody is that you know anything that is causing an issue can be approached for an expedite um so we will always be able to fix the problem quickly but we can't fix all of the problems quickly is the emphasis we've put to solicitors because if we try to expedite everything we'd be expediting nothing in terms of our targets we are targeting in as I explained earlier where we're targeting continuing to increase how quickly we deal with new cases so that we can free up more people to get them on to the backlog cases we are about to publish our corporate plan so I don't want to jump the gun on that and I'd be very happy to follow up and writing in terms of what we're setting for the specific case numbers to come out of the backlog in the year ahead and the other thing we're just doing the final cranking of the calculations on is where we expect the backlog to be in a year's time in terms of how old the oldest case will be and how big it will be so that we can be kind of transparent about that so I'd be very happy to when we finish those calculations provide that to you okay so we'll we should know in your corporate plan where you the path you know where you expect to be for next year in the years forward okay right and I mean certainly it'd be useful to get more detail on on the cases because I think it gives us potentially an idea of where where these this backlog is actually impacting this as well and who it's impacting on it can I just ask as well in terms of you talking about expediting what criteria is that done on you know is it size size of the organisation is it the you know number of cases but what criteria do you use to kind of to use that expediting of the cases so we have absolutely it isn't on size or anything else we have two criteria financial and personal hardship and that is a pretty broad set of criteria so an example might be um we might have someone who is borrowing with a very particular lender for a very particular specialist kind of mortgage and their lender has said I'm not prepared to lend unless your case is fully registered so that would be a financial hardship example and on the personal hardship example obviously sometimes sad cases perhaps there's been a death and someone wants to get their registration completed in order to deal with probate and things like that those are those are examples we have a very broad set of evidence that we will accept when people come and and perhaps I could just put the expedite numbers in context because again I think it tells a useful story so we have had so far this year we've done a thousand expedites so out of all the cases in the backlog a thousand customers have come forward to say here's the problem I'm having and we get their case turned around and back to them within two weeks so again it's a it's a small number of cases out of the number of cases in the backlog where there is an issue and we can obviously fix it where that's the case thank you very much can I just to clarify so when is the corporate prime expected to be published gets published on the 1st of april 1st of april thank you okay thanks computer thank you Colin BT to be followed by gordon mcdonald thank you computer i think it was in your opening statement you mentioned that the 2024 target for completion of the land register will be met in terms of that being a target is that correct delivering of the benefits of a complete land register in 2024 we plan to do it in a slightly different way from having every last inch of land on the land register can you maybe explain a bit more certainly i'm delighted to get the chance to talk about this and so if i can i can perhaps just explain what we've been doing for the last few years so the way in which land come we've been moving land on to the land register since 1979 but 2014 was where it really kicked up a gear because the sazing register which was previously where people could register closed to a number of deed types so people had to move on to the land register for example if you bought property if you remortgaged and things like that so there's been a huge acceleration in things moving on to the land register in the last what are we now 22 to eight years first registrations which is if you buy a property is the obvious driver but the other thing that have been coming through in large numbers we've had 29 000 since 2014 are voluntary registrations so that is people who aren't selling their property but nevertheless would like it on the land register what we have noticed though in the last two or three years is the volume of voluntary registrations is not going to get us to having everything on the land register by 2024 so we've been taking a step back and thinking what was the point of completing the land register what was it we were hoping and Scotland was hoping to achieve by having everything on the land register and our view is there are two benefits that were expected to come the first is ease of transaction if you are buying or selling a property we will deliver that because everything that will need to transact will be on the land register so that leaves well what about those areas of land that are never going to sell how do we get information about them if they haven't come through the voluntary registration process and in that respect what we've realised is there's nothing wrong with those properties still being in the saizine register apart from the fact that the saizine register doesn't have a map so you can't look at a map of Scotland point to an area of land that's still in the saizine register and go tell me who owns that so we've come up with a solution in the last year where we've been mapping those areas and in fact I've just published it on Monday so I'll be very happy to share the link with the committee