 Good morning, and welcome to the 19th meeting of 2022 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. I have received apologies from Gordon MacDonald and I welcome John Mason, who is attending in his place as committee substitute. Our first item of business is a decision to take items 3 and 4 in private. Are members content? Our next item of business this morning is an evidence session with the register of Scotland's activities and performance. 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 mainly within the remit of this committee. I welcome Jennifer Henderson, keeper of the registers of Scotland, who is joined by Christopher Kerr, Registration and Policy Director from Registers of Scotland. As always, could members and witnesses keep their questions and answers as concise as possible, and I invite the keeper to make a short opening statement. Thank you, and lovely to see you all today. Thank you for the opportunity to give you an update on Ros's progress and to make a very brief opening statement. I'll start by talking about the volumes of open case work. I'm pleased to say that we have successfully stabilised the volume of open case work since my last appearance at the committee, and critically this has been against a backdrop of a significant increase in the number of applications. The strategy that we've put in place has meant that, despite a 31% increase in the number of applications in the last year—we had half a million last year and we've had 655,000 this year—we continue to stabilise the volume of open cases as well as meet or exceed our key performance indicators. I'm also pleased to tell you that over 90% of the applications received continue to be completed within 35 days. However, we know we have much more to do to reduce the number of open cases and we're focusing every effort on this goal. A brief mention of our performance reporting, the committee will have noticed that we are trying to be as transparent as possible about our progress and this is why we have recently launched our new performance pages on our website, offering customers and stakeholders an even greater level of detail and accessibility about how we are performing. On transparency of land ownership, we continue to make good progress in delivering the benefits of a complete land register. Around 87% of the addresses that regularly transact are now on the land register and our total land mass coverage is now around 80%. In the last period, we've been working closely with Scottish Government officials on the land reform consultation and have continued our engagement with the Scottish Land Commission. Brief mention of the new services that we've introduced. Since we last met, we have delivered new digital functionality, which has been well received by customers. Our new system for customers to digitally submit applications continues to develop and much to customers' delight, we have introduced the facility for customers to self-serve copy deeds through our Scottless for Business system, which customers have described as transformational for how they work. Investing in our customers and people, delivering a high quality service to customers is always our priority. We do consistently receive high customer satisfaction scores and we've set ourselves a new in-depth benchmark for service, which sits above the public sector average. Since our last appearance, we've won two awards for our delivery and we have maintained our gold investors in people status and are planning to complement this by working towards further accreditations relating to wellbeing and young people. Finally, on our finances, I'm pleased to say that by the end of last financial year, we continued to meet our delivery and quality targets and achieve a financial surplus a year ahead of schedule, which makes us a net contributor to the Scottish Government. I also take the opportunity to thank you for the monthly reports that the committee has been receiving. That is an area of interest to the committee, and it is a number of areas that we wish to explore this morning. I'm going to hand over to Colin Smith to be followed by Maggie Chapman. When you last attended the committee, I recall asking specifically about staffing levels at that time. It was indicated that there would be a 25 per cent reduction in staffing, but you said that that was under review, not least given that the backlog that the service is facing. Your current corporate plan refers to a plan reduction in staff numbers over the next five years, but there is no reference to any figures. What is the scale of the plan staff in reduction? It would be helpful if I could just put how many people we need in context and then explain how we're thinking about the reshaping and resizing of the workforce. The first thing to say is that we're doing some detailed strategic workforce planning and that is looking at how we crystallise assumptions around what's going to happen to the housing market, which determines how many people we need, the pace with which we'll clear our long-standing open case work, which determines how many people with what skills we'll need for how long, the degree to which we'll be successful in converting permanent civil servants into digital people so that we will no longer need such reliance on our contractor workforce in the digital sense, and then there are other factors out with our control. For example, customer adoption of some of our new digital systems will determine how many people we need to do the upfront stuff. If we get really high levels of customer adoption of our new digital systems, that will allow us to introduce more automation of the processing of applications and will need fewer people to deal with those upfront applications. Hopefully, that's an illustration that says there's a lot of variables, many of which we don't yet know what the answer will be, and therefore we're working through what assumptions can we make about those variables and what will that lead to in terms of future staffing numbers and when might those changes need to happen. I think it's appropriate that, at the point at which we've reached some answers on that, the first people to have those discussions with will be colleagues within Registers of Scotland so we can help people understand what some of those changes may mean in detail for their roles in the future. You'll have seen in our corporate plan we've given indicative changes, so we've said certain skill sets will need fewer of, certain skill sets will need more of, but until we've crystallised some of those assumptions it's impossible to put detailed numbers on. Also, I think rightly our customers expect us to use every person we have available to us for as long as we need them until we've cleared our long-standing open case work, so I don't want to start putting numbers on future reductions until we're really sure that we can be confident about when we won't need people on our long-standing open case work. I think it'd be fair to say, though, that the plan is pretty vague when it comes to those skill sets that you need. I mean, there's a diagram contained in it that seems to suggest that there are very tall people working for the service, very small people. There's no detail at all as to what your direction of travel is on this. I mean, what is the overall aim of the staffing reduction? Is it a budget process? Do you have to reduce numbers in order to balance the books? What is the actual aim of your staffing reduction? You've said very clearly there'll be a planned staffing reduction, but you don't seem to know what that reduction will be. So the overall aim is to have the right number of people with the right skills to deliver our work in the future? That'll be a smaller number of people. You're clear from the very start that there's going to be a reduction, so you've got to start on assumption as you need fewer people. We believe so. I mean, perhaps I can illustrate it. Currently, we need a certain number of people to deliver new cases that are coming in the door. As we introduce more digitisation in terms of how customers submit to us, and as we introduce more automation of the processing of those cases, which fundamentally depends on customers submitting to us digitally, we will need fewer people to deliver our new registration services. But if the housing market is very buoyant, we might need more people, because there will always be a certain number of new cases coming through the door that will have to be processed by hand. So I think the purpose of our workforce plan is the right number of people with the right skills. It's just quantifying exactly how many people. I think we can be clear on what skills we need. It's the quantification of how many people with those skills that is determined by factors that we can't yet put our finger on, because it makes a big difference. I mean, automation, by way of example, if we are successfully able to automate 50% of the cases that come in the door, that means we need a particular number of people in the future. If we can only automate 30% of the cases, that will mean we still need more people to process those cases. We haven't yet built the automation systems. We don't know how successful they're going to be, so putting a firm number on how many people we might need can't be done yet, but we do know—it will be fewer, because we do know—we'll be able to automate some of the cases that come through the door. It's obviously quite a substantial change from previous reports that talked very specifically about that 25% reduction. What process are you going through then? What are the timescales for this process? Have you done consultation with staff at a point whereby you're speaking to people about new jobs? How far advanced is this process, and when will you start to be able to say, this is what we think future staffing levels will be? We're running a strategic workforce planning project, and that is doing the work to do two things. It's quantifying what we expect those numbers to be within a range, so it's best illustrated with an example. If we determine that, with automation and digitisation, we will need somewhere between 100 and 200 people to deal with our up-front cases, and currently we have a larger number than that, then what's the plan for how we will reskill and