 I welcome to the 19th meeting of 2023 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. I have apologies this morning from Colin Beattie and Fiona Hyslop. Our first item of business is a decision to take items 4, 5 and private. Our next item of business is consideration of our legislative consent memorandum on the UK Parliament electronic trade documents bill. This is a UK Government bill introduced in the House of Lords on 12 October, which changes the law on devolved matters. I welcome Richard Lochhead, Minister for Small Business, Innovation, Tourism and Trade, who is joined this morning by Chris Nicholson, Solicitor and Head of Branch, Constitutional Reform and External Affairs, Director for Legal Services and David Barnes, Deputy Director Trade Policy Directorate for International Trade and Investment, Scottish Government. I now invite the minister to make a brief opening statement on the Scottish Government's position. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the committee. Nice to join you this morning. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss the LCM for the Electronic Trade Documents Bill. As you'll be aware, the Government's committee to ensuring that Scotland is a successful trading nation and we want to create the best conditions possible for our businesses to operate within. One way we can do that is by harnessing advances in technology. We are committed to taking advantage of technology-based improvements to modernise trade processes and practices for Scottish enterprises and in doing so deliver benefits, of course, for the people of Scotland. It is vital that the Scottish legal system is tailored to help us to realise those ambitions, to provide a competitive platform for our businesses to operate and to support the businesses that we want to create tomorrow to be adapted to the modern world. The Electronic Trade Documents Bill is designed to do just that, to bring trading processes into the 21st century by giving electronic documents used for the purposes of trade the same legal standing as paper documents. This simple and common-sense measure will immediately remove burdens for businesses who choose to operate in a more digital way and it will create a more streamlined and modern trading system. This is something that Scottish businesses should be able to take advantage of in the future. The bill has been brought forward by the Law Commission of England Wales in recognition that this is an area of law in need of reform. Not only has there been significant engagement with Scottish legal and academic stakeholders, the bill did go through an expedited process in Westminster, given that it is highly technical and uncontroversial in nature. Therefore, as a Government, we support and welcome the policy intentions of the bill, which align squarely with our ambitions for the future of the trading landscape in Scotland. I should say, of course, that, unfortunately, despite our views and the policy intent of the bill, the Scottish Government could not support it as it was introduced due to the drafting of delegated powers. As drafted, the bill conferred powers on UK ministers to make secondary legislation in areas of devolved competence, and it gave UK ministers the ability, for example, to unilaterally disaply parts of the bill's regime in Scotland in devolved areas, so that paper documents would once again be needed. UK ministers would be required to consult Scottish ministers who would express concern, perhaps, or disapproval, but Scottish ministers could not prevent the UK Government from legislating in devolved areas. The Scottish Government has therefore spent considerable time defending the interests of the Scottish devolved institutions and negotiating with the UK Government to secure amendments to the bill. However, the process has been constructive, lengthy, and, of course, as a result of it being lengthy, it led to a delay in the LCM being lodged, so, of course, I want to take this opportunity to apologise to the committee for the delay and to stress that both myself and my officials recognise the important role that the committee has in the process. With the benefit of hindsight, had we known that it would take this long to conclude discussions with the UK Government, we would have lodged the LCM much earlier. I am, though, pleased to report that amendments have now been formally tabled by the UK Government and we anticipate them to be voted through without concern in the coming days. This has enabled the Scottish Government yesterday to lodge a supplementary legislative consent memorandum with the Scottish Parliament recommending consent to the bill on the basis of these amendments. I am very hopeful that this development allows us to secure the benefits of the bill, modernising our trade processes, delivering benefits to Scottish traders, those who trade with us, and, of course, the economy overall. Once again, I thank the committee for your time this morning and, of course, we will do our best to answer your questions. Thank you very much, minister. If I just start with a couple of questions about process, I welcome that you recognise the delay that has been introduced in the LCM. That is a bit of a feature of Parliament at the moment, and it is quite frustrating for committees not to get proper scrutiny, so I accept the apology for the lodging of the LCM quite late. You have indicated that, if you had realised that it is going to take so long, there might have been an option to introduce it sooner. Has there been lessons learned from this process? Would that be something that you consider going forward? Also, at the convener's group, there has been a discussion around whether we could look at interim LCMs or pre-LCMs just a way so that the committee can be involved earlier. The answer to your first question is yes, we will do our best to learn lessons. The background is that you are dealing with a technical uncontroversial bill, but there are issues of concern within that, so there were constructive negotiations to sort that out. Clearly, it took some time to do that, and I guess it is striking a balance between the fact that you are dealing with something that is potentially uncontroversial technical, but with the fact that you have concerns, but because it was generally uncontroversial, perhaps we could have lodged LCM earlier in anticipation of negotiations, hopefully being successful, because it is not the most highly political issue in the world. I am interested to hear about the conveners discussing a kind of interim LCM. That potentially could be a solution to that kind of scenario. Now that the Government has recommended the acceptance of the LCM, there may be some questions remain of our Scottish Parliament's role in scrutinising future pieces of work that