afterwards we've now published the map of Scotland that shows everything on the land register plus everything we've now mapped that's tied to a saizine title so that transparency we're up to 80 coverage of the landmass of Scotland with that method so we're getting there in terms of answering that who owns Scotland question which was the other benefit we expected to get from getting everything on to the land register and that's the important question that needs to be answered in relation to those sort of policy decisions concentration of land ownership kind of public private split of land ownership so we're foot down on that to get to 100% of the map being filled in by 2024 whilst making sure by clearing our backlog that everything that's transacting is on the land register so it can kind of be going through smoothly from a transaction point of view so hopefully that clarifies where we're at I would also just quickly say in the background we will still continue to accept voluntary registrations we would still love to get everything fully on to the land register but in the absence of those coming through in the volumes needed this is a kind of alternative way of making sure we deliver the benefits it sounds like a bit of a compromise here the the original target and delivery under that target has clearly been changed has has I mean to me it seems quite fundamental the changes that you've made there and it's going to take years longer to get everything that was anticipated the benefit all the benefits that were anticipated by completing this the the land register is going to take years more and we don't have a target for that you're hoping that by 2024 you'll be getting some of the benefits although it seems a little bit vague in some ways as to how that's going to be achieved has this been discussed with the Scottish Government your your sponsor department is there clarity as to as to how this is going forward and well we've discussed it widely actually with a range of stakeholders because I guess what we wanted to make sure was that the people who were expecting to realise the benefits of a complete land register felt that they would still get the benefit in the timescale planned from us and I wouldn't describe it as a compromise I would describe it as I guess as a sort of pragmatic solution to try and make sure we achieved something by 2024 that was going to give those benefits so we've been talking to I mean if I take the two kind of big stakeholder groups I suppose we talked to the Law Society of Scotland who clearly are representing the people who transact and they are content that you know if everything that's going to transact is on the land register then that makes their member's jobs much more simple because the idea that you know you will be having to comb through the saizine register for a first registration support will be a thing of the past then we've talked to I guess sort of land reform organisations people at the Scottish Land Commission providing advice on those kind of big policy decisions and their content that provided we're in a position to be able to look at the map and clearly provide information about the ownership of everything on the map that allows them to do the kind of work that they need to do in terms of drawing out those kind of that policy advice and policy shaping they're giving and we've scratched our heads long and hard I guess to think about is there a different way of doing this but the voluntary you know there's a very good reason why some organisations and some property owners are not in a position to come forward for a voluntary registration which would be the thing that would get their land on to the land register and that's an affordability issue it's a not not from a registers of Scotland point of view our fees are pretty modest in relation to registering we give a discount for voluntary registration but the actual effort involved in combing through all your information putting together an application to get voluntary registered is an expensive endeavour and we've very clearly had feedback from some customers that it's just not something they're able to prioritise putting their resources into and therefore yeah they may get to it at some point in the future if they have the ability to afford it but in the interim we've had to find a different solution that allows the benefits to still be delivered so one could describe this as a pragmatic compromise I would go with a pragmatic compromise and I think the the other thing that we've had feedback on is the bit of work we're doing where we're mapping the producing the map of the p and linking it to sayings is the first step that someone would have to go through on a voluntary registration so some of the feedback we've had is it must might nudge some people to go off fine all right then I am going to kind of go all the way and get that voluntary registration done so we think it acts as a bit of an encouragement as well but yeah I think a pragmatic compromise is a good way of describing it yeah there's a bit of a question mark on that never mind let me move on to something else you mentioned about the loss of your financial reserve because obviously your status changed therefore you know your your your the difference between your fees and your outgoings is now met by the Scottish Government obviously there's additional costs in even achieving the target you're looking for the more the more limited target for 2024 has the Scottish Government committed to funding that over the years so yeah perhaps it's just worth kind of explaining a little bit about our finances in the last couple of years because the changes in the housing market have presented some challenges but broadly we are expected to be an organisation that covers