retrain those people who we aren't going to need for those up-front cases? At the moment, the plan is we reskill and retrain them to deal with the long-standing open case work. That will eventually be gone, and then we are reskilling and retraining those people to become our digital people in the future. It's a sort of moving of people, and it's through the current financial year we're in now that we will be crystallising the detail of that, and we'd expect to be able to provide more detail in our next corporate plan, which will be published in April 2023. Again, managing everybody's expectations, I still anticipate we'll be talking about ranges of staff numbers, because things like customer adoption of our systems, things like just how successful our automation will be, we won't know that until we've brought it in and we can see it, so we don't want to commit ourselves to a particular trajectory for staff numbers until we're confident that that will give us the right number of people. Final thing I'd like to say on this, I guess, in terms of just answering the overall question, is the reason we've put indicative directions of travel in our corporate plan, is because we are already having conversations with colleagues about the fact that we definitely know we're going to need more digital people in the future, so we want to encourage colleagues to think about taking up the offerings that we're putting forward of retraining them into digital, because we're sure we're going to need more digital people. How many more, how many digital people is still something we're working out, but we know it's more than we have now? Equally on the registration side, we can be clear we're going to need fewer people, I'm sure I'm using fewer and less and more wrongly, but fewer people, and therefore people can be confident that if they want to work with Ross in the future, getting themselves upskilled in digital is a good thing to do, and we've got training offerings to do that. So when you publish your plan next time, you're likely to have a trajectory of numbers then? With ranges, I'd want to be really clear, but what we will be able to publish in our next corporate plan is some of the assumptions we're making, so we are assuming a level of automation, and it will be between X and Y, and that will mean that this determines the numbers we need, but it's going to take us, I think realistically it's going to take us a couple of years to crystallise on to what's the exact numbers, and at that point we'll be in a really good position to have detailed discussions with colleagues about what that means for future careers within Ross. Thank you for your opening comments and for your answers so far to Colin. I want to pick up on staffing as well a little bit, and maybe just seek a little bit of clarity. I understand what you say about the assumptions that there are a lot of unknowns in what your current processes and thinkings are, but in the corporate plan where you've got the now, next and future plans, is it right that the future will only become a reality, that the future where you have the registrations, new services, digital data and corporate services sections of staff, that will only become a reality once you've dealt with the backlog? So the next is kind of that transitional phase, so the future we're looking at, I think you've said before, three years or thereabouts, is that right? The current corporate plan is 22 to 27, so our expectation is that we will be in the future description of the staffing by the end of the current corporate plan. Okay, okay, thank you, and if I can just unpick to understand a little bit, you talked in your answers to Colin about automation and the need therefore to shift skills into digital, what's the difference then between the staffing you'll need in the digital services? I'm assuming that's for the sort of supporting the automated registration and the new services that you've outlined. Oh, yeah, that's so, you're right, let's see if I can try and explain, so oh, forever, Ross is going to do registration, that's our assumption, and if you look at jurisdictions that have already delivered digital and automation, they can automate about 70% of their transactions, so we will always need people with registration skills to be manually processing the more complex registrations. We are also, as an organisation, being asked to bring in new services, so we've brought in the registered persons holding a controlled interest in land, we're providing support to the register of overseas entities, we expect to be providing support to the register of moveable transactions, and there may be other services that we're asked to provide in the future that we will need people with the right expertise to support those services, legal colleagues, policy colleagues and so on, and then all of that will be underpinned by a kind of digital infrastructure that will need people to be building and developing whatever digital systems are needed to support those new services and maintaining and updating because we don't stand, you know, we don't just deliver a system and then it stays like that forever, and our ambition is very clearly to get to the point where the maximum number of people who can be civil servants in that digital space are civil servants at the moment, and I know we've discussed this with the committee before, we are hugely reliant on contractors to deliver our digital development, and that's appropriate in some cases because you need more people to do the development that you need to do the maintenance, but we're working very hard to reskill colleagues to be able to pick up that digital delivery, so I hope that clarifies the difference between registration services, new services and the digital bit. No, that does help, thank you, and actually you moved on to talk about contractors and I want to ask on that, how many contractors do you currently have and how do you see that given that some of these things take time and some of that time is unclear or undefined at the moment? How many contractors are currently employed by Roz and do you see what's your ideal over the next five years in terms of production? So, Roz has about 1200 people, but it varies slightly, but our contractor workforce is between 10 to 15% at any given time, and the reason it varies is regrettably sometimes we lose permanent colleagues and the best short-term solution is we backfill with a contractor while we see whether we can get a permanent person back in, so any given time we've got sort of around about 150-ish contractors, most of them are in the digital space, and a decent chunk of those people are doing the kind of bulk of the development work that when it's done will need fewer people. So, actually, going back to the previous question, the workforce planning does also look at the number of digital people we will need and the skills within that digital workforce, and it won't be exactly the same size and shape as the current digital workforce we have. My ideal would be to have two thirds of our digital workforce as a permanent workforce and one third potentially is still as contractors, and the reason I think it's appropriate to continue to still rely on contractors is that it allows you to access very brand new skills from the market, it allows you to bring people in where there's a transient piece of work where you want a very unique skill set, and actually you want that person to come in, do the work, transfer that knowledge to the permanent people, but then you don't necessarily want them anymore. So, I think it's going to always be appropriate for roles to employ a certain number of non-permanent people to meet its digital ambitions, but we would certainly like to shift the balance, I guess, flip it on its head in terms of two thirds of the workforce in the digital space. We would really like to be permanent people, and that's a big ask. Developing the skills and training people in a very competitive market is a not insignificant challenge to meet that ambition. No, and I was going to ask how to grow your own, because I presume that that's where a lot that the bulk of that work is happening, how's that going, and what impact is that having on I suppose on two elements projected costs for both your overall salary spend, but also other associated costs, and also on staff morale. So, grow our own is going really well. The first cohort of people have graduated off the development programme, and we've been delighted at how much they've been able to hit the ground running into digital roles and actually apply everything they've learned, but grow our own is very deliberately bringing people in at the bottom of the digital pipeline. It's equivalent to retraining people to start in the more junior digital roles. Broadly, the only way those people are then going to progress within our digital workforce is hands-on experience that will allow them to achieve promotion within our digital workforce and take on the more senior roles. We're also therefore thinking about what else do we need to do to potentially attract people in to work for us permanently in the more senior roles. We've had some success, we have some people who've chosen to give a life in public service and they want to be a permanent civil servant even if they could go and earn a lot more somewhere else in the private sector, but we're looking at more imaginative ways of also bringing people in at the more senior levels whilst we grow our own cohort, progress and develop, and also we then backfill and we'll be running another grow our own cohort so you get a pipeline. We're also thinking, and this is true more generally in the round, about what's the offering we give to retain those people because there's always a danger we develop them and they get great skills and they take them off elsewhere. That's not a bad thing because that means we might be supplying wider Scotland with great digital skills, but it's not a great thing for us, so we're thinking about how we provide a really attractive employee offering so that people who've developed as a permanent digital person for us will want to stay and give us long enough service to get real value out of them. Sorry, Mr Chapman, do you mind if I move on? It was just the question on staff morale. I could remind witnesses and witnesses and questioners to be as concise as possible. We do want to get through quite a lot this morning. If you want to respond to the issue on staff morale, I'll then bring in Jamie Halcro Johnston for a brief supplementary before John Mason. So staff morale is good. We will know more. We have our next civil service people survey running. It starts later this month, so we'll have the latest update on that and be happy to provide that in one of the monthly reports. We're talking about contractors. I was just wondering what the availability of contractors is, how easy it is to recruit and therefore how easy it is to scale up, say, to meet demand or how flexible that can be to meet demands or peaks and troughs. It's got more difficult. The market has definitely got more aggressive in the last few months, so it is proving more challenging than it has, but we are still managing to fill the vacancies we have where we need to with contractors. Thank you very much, convener. If I could ask around about finance a few questions, understand your annual accounts and if financial accounts would be out fairly soon, is that the case? I think later this month is the publication date 26th, I want to say, but I would need to check that. I'm guessing that they've been fully audited and approved and everything. Can you tell us, was there a surplus or a deficit? The accounts are still subject to final sign-off at our board meeting next week, but the provisional position, which I don't expect to change, is that there is a surplus. You're not going to tell us so much? Similar to the surplus that we delivered previous year. I'm sorry, I'm new to the committee. I don't know what that was. We delivered a surplus of about £10 million. Right, okay. I think I'm right in saying that when the financial setup for the registers changed, there was an accumulated surplus, which was handed over to the Government. So on the whole you have been making surpluses, you've not been making deficits. Apart from what I'd call the Covid year, where we made a loss essentially in Covid year. We're just kind of expected and acceptable. And for the coming five years that are in your corporate plan, are you budgeting to make a particular surplus? Is there a target or is it just to break even? The target is always to break even, and if we can deliver a surplus we will. Where the surplus comes from is whether the housing market is more buoyant than expected, and that's obviously not within our gift to predict accurately, but the target will be to deliver a surplus. And it's correct that we do, because the exact example of the Covid scenario, where we needed to draw down from the Scottish Government because we didn't have enough income to meet our expenditure, we should always be building up a bit of a surplus and then draw down on it when we need to. Right, so at least although you don't actually have the surplus, it is there in one sense with the Government. Assuming that you're making surpluses, the staff reductions that we've just been talking about are not driven by a need to increase the surplus or reduce your cost particularly, it's more linked to the amount of work that you've got to do. Correct. And we're obviously in a period of quite a lot of inflation, say we're around 10 per cent at the moment as I understand it. So what's your position on fees? Do you just increase the fees 10 per cent next time round and increase wages 10 per cent or is it not as simple as that? It's not as simple as that. I mean our ambition is always to become more and more efficient and not need to put our fees up. I mean the last fee review we did last year was the first fee review in 10 years because we'd managed to absorb all the cost rises we'd seen in the previous 10 years by delivering more efficiently. But we, as an organisation, on an annual basis we look at whether our fees are set at the right level and if we thought that we weren't going to manage to cover our costs with our fees, it's the fees are a matter for the minister so we'd be having a discussion. But our last fee review, we try to set the fees on the basis that we think they will stand us in good stead for the next few years and kind of part of what we're trying to do with delivering more efficiently with digital is to take our costs down in areas so that if costs are going up elsewhere we're still in a break-even position without needing to do anything with our fees. I mean I take that in a time of normal inflation that's quite nice to keep your fees although it has to be said that train fares and Mars bars and most things go up every year, not just once every 10 years. But I mean with inflation at 10 per cent or so do you not need to rethink that model and think about an annual increase? So we're currently just about to go into our corporate planning process which is where we look at the finances for the next five years, we do our cost projections, we look at whether we still think we can deliver everything we plan to deliver within the cost envelope, we'll be taking expectations around inflation into account with that and if out of that process we think there is no way of balancing the books we'll be having a discussion but at the moment I think we think we can but that's something we haven't done the detailed planning for yet. I mean can I ask about you, do you negotiate your own pay increases for staff or is that just purely part of the public sector? So we are a separate pay bargaining unit but we negotiate within Scottish Government pay policy so we follow Scottish Government pay policy in terms of what pay increases we are able to offer. I mean others are going to be asking in a lot more detail about new cases and arrears and all that kind of things so I don't want to go there but I mean have you asked your users for example would they prefer a higher fee increase and lesser arrears or do they prefer a lower fee increase and keep the arrears? We haven't and the reason we haven't is because more fees wouldn't solve our long standing open casework problem. I mean we've had the money for those cases that we are working on and we have the money to do that work so we haven't asked our customers that question. I understand that Spice had requested some data around the income and expenditure plans but the register wasn't able to provide it or wasn't willing to provide it and we've also had some questions around transparency over staffing. The impression we get is that there's less information being shared than in previous corporate plans and I don't know if that is you've kind of set out why there's a vagueness around the staffing levels that you're undergoing a workforce planning project at the moment. We did feel there was less information on the income and expenditure projections and what we've previously received is there I just wonder why that you weren't able to share more of that information with us and well go ahead. In our corporate plan we project a range of income and a range of expenditure and it takes into account the sort of things Mr Mason asks about what if costs are higher, what if we can deliver more efficiencies, what if the housing market is more buoyant, what if it's less. We could provide the current numbers that sit behind each of those ranges but the purpose I guess in the corporate plan is to demonstrate the fact that there is that range and it's a reasonably significant difference between a high housing market and a low housing market and then the kind of expenditure that might come and we felt for people reading our corporate plan that was more helpful to understand the kind of envelope we work in but I'm very happy to look at what else we could provide to the committee in terms of the numbers that sit behind that. I think that would be helpful given the committee's scrutiny role and we'll have spice contact. It might be that you do share the briefings with us monthly whether there's more information provided than that or it could be in private if that was something that the register felt was important but we would appreciate more sharing of figures on that issue would be helpful. Colin Beattie to be followed by Michelle Thomson. I'd like to look at some of the issues around new cases and one key element in this is that you're anticipating that new cases will be dealt with within the 35 days, new registration cases. Firstly when you talk about new registration does that include dealing with whole and transfer of part included in that? And first registrations yes. Okay now I understand that your performance April June 2022 and first registrations is at 66.8%. The aim is for all new registration cases to be completed within 35 days but that's by March 2027. That's correct. Which seems an awful long time off. I mean I'm assuming that the first registration, I don't have any figure here in front of me for first registrations themselves. Dealing with whole I assume is less in volumes. Similarly transfer of part would be less. I'm afraid it's the other way round so dealing with whole is by far and away our biggest volume intake. House is already on the land register or property is already on the land register coming in to be transferred ownership. That dwarfs everything else we do. That is thousands of applications a week. Our first registrations typical intake for a week is about 500 and the transfers apart typical intake for a week is I want to say 400 but I'm going to look at Chris who's nodding. Our dealings with whole is much the biggest volume that we do. And you're at 91 per cent on that for the quarter April June. So why is it going to take the 2027 to be able to get to 100 per cent? Probably most helpful I guess if I talk about first registration and transfers apart. They're different skill sets so a registration officer who can deal with a dealing with whole couldn't instantly go and deal with a first registration or a transfer apart. They need to have additional skills to do either of those roles. So we've set ourselves a target to ratchet up for first registrations and transfers apart each year to get more and more of them done within the 35 days as we can build additional capacity with skilling people up. It will also be the case that it will never get to 100 per cent for first registrations and transfers apart because some of them are simply so complex