its costs so the level at which the fees are set for the things we charge for are expected to cover us delivering what we're here to do and that includes delivering the work to complete the land register we are I think in the fortunate position now this year where the housing market's been very buoyant so we've received we're receiving more fees than we expected to we continue as a public sector organisation to make sure we are as cost efficient as we can be so we are going to cover our costs this year we're going to be able to do everything we need to do and we're not going to need to draw anything down from the Scottish Government reserve we thought we were at the beginning of the year we'd predicted that the housing market wouldn't be as sustainingly high as it has been all the way through the year but we're in the position where we're covering our costs this year and in fact when we publish our corporate plan and give a preview of this we expect to cover our costs for the next five years in terms of what we project the housing market will do and what it's going to cost us to do everything we need to do we aren't expecting to have to draw anything down from the Scottish Government however what I would say is it was very clear when we our status changed and when we handed our reserve over to the Scottish Government we made it clear that three risks were essentially transferring to them they were taking on the risk of a drop in the housing market so if we didn't have enough fees to cover our income we would be coming to them they were taking on the risk of a large compensation payment and they were taking on the risk of if there were extra things that they wanted us to do we were not going to have any ability to fund that ourselves if our fee level wasn't high enough so and the Scottish Government had accepted that that was a risk transferring to them but we're in the position at the moment where we haven't needed to to call on that extra money. How closely on this do you work with the Scottish Government's sponsor department? We don't directly have a Scottish Government's sponsor department in the sense that because we are non-ministerial we we sit outside that structure. Mr Arthur is the minister who speaks for us in Parliament and has the various powers mentioned in our framework agreement. Who we work very closely with is our Scottish Government finance colleagues so the people who do all the budget setting work my chief finance officer has a very regular meeting with her opposite number in Scottish Government making sure they're absolutely up to speed on our latest forecasting our latest expected expenditure and that they are aware of where we're at because I mean the expectation eventually will be that we will generate a small surplus and that will be returned to the Scottish Government coffers so that we're I guess building up some credit for the events when we do need to draw money down from them. Can you maybe explain just a little bit more detail what unlocking the Sassines means? Yes, so what it essentially means is attaching a map to the Saisine register so we the Saisine register is a brilliant register if you're an expert at reading the Saisine register you can get any amount of information out of it but what people want is to be able to look at a map so what we've been doing to unlock the Saisine register is collecting up mapping data of estate plans and things that give us the shape that we can drop onto the map. My searches who are the experts in understanding the Saisine register then look at the shape on the map they look at the Saisine register they go this is the search sheet that relates to this so we can join the two together so you pull through the ownership information from the Saisine register and you're able to say this shape on the map is owned by this person who's a private individual or a public company or whatever so it's just as simple as making it map based which is I mean that's what the land register does the land register allows you to click on a map and get the ownership information we've just put an extra step in to say you can click on the map and it will you can get to the Saisine information in a much more accessible form than needing to understand the detail of how the Saisine register works so just to be clear as an alternative to the completion of the land register we're going to presumably on a semi permanent basis still be running with the Saisine's register alongside I think we're going to have to until until every I mean the Saisine register was always going to have to be in existence until every last piece of land had moved across but I mean what we will expect to see over the next few years is we will get voluntary registrations come through they will drop into the land register and then they will vanish from our unlocked Saisine register so the Saisine register is going to shrink and shrink and shrink over the next few years but in the interim I think yeah it's a pragmatic solution to deliver the benefits thank you Gordon MacDonald thanks very much convener I wanted to continue the discussion about rose finances so you highlighted that this year you expected income to cover all costs and your quarterly update that we received for this year said that your eking your income would be circa 95 million pounds if you look at the four years prior to the pandemic your income range from 72 to 78 million and the first year of the pandemic it collapsed to 65 million so it seems a substantial increase 45% on the first year of the pandemic and 20% up on the last full year 2019-2020 so is it just purely an increase in the housing market that's giving you this substantial increase in revenue so we put our fees up as the other the other driver we had identified