that if the moment they came in the door a registration officer started working on them they wouldn't have finished it in 35 days. They can take that long. So we're aiming to get as close to 100 per cent as possible because what that will allow us to do is say to customers when your registration comes through the door whatever it is we will be able to instantly tell you whether it's one that we can do within 35 days and if it isn't we can come back to you and agree a timescale because we can have looked at it and say this is how long it's going to take us to do it and the customer can then know when they're going to get it back. I'll come back to your bespoke timescales in a second but that means that over the next five years you're not anticipating that you will be dealing with the new cases within the period that you anticipate therefore they will go into arrears surely. They are the ones that are not picked up so the next five years you're going to be treading water. That's not correct so I'm going to bring Chris in in a minute to expand on this but we've set a 35 day target because it aligns with the advance notice so when a transaction is going through as listed submits an advance notice that sort of holds the place for them to submit an application for 35 days so the ideal is they get the application in and it's processed before the advance notice expires. Not Chris can elaborate on the details or the problem if it doesn't but that's the ideal. We might have some cases that take 36 days or 37 days or 38 days so we're not going to end up with long standing open case work from this it just might be that a small percentage are going to take us longer than the 35 days. Now we could have set the target at 50 days or 60 days we could you know we could have a longer target but what customers have said to us is it'll be helpful if you can tell us how much you're going to be able to get done in 35 days and the conversations we've had with the Law Society say that they're happy with the kind of approach we're taking to getting to the point where as much as possibly can be done within 35 days and anything that falls without with that is because it's going to take us longer than 35 days full stop there's no way of it being done within 35 days. So 35 days is just a notional target? Well it's aligned to the advance notices so it's that's why it made sense as a target. Five years five years before you're going to be where you want to be that seems an awful long time when your percentages in terms of performance are already quite high why isn't it possible to do it quicker? Well we've modelled the time it takes to skill people up we obviously also have to deal with the long standing open case work so we aren't putting all of our resource on to the new stuff we're also making sure we're keeping keeping pace with dealing with the old stuff we aim to be at 75 per cent for first registrations by the end of this financial year so it may be that we can get there quicker but the numbers we're putting out are based on our current modelling of the extra capacity we can create what we think the housing market's going to do and therefore what percentage we think we'll be at. But you're projecting for staff reductions in the coming years and here you're talking about training staff up and putting extra resources in. So we are I mean as discussed earlier we're talking about so dealings with whole is the place where we will be able to automate so if we can introduce a level of automation in dealings with whole it will allow us to take more of those people more quickly and retrain them on to first registrations and transfers of part so that we can get more quickly up to more of those being done within the 35 day target and retrain people on to being able to deal with the old cases. So that's part of the reason why there's a lot of moving parts in this and things that are completely out with our control like the volume of the housing market and customer adoption of our digital systems all of which make it quite difficult to predict accurately and hence our modelling takes all of those into account and says here's where we think we'll be if we can do better of course we will but I think it's important to be honest with people about expectations rather than predict something that I don't know how I'm going to deliver it and then let people down. For a few years. Mr Beattie, have a number of members who are interested in this area of question now, once I've let them in, if there's something you'd wish to come back on if you could indicate to me? It's Michelle Thomson to come in next but can I just ask for a point of clarity following Mr Beattie's questions. The bespoke time frame, the example you seem to say 36-37 days kind of thing like it would just be over but the website seems to address a time frame of six months for complex cases and is there a what is so the committee can understand what is meant by a bespoke time frame is there a limit set on that or is that. It would be agreed with the customer based on the complexity of the case we have I mean Chris do you want to come in and just talk about our most complex first registration cases and how long they actually take for us to work Yes I can do briefly good morning. By way of context the thing that we discuss most frequently with customers and the customers tell us they want most is certainty of outcome so that 35 day period in the bespoke arrangement is designed to give certainty of outcome to applicants to say you can have a high degree of certainty that your case will be done within 35 days or if it is more complex then we will have a bespoke arrangement with you that will take account of and take account of the complexity of the transaction. Now sometimes you will have transactions which are you know large complex areas of land you think about a larger state which can have hundreds of properties which have broken off from that estate over the years and there can be a lot of complexity around where the boundary sits exactly and you'll understand that we want to get that right and that getting that right is more important than doing it in 35 days in that scenario and so we would look at the complexity of the estate title in that example we would look at the number of properties that have broken away from it the relationship between those properties and the estate title and we would agree with the submitting solicitor a period that we both thought was reasonable to complete that work in and to deliver on the certainty that customers tell us they want most. So it depends on the case there's no kind of upper limit to how long a complex case could take for a bespoke arrangement that could be. It does depend on the case I think we would have in our mind that it would be no longer than 12 months certainly and quicker than that if we can but it does depend on the case yes. Okay thank you and Michelle Thompson to be followed by Alexander Brannock. Good morning. I wanted to ask you some questions about the backlog and I expect other members will want to come in that matter as well. When you appeared before the committee and asked about the backlog you had how long it would take to clear you said and I quote three years or a little bit longer. Now you will have seen the letter from Mr Keith Robertson in which he extrapolated some figures and most critically suggests that some cases lodged in 2017 will actually take 11 years to complete. So I wanted to ask you first of all the question about where Mr Robertson is wrong or if indeed he is wrong. I don't Mr Robertson's numbers are based as far as I can see on him looking at how many cases from 2017 we've processed over a time period. I think I've said to the committee before our current approach to dealing with our longer standing open cases is to ask customers where they want us to focus the effort. So we have our expedite service and in the last quarter just 2017 is a good example actually because in the last quarter we did 5,390 expedite cases. Now if I put all of that energy into the 2017 cases 2017 would be gone there are less than 5,000 cases from 2017 but those aren't the cases the customers wanted us to focus on so we're quite deliberately targeting effort on the long standing open case work where customers tell us there's a need to get that case back more urgently and that's been the position until now where we've put back to Mr Beechey's question a lot of energy into getting on top of our new cases energy into making sure we're keeping pace with the cases in the backlog that the customers want us to get dealt with. We're just in the position now where we've released some capacity and we're putting a dedicated team onto 2017 because the next thing the customers have said is when you're on top of the new staff when you're on top of dealing with all the long standing stuff that we're asking you to do work from the oldest case forward so we will start to see an acceleration through 2017. Can't tell you right now that we've had a team in the office going through all those cases looking at them trying to understand just how long it's going to take but we are going to start to see an acceleration so I think Mr Robertson's calculations are based on assuming we only do the amount of work we have been doing and that is not the plan the plan is to accelerate and as we can release more capacity more people go on to the older cases and we move faster through those. I understood that expediting of cases didn't include the length of time since it was lodged as your process changed then. It doesn't in the sense that we could get a case submitted today that there's some huge urgency to get back tomorrow. In general an expedite request comes about when we have had a case for a longer amount of time it's very rare that we get an expedite request for a relatively newly lodged case. They are tending to be cases that date further back than 2022. Therefore for the record for solicitors at lodged cases in 2017 you're saying that if they come to you with a request to expedite because of the time taken you will do that. Oh 100% and in fact the numbers that Mr Robertson will be quoting in his letter will be expedite cases they will be where the submitting solicitor has come along and said this is the priority please could you get this case done and we get it done but as I said now we're in the position to put some extra resource into the long-standing open case work and that will mean we can start to go faster through that. Okay and when you said you asked the customers what was the specific feedback from those who still had outstanding cases from 2017 did they say that they wanted ones that had been lodged more recently to be dealt with first? Or did you break it down in that way? So the engagement we've had is with the Law Society Property Law Committee who are the sort of representatives of that wider wider solicitor group and the answer was we want the ones back that are most urgent and it might be more urgent to get a 2020 case back than a 2017 case. It's not actually the customers then you used the term customers it's a committee in the Law Society that have given suggested that approach rather than the customers at the end of the chain. I'm not sure how the Law Society would have sought views from the people they represent but we're very clear I mean expedite exists if people start to ask for lots of 2017 cases to be expedited that's where we'll be focusing our effort but I think it makes sense I don't know Chris might want to come in on the sort of reasons for expedite but expedite is relevant where the fact the case hasn't been completed is going to cause some sort of problem there will be plenty of 2017 cases that aren't going to cause a problem and customers aren't going to therefore want us to prioritise getting them done over and above something that's more urgent for them of course customers want us to get them done I fully accept that but with the amount of resource we have and we can't do all of it the feedback we most clearly had was do the ones that I need back but surely the point is that some customers won't know that there's a problem with cases going back to 2017 until the point at which it's uncovered in which cases it's too late I think I disagree I mean the point at which a customer might realise that they have an urgency around 2017 case for example would be if there's going to be some element of a further transaction and the fact that the case hasn't been completed but our expedite system is very efficient I mean nine days is our typical expedite time so we have the ability when a customer gets hold of us and says I need that 2017 case done we get it done very quickly um I think you may be referring to the problem element as being when we come to do the case if we discover that the case has been incorrectly completed by the solicitor and we can't register it and in in that case we would need to consider if it should be rejected but that's why we have a separate approach around not rejecting things where we've had them for a period of time if it's legally possible for us to not do that precisely to avoid causing a problem for a customer by rejecting something some years after they submitted it but Chris is much more expert than me and able to expand on what we do just one more question before you cut you come in Chris thank you is it the case that the impact in that scenario you describe being discovered later on is a much greater impact if you leave it till later on because the recourse for customers or clients is diminishing over time it's not I mean the the fundamental let's give you an example and then Chris will expand so if a solicitor has made a mistake in an application and we therefore can't register it that mistake is there whether we discover it the day we look at the application or some period later and the things the solicitor will need to do to correct that mistake are the same the thing I would absolutely accept is clearly if it's a piece of work a solicitor's done very recently it's going to be fresher in their mind are they going to remember what the case is it's probably less effort for them to do the necessary additional work to correct the mistake that they've made in the first place I accept if you get something back some years later you're going to have to refresh your memory on what was this case how did I do the conveyancing what do I need to do to fix the issue but the mistake hasn't got any bigger by virtue of it being sitting there waiting to be processed but I don't know if it'd be helpful for Chris to just talk a little bit about that approach I know that convener's going to commit yes because we are quite poos for time one thing I would ask if the convener is agreeable on behalf of the committee is can you come back to us outlining your specific strategy for dealing with cases from 2017 and then also reflect on what threads of that will influence your strategy for dealing with backlog cases from subsequent years because I don't personally accept the revisioning approach of by getting rid of a backlog you get rid of the term backlog because some of these historical cases if they're not dealt with could be and I agree with Mr Robertson in his assessment it could be catastrophic if a rejection were to occur hence me asking about a strategy I'm very happy to come back on that but for the record I'd like to be really clear it will not be catastrophic we have many processes in place to ensure that there is no catastrophic impact for a case being rejected after a period of time after Burnett but it has been expedited cases have been raised already can we have some figures that the expedited cases there was a 54% success rate so out of 1,359 applications it was only 728 that were accepted has been expedited in 2021 why is there such a high rate of refusal for expedition requests so we have a very clear criteria on which someone can request an expedite and if it doesn't meet the criteria we don't accept it for expedite now sometimes it doesn't meet the criteria because the solicitor hasn't submitted the relevant evidence or hasn't made the case appropriately and they will go away produce the necessary evidence and come back in and then we would accept it but it's just to be extremely clear with customers these are the criteria on which things can be expedited and if it doesn't meet those criteria it's not appropriate for it to be expedited I mean in 2021-22 it's sitting at 49% when approved that's actually below 50% it has looks like it's increasing during this financial year but it's on a lower figure I mean it just seems quite high for people if they're making mistakes that it's not appropriate get not be dealt with so there's not as many coming in because you as an organisation you have to process them that's exactly what we're working on so our customer service team if someone requests an expedite and they haven't adequately demonstrated why it meets the criteria there'll be a conversation explaining what we would need to see often the solicitor will go oh fair enough I hadn't understood doesn't need to be expedited there's a different way of solving the problem or if they've misunderstood and then can supply the evidence they do and then we're trying to educate the customers about what we need to see and I would hope I mean my ambition would be that we never have to refuse an expedite case because solicitors are only asking for it when it meets the criteria but I think it's something at the moment where we are getting some requests that it's not appropriate to expedite and therefore we're not expediting it okay Alexander Burnett thank you convener and members to my register of interests just starting with a positive I've had some good feedback from professionals I think just like to pass that on with some of the improvement in service and in a similar vein can I say what an avid reader of your blog which comes out and welcome you your appearance today and willingness to share information today however I hope you do take away a disappointment I think the committee's had and Spice has had with some of the transport lack of transparency or lack of willingness to share some of the data and I suppose it's on that really my question is what more data can we get but I'd like to pursue now and following up on Michelle Thompson's questions on the back of Keith Robertson's letter with with the bespoke agreements can you just be clear who those agreements are with are they with customers and therefore what can you provide in the way of information in terms of a some sort of metric or kpi of how many of these agreements are what is the time frames they are agreeing with is it three months is it a year are they actually all under a year as you're saying can we see that because the letter some of the data here shows that some of it might take 11 years so how can we actually see that happening so I was wondering just to start with what what you can share in terms of more data on on those agreements and also if anybody has any appeal if a if you is an agreement really a mutual agreement or is it being dictated to them so I think I think we should be clear that the ambition and back to mr beach's question the ambition around new cases coming in the door and when we may want to reach bespoke agreements about the timetable for turning those round we're not there yet that requires us to get to the point where we've got the vast majority of cases being done within the defined 35 day time frame and then that small number of cases that we recognise instantly can't be done are going to need a bespoke agreement and at the point of which we reached that point I'd be more than happy to be thinking about the metrics that we would capture around how many of those what's the average time frame the position we're in at the moment with our long-standing open cases is it's very focused on expedites so when a customer comes to us and says I've got an urgent need to get this case back we will tell them how long it's going to take and as I said a moment ago our typical turnaround time is or our average turnaround time is nine days but we have an example of doing something in 48 hours when it was that urgent and colleagues worked through the night to get it done and I'm proud of them for that so again I think if it would be useful to provide more information on expedites and the turnaround times for expedites and then I think as I said a moment ago to miss Thompson at the point where we have moved people across to work on additional people to work across on our oldest cases we should start to be able to predict how