prior to the pandemic that we weren't going to be in with the we hadn't put our fees up since 2011 and we'd identified that we weren't going to be in a position to cover our costs we'd absorbed a lot of cost rises but we'd run out of road so going into the pandemic year we'd always had in mind obviously not anticipating what's going to be the pandemic year but we'd had in minding in this would be the year to do a fee review so we've we did that it got approved by parliament so our fees went up the other thing I guess that's happening is our we have different fee levels and our fees are attached to the the price of that property that's selling so as property prices rise we get a greater proportion of our fees in our slightly higher brackets so then you get a very high property market so I guess it's three factors increase fees house prices rising and a very buoyant property market adds up to that extra amount to reassure you I think though what we do and in relation to the question about how closely we're with Scottish Government finance colleagues we do actually do a three-point estimate so we look at a high housing market a medium housing market and a low housing market and those numbers are all shared with Scottish Government colleagues so that they can get the sort of best and worst cases and it's the midpoint estimate that we take forward so that gives us a bit of opportunity in case some of the predictions haven't been quite right and we do the same with our costs because obviously you know depends how quickly we recruit staff depends how much staff leave depends how much we're paying our contractors and so on our costs also we do a three-point estimate for that so we're very transparent in what it might cost us and what we might come in that's really helpful to understand that what I'd like to also understand is how do you see this 95 million pounds are you expecting that to grow in the next few years I see that your corporate plan expects another 7 million pounds of income to 2025-26 but how much has built up demand from the problems that has been in the housing market and do you see that plateauing in future years or? Oh it's a good question and I mean predicting the housing market is a challenging thing I mean we do quite a lot of historical analysis I mean in terms of what happens on the housing market and I think our prediction at the moment is we would expect the housing market to stay relatively level it might it's a particularly buoyant period at the moment so we're factored into our planning well what if it settles down to what we'd call a more normal housing market but the other thing of course we keep a very close eye on is all the commentators who are talking about what could happen to the housing market with cost of living crisis with interest rates rising and things like that which is why we do our three-point estimate where we also look at well what if the housing market drops a bit so we try to make sure we're resilient to whatever's happening in the housing market and in fact one of the things we're doing to make us resilient is where all the automation comes in because at the moment our ability to deliver is the amount of the housing market means we need so many staff to deal with it in the future when we've got a bit more automation in it won't matter so much if the housing market's fluctuating because actually we will be able to cope with a high housing market or a lower housing market because quite a bit of it will be taken care of with automation and then we'll have a base of very expert staff dealing with the more complex cases and the complex cases really aren't as impacted by the housing market it's the dealings that are done by the housing market if that's helpful yeah and you you quite rightly touched upon the fact that your fees hadn't increased since 2011 given the inflationary pressures that we've got at the moment where cpi is at five and a half percent expecting it to be over seven before the end of the year and that will no doubt have pressures on wages and other costs do you anticipate any increasing your fees in the next few years we don't when we do our fee review one of the things we try to do is make sure it's going to last us for a period of time so our forward projections of income over five years our forward projections of costs taking into account wage rises other cost rises and things like that we are we try to make sure that we've set our fees at a level that means we will break even across the housing market we do every year we look again at that we make sure that we have got them pegged right but um and we continue to drive efficiencies in because as a as a public organisation we should be trying to you know reduce our costs and deliver more with what we've got so at the current time no i don't anticipate we'll be doing a fee rise over the next few years okay i'm just my last question is to do with your large increase in provisions that you've got in your accounts for 2021 where the movement and work in progress has increased from 190 000 to 13.1 million and and that is um the way we have to account for the work we haven't yet dispatched out the door is we have to make a provision in our accounts for it it relates to the fact that our backlog got worse so we have more cases the more more of the more expensive cases more waiting to go out the door so that's the provision in the accounts for the effort that will be involved in delivering that okay thanks very much that's me thank you and alexander brunette you wish to come in yeah thank you very much convener and i just know my register interests relating to land registration and as a taking part of the voluntary registration process i've got three three points that the first is maybe more of an observation