quickly we will be getting rid of that 2017 set of open cases and I'd be grateful for the committee to hold me to account for that delivery so I think as we've when the team have been through the 2017 cases and got an estimate of the time frame we'll be able to be clear on when we expect that to be gone and then beyond that how we would expect that to roll forward into 2018 2019 and 2020 and I'm extremely confident it will not be anything like the timescale suggested in Mr Robertson's letter. Thank you I'm sure we all hope that. I'd be grateful for more information on that expediting data but just the outstanding cases of those 5000 how many of those do you think have agreements bespoke agreements would you say? Sorry on the 2017 so none will have yet I mean if someone's requested an expedite they'll have had it back it'll be gone to the next. Sorry how many of those have had bespoke agreements agreed not expediting how many of those backlog from 2017? None yet. Okay when do you expect to have an idea of when that will be because you've just said today that you expect all of them to be done within a year but yet you've gotten out nothing to evidence that? Sorry I think so I think just to be clear on that we were talking in relation to the 35 day period and the bespoke agreement around new applications not applications which are already in the system applications which are already in the system as the keeper has mentioned we will deal with by expedite and the improvements that we're making in the up front space are designed to release capacity to move those cases that are in the system already much more quickly particularly focused on the 2017 cases but we don't have bespoke arrangements for them but we do speak to the customers and the customers who have submitted those applications you know all the time about progress but the bespoke arrangement that we mentioned is focused on new applications. So what more information are you able to provide at the moment of the detail of those backlog and when they will be able to be completed? As we firm up the capacity that we will be able to release onto the older cases so that the capacity that will take us beyond just being able to deal with the number that are requested for expedite we will start to be able to be firmer on the timetable for clearing those older cases because at the moment we're in the situation where we're able to deal with all the expedites that we approve and some extra as we release more capacity we should start to be able to be clearer on the timetable for clearing 2017 clearing 2018 clearing 2019 will be being transparent with customers about that and that hopefully will help customers make an informed choice about whether there are additional cases they would like to then request an expedite from because the timetable we're able to commit to is going to be too long for them. I mean I think one thing I'd really like to be clear on is we're in this window of fixing a problem that's a very long-standing problem and we're fixing it forever we will get to the end of our current corporate plan we will not have long-standing open cases we will have everything that comes in the door done within a fixed time frame and done in agreement with the customer where it takes longer than that fixed time came so a solicitor qualifying today is going to have two or three or four years of experiencing some long-standing open case work with ROS and then it will be gone forever and that will be a huge amount of progress because long-standing open case work is not a new problem for ROS it is a problem ROS has had forever and it's just taking us a bit of time it would have gone faster had it not been for the pandemic to get that problem gone for good. Thank you and just finally when do you expect to be able to share that timetable with the committee and also on your the information you're given your blog is it possible to do improvement show month on month or quarter on quarter improvements alongside some of those figures? On the latter point definitely we feedback really welcome about how the blog information and the performance information would would help people see see improvements on the 20s on when we'll be able to come back for with a timetable for the expectation on 2017 as soon as we've completed the work of looking at it so sometime this quarter do you think Chris? Rejections has been mentioned there has been an increase in the number that have been rejected in 2021-22 the last full year it's increased significantly it's in some cases more than that's more than doubled the number of rejections over three months old for applications what is why is it going up at the rate that it has and do you see this stabilising or why there's I know it's a small percentage of overall cases but the rejection rate is on an upward trajectory so I'll ask Chris to come in my my understanding is that the rejection rate for not older than three month cases so younger than three months is increasing and bluntly that's because solicitors are making more mistakes with what they're sending to us and we need to reject them I think our percentage for over three months is very stable it's about 0.3 but Chris do you want to just come in and just perhaps it'd be helpful to briefly explain why we need to reject things so what I would say about about rejections over three months you'll know the position is that the legislation sets out what's called the one-shot principle which says that applicants should get applications right first time and if they don't the keeper should reject them our position is that if we haven't spotted an error or a problem with an application within three months then the keeper should relax the one-shot principle and allow applicants to amend or supplement their application and that's what we do so any case that's rejected after that three month period there is a discussion between one of our senior registration advisers and the submitting applicant about the best course of resolution and sometimes in those cases the applicant will decide to have the case rejected and to start again because that is a better solution for them in the circumstances even though there is an option to keep the application on the record the other thing that I would say just about the data on that is that it will include what I might call administrative applications if I can give you an example of that a party would submit to us for registration one deed we might then make create two administrative applications to give effect to that deed depending on what it's doing and the titles the titles that it's being registered against when we come to complete fully complete that registration we might discover that in fact we didn't need two administrative applications we only needed one and one of the administrative applications will then be rejected and that will count in the rejection data and count as a rejection but from the applicant's point of view there's no further work for them to do there the deed itself hasn't been rejected it's an administrative in-house rejection rather than an application being returned to the applicant okay is that because in 2021 there was 716 applications rejected and in the following year it was 1,247 so it's quite a lot that did go up in that case is that still the same reasons you've outlined why that's gone up or is there a reason why it spiked at that point I don't think there's a particular reason why it spiked that's just you know the discussions that we have on a on a case by case basis with the applicant that has been the outcome of them okay jamey how cool johnson to be followed by um if you want a heads up um thanks very much just just a few clarifications actually really firstly just that there isn't an additional charge for the expedient service or is it not at all okay thanks in until 2020 you operated as a trading fund you were able to build up a reserve and hold a reserve firstly where would you still hold that reserve or is that with the scottish government since 2020 any surplus has gone to has been handed to the scottish government is that held in a reserve because you mentioned being able to draw down on it now I don't know if that means you know it's allocated ring fence to you and in those two cases what those kind of what those financial figures basically would be and also if you were able to access those support I mean you know you have a backlog you've identified that you know it's about putting resource to it and being able to clear to it could could that some of that not be used to deal with these uh with these longstanding cases um I'll do what was quickly as I can with the three points so um we transferred the reserve we held at the point at which we reclassified it was just short of 60 million who was transferred across it goes into the scottish consolidated fund it's not ring fence to rose the same is true of any surplus we generate it goes into the scottish consolidated fund it's not ring fence to rose but what we were very clear when we were reclassified was that two fundamental risks that rose was able to manage itself when it held its own reserve had to transfer to the scottish government the first risk was the risk of a downturn in the housing market and us basically not having enough income to cover our costs and that was why we were able when the pandemic hit to successfully make a case to the scottish government that we needed budget from them to allow us to continue to pay people and the second risk that's transferred is the risk of a very high compensation claim so the warranty that I provide is infinite effectively people could claim against it and if we get a very high claim I clearly won't be able to meet it if I don't have money to draw down on so the scottish government have accepted that in that case they would be liable to pay out and in terms of the amounts of money that we are expecting to generate as a surplus over the next few years it varies depending on what we think the housing market and it's back to the convener's question about the kind of window of our sort of financial projections but we currently expect that surplus if it's generated to be between two and ten million each year depending on the housing market but our commitment to the scottish government is that we will break even and that we will not therefore expect to be a drain on them in terms of needing any money from them to cover our costs and if we generate a surplus that's a bonus I suppose okay and then obviously as you say 60 million was passed across so they might have more confidence than that on that basis can I just ask the kind of last kind of question I suppose the if you I don't know whether you've done any analysis on the cost of clearing that clearing that backlog obviously it's part of your plan to do it steadily but if you wanted to expedite that do you know how much that would cost in terms of additional resources it's really why I asked the question earlier about contractors and being able to be flexible on kind of meeting kind of demand and it's a really interesting question because I have often wondered if we had spent more money could we have got here faster and I think the answer is no because if we could hire extra staff if we had more money and we could hire extra people there's a big training overhead to get those people effective on the old cases we actually see a dip in the productivity of our existing people because they're busy training up new people so we sort of go backwards in order to go forwards yes we may then have had extra people available to work on the backlog but what would we do with those people when we no longer needed them I think it would be really irresponsible to recruit a lot of people to solve what is essentially a shortish term problem three to four years problem and then have a whole load of civil servants that we had no role for so our workforce planning is all about the right number of people to work through the plan we have in front of us retraining and reskilling those people as we go for other roles in digital replacing our contractors and to not end up with a lot of extra people who we've skilled up and used for a few years but we just wouldn't need in the future in the volumes that we would need so contractors coming in don't come in with necessarily the skills they come in and they do need training up if we were to bring in contractors to there aren't contractors out in the well maybe there are but there aren't really people out in the market who could come in and deliver on our registration function our contractors are all digital people who deliver our digital skills the registration stuff requires you to be in-house understand how to use our systems even if we were to hire people from other jurisdictions they would need a lot of retraining to work with our systems okay thank you thank you if you want to have a look thank you and good morning I would like to ask about your risk register and we understand it was published it's published on a monthly basis for your board we can find a June 21 risk register but I'd like to ask about the transparency of that and for scrutiny purposes access for this committee but also how it's informed your corporate plan so the yeah the most recent visibility of the risks that we are covering will be available through the board papers that are published and the last lot of board papers published would be the March 2022 board papers we quite deliberately take the decision to not publicly publish the detail of the risk register but I would be very happy to provide that privately to the committee if it would be useful for the committee to see all of our risk register and all the controls and everything else that sits sits underneath it it's just obviously something we wouldn't want in the public domain in detail because it contains some sensitive information about how we're mitigating some of the risks around for example our cyber risk and things like that in terms of how it informs our corporate plan so it's a sort of chicken and egg we develop our corporate plan in terms of what we want to deliver we then run a risk workshop with our board and our audit and risk committee where we look at what are the risks that are going to stop us achieving that we then identify the mitigations and controls for those risks and then we then have a process with the board and the audit and risk committee through the year of making sure that we are mitigating those risks sufficiently and then when we get round to the next corporate planning cycle clearly some of how much success we've had in mitigating those risks then informs what are we going to do in our next corporate plan so the best the best example would be around some of our digital risk mitigations so developing our digital systems is partly about providing better services to our customers but it's partly about taking out some of the underlying risk we have with having very legacy digital systems that could potentially be more vulnerable so that's how it sort of goes round in that cycle of informing what we do but then also being part of what we need to manage in order to ensure we're successful in what we do if that makes sense so it's fair to say that a lot of the risk management is supply side it's about how you operate as an institution and an organisation but clearly the importance of the register of scotland is vital to our economy to our businesses and to individuals so the impact of the risks that you carry can have really quite life-changing effects on people who manages that risk and why does that not appear in your corporate plan or indeed what I've seen from your risk register you're outward facing the risk impact are you describing I mean it sounds like you're describing the risk of us not delivering effectively and the knock on effect that that would have so I suppose I mean that's our whole purpose as an organisation is to deliver effectively and the risks that we manage as an internal organisation are about making sure that we do deliver effectively and therefore the consequences of us not being an effective organisation we're mitigating that risk in everything we do so I mean that's the whole point of us I suppose is to manage the risk of delivering effectively so that we give good service to the people of Scotland but there isn't an obvious transparency of that overall impact whether that should be the boards oversight or indeed the ministers oversight to make that clear so can I maybe give examples we've talked a lot about volume and we've talked effectively I think about how you're managing volume but clearly if register of scotland make a mistake or clearly if the loss of sight or lawyers make a mistake that can have consequences I think the rejections should be potentially seen as a good thing that's gatekeeping potential problems with what's been presented but clearly the risk of that is greater and you've said it yourself if it's from a 2017 case than if it is from telling more recently because trying to manage that risk or rectify it whether it's using an organisation or whether it's the supply chain of lawyers providing that kind of integer application is more problematic if you're carrying more older cases and the impact of that severity needs to be measured somewhere in terms of that area and I'm not sure that's transparent either in what you've been saying to us today or in your corporate plan or indeed from what I've seen the risk register is just inputs it's service inputs as opposed to risk outputs to the economy and we are the economy committee so clearly we're interested in you know what you might not always be you it might be individual lawyers so between yourselves and your major customer base obviously in our lawyers and obviously you work very closely with the law society how do you manage that risk of when things can go wrong and do go wrong because we know again it won't be large cases it'll be small cases but those cases could have a major impact and do you have a duty of care at all for either who holds that responsibility of that impact either for individuals and you'll know about mental health issues that people will come to you about either as individuals house at homeowners or indeed businesses so where does that risk and that impact lie and where is accountability for that lie is that within individual lawyers within the law society your board you as an organisation because there's definitely a risk there but who's managing that risk and how do we make it more transparent that is being managed properly so I suppose in terms of how I mean it's a neat I think what you're describing miss his love is a sort of it's an ecosystem level risk that if a mistake happens somewhere in the system there is an impact on an individual and I think at various stages in the system there's gatekeeping I mean lawyers are professionally trained they hold indemnity about the work they do our role as an organisation is to do our job our part of that kind of chain of what happens in a in a property transaction as effectively as possible it's one of the reasons we have a quality metric so that we measure trying to continuously improve getting it right and not needing things to be rectified it's why we have a warranty scheme so that if a mistake has occurred somewhere in the system and an individual has lost out as a result there is a recourse to come back to a warranty scheme and it's not it's really important and chris speaks better than I do to this really important to know the keepers warranty scheme isn't just about mistakes I make it can be about a mistake a lawyer makes that actually the individuals lost out but they can claim against us and then we sought out behind the scenes whether I should claim from the lawyer and so on so I think we're part of a system that manages that risk to the individual person transacting on a property of their being a mistake but we can't control all of that risk and and in terms of where our responsibility lies I think you know our our whole strategy setting for an organisation is about how do we improve how we deliver how do we eliminate the possibility of making mistakes how do we turn things around more quickly so that if there are problems they're spotted quicker and can be dealt with more quickly and and I feel that is what we can do within that system other people in the system will I'm sure be looking at I mean rejections is a great example when we reject the law firms get individual reports about what's happened with their cases are they seeing more rejections for a particular case I sincerely hope those firms are taking those reports