and you know fellow professionals are very sympathetic to the work of the register and their staff however they do indicate that a lot of the kpi is based on volume based on volume rather than the complex cases or land area and what's that what is what that is hiding or masking is actually a a larger amount of complex cases coming down down the track and as you say something you know even only 80 percent of the land area may be covered by some of the work you've done but that means a lot of the larger more complex areas haven't even started yet which will create more complex cases of it so there's a feeling that some of the estimates for the plan of the recovery you know the tip of the ice but we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of complex cases so that was really just an observation which you might want to come back on. The second one and my colleague Jamie Halcro Johnston raised it was which we'd be grateful for more detail around where some of the backlogs are some of the which areas have better coverage than others in terms of registration so we suddenly welcome that I just wonder if you're able to verbally just very quickly let us know on council areas certainly our anecdotal evidence from local authorities is they haven't even begun to set aside staff and resource to meet your own objectives and then maybe disconnect there so there's one way we've very briefly if you've got any comment on that and thirdly you mentioned that the new year you've got a new plan coming out I just wonder given given the you know worrying situation in the backlog whether you'd be able to give further or more regular updates either in writing or in person to the committee thank you thank you I'll come back on each of those points if I may convener it's an interesting observation mr Burnett I think about the sort of number of very complex cases that might be waiting to come I mean we have had as I said sort of 29 000 voluntary registrations since 2014 they're not all really complex some of them are very straightforward but the flow of the very complex cases we we work very closely with anybody who would want to submit a complex voluntary registration so that we make sure that we've got a sort of space in the queue at the point they want to come in I mean you're right to highlight the complexity of them just to give the committee an illustration of it we've got an estate voluntary registration case at the moment where I think we've got 34 boxes of deeds that we've had to scan and are being worked through digitally the map would cover you know the size of the committee floor here that's got to be analysed and worked out so they are some very complex cases but they kind of slot in regularly so we are managing that flow through and making sure that at the point we say to someone who said I'd like to bring a voluntary registration case forward yes please come in that we've got the team assembled ready to do it so um but we aren't getting overwhelmed by more people wanting to come in than we can serve um so I'm confident we'll be able to deal with all the complex cases that come through as they come through um but but as per discussions earlier they're not all going to come through by 2024 um in terms of where we've got coverage in across council areas I'd be really happy we have the data to be able to show you by council area or local authority area how much of the land is on um and how much is missing you are right to identify that some local authorities who own land have not been in a position to come forward with voluntary registration um we've worked very closely with six local authorities whose data was in a state that we could put it onto the map through something called keeper induced registration um which is the free service they just have to provide all the data but it requires the data to be in a state there's possibly a few more local authorities where we're working with them to sort of explore whether their data could be got into the state for us to do that with but it's not looking that optimistic and then there are a number of local authorities that simply don't have the data to provide us in a format that we would be able to work with so we can certainly follow up in more detail on that um and on your third point um I'd be I would be delighted to provide more updates to the committee I'd be delighted to come back whenever you want to talk to me about this um and to keep you posted on the progress we're making generally with dealing with all the casework we have um so perhaps I can follow up afterwards with how you'd like to kind of with you'd like a monthly written update just to keep you posted on how we're getting on with completing the land register and clearing the backlog we have that data monthly I'd be delighted to share it with you and then come in and talk to you at any point where you'd like to discuss it thank you very much very helpful answers and I'm sure the convener will come back to you on that last point thank you okay thank you um thank you very much for attending this morning and we will be in touch about the best way in which the committee can keep up to date with the work of the register and we do appreciate the evidence you've given us I'll now suspend the meeting and sorry the other thing I was going to mention is you have committed to send us I think some further information on analysis and also the launch of there's something else the probably the link to the yeah the map we've published that shows the coverage and obviously our corporate plan as we publish it yes so the committee will look forward to receiving that correspondence I'll now suspend the meeting we move into private session thank you thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you today