seriously looking at them and thinking well how do we improve what we do so we aren't making these mistakes in the first place and so on and so forth but I mean it's something I'd be very happy to explore in more detail in terms of what else we could be doing to reassure the committee that yeah we take that responsibility to the economy very seriously like well somebody needs to do it and that's probably what people are really interested in so some kind of rather than hoping I think some kind of collective you call it an equal system which it is some kind of oversight to ensure that those risks and that impacts is being managed I think is would be very helpful if you could consider consider that thank you I'm going to bring Michelle Thompson in for a quick supplementary on this point so it's not a supplementary it's something entirely different but it's a quick question at the end okay there's a couple of issues I wanted to raise just before we conclude I'll come back if that's okay it's just to do with the land registers the original target of 2024 was the target for completion of the register and we're now I think last time you spoke to us about the difference between completion and functional completion so do we have a date is it a date for actual completion and then tied into that question we've had some issues raised around voluntary registration which is a key part of achieving functional or completed registration about the amount of time it's taken for those to be completed and other ones around excluded categories I think spice had contacted you looking for some clarity around what are what the excluded categories are what percentage of the overall land mass are covered by excluded categories so what's about that what is the target for are we aiming for full completion and closure of the say sign register or is it still functional completion and only functional completion or do we have a date for full volunteer registrations about the time it's taken for those to be completed and could we have some more detail on the percentage of excluded categories so I'll bring I'll bring Chris in I mean the there isn't a date for when every last square inch of Scotland will be on the land register because it's all the certainly not a date from our perspective because it's not within our gift we can't make people voluntary register and therefore there may be people who choose to never submit their land to the land register and that's why in terms of delivering the benefits of a complete land register we've gone for saying well functional completion benefits people who do want to transact it means their lands on the land register it means it's a dealing with whole when they do want to transact and we've done the unlocking say zines work so the visibility of the ownership is attached to a map for all the things that aren't yet on um Chris do you want to say something about the excluded categories for um functional completion because most of it is social housing it's never going to transact and therefore it doesn't need to be on the land register to deliver functional completion but there's other odd things like telephone boxes and ancient monuments and things that are also never going to transact so I can just take a couple of things if you like so first on on voluntary registrations I think they're subject to the general improvements that we've spoken about and trying to speed up the rate at which we're going through voluntary registrations um in a voluntary registration situation I think it's probably important to understand that rights are not changing a party is taking their ownership from the register of say zines into the land register and they've been giving greater clarity on the boundaries and what they own but there is no change of rights in a voluntary registration um set against the 2017 casework for example where rights are changing um so that's just for context but that has swept up in our general improvement approach that the keeper has outlined in relation to excluded areas what I would say is just just for clarity that um nothing is excluded from coming on to the land register if someone applies for voluntary registration we will do that if land is triggered if a sale was triggered through a first registration then again we will we will process that of course um when we talk about exclusions we're talking about our idea of trying to set out what we mean by functional completion and what we mean by functional completion is that properties which tend to transact regularly are on the land register and therefore they get the benefit of the faster convincing that you can get with land register titles in particular dealings with whole which go through in large volumes very very quickly and so to do that we look at the number of addressables in Scotland the total number of addressables and then we take properties out that we think will not typically sell very often so as the keeper mentions social housing is one things like garages are you know which are generally won't sell on their own I know there are some exceptions to that but generally a garage will sell with a property to which it's attached and we review that data every six months so every six months the address space is updated generally and we review whether the things we have excluded are right to be excluded or in fact is their data that they are actually trans transmitting or transferring more regularly than we anticipated so in terms of giving you a full a full list of that I think we did give that space and if we didn't then we will because I think sorry to interrupt I think what they'd asked for was a percentage of the land mass that was covered by excluded I think we do have an idea of what includes what would come under excluded okay so the answer to that is we don't we don't know against land mass because we don't know the land mass that's covered by things like ancient monuments you know post boxes pio boxes that have an address and as I said in that addressable date so it would be sort of comparing apples and oranges there I don't we don't have it okay thank you Michelle Thompson it's actually a supplementary to that looking at the land register completion by local authority it's quite quite variable I mean there's some very high completion rates with some local authorities and incredibly others below 50% and some with 0% I wanted to understand what influence if any you have over that by local authority and why there's such disparity in these figures regardless of whether you separate it from land register on or unlocking say scenes so in headline terms local authorities have had two ways of bringing their land onto the land register they can go through voluntary registration for things and local authorities have in some cases chosen to do that in some cases have not and the most typical reason for not is an affordability not adjacent to add about our fees but just about the kind of necessary background work they need to do to prepare a voluntary registration application so I think that's part of the variability the other issue then is we were running a programme of keeper induced registrations so typically actually for things like social housing where a local authority had all the data and could supply us with the information we were able to do the work at our own expense to put that on to the land register local authorities held held their data in very variable ways and only a small number of local authorities had their data in a state that they could give it to us so that we could process it other local authorities simply didn't and therefore keeper induced registration wasn't an option for them for that but we did at the time of doing this we spoke to every local authority to understand whether they did have data in a way that we could help them and if so how that approach would work so that I think describes the variability the the positive thing I would say that's happened since then is for those local authorities that haven't been able to go through voluntary registration or didn't have their data in a state that might be appropriate for keeper induced registration we've worked with a number of them on our unlocking sayings work so the data was in a good enough state for us to say can we plot it on a map can we tie it to the underlying sayings sheet so it turns up in that transparency of landmass ownership and we will continue to talk to local authorities about whether we can help at least surface some level of information about their ownership through that approach and so you've got an active plan for the next wave of how you engage with local authorities given the disparity in the figures because obviously I appreciate the local authorities that have been affected by Covid and are restarting a lot their operations so as part of our overall unlocking sayings work we will be I mean we're just above 80% of landmass now covered so we'll be looking hard at the remaining 20% and targeting it might be local authorities it might be actually we can get a bigger bang for our buck by going and talking to some of the big landed estates who haven't yet voluntary registered and say can we work with you on on doing at least unlocking sayings so the goal is get as close to 100% as quickly as possible and we'll talk to the right people to do that okay thank you thank you and with the to the keeper induced registrations is that mainly focus on local authorities or a demation large land so for clarity we can only do keeper induced registration really for houses and we had a programme of doing it for private houses it wasn't efficient we've stopped that now we're much better to put the people who can do that work on to our long standing open case work and for local authorities we've done what we can with those local authorities who had their data in a decent state there isn't more but clearly if a local authority came forward and said we've got our data in a good state can we have a conversation about keeper induced registration we'd absolutely be open to that but at the moment we aren't being approached on that basis okay thank you that brings us to the end of this morning's evidence session and can I thank Jennifer Henderson and Christopher Kerr for joining us this morning I suspend the meeting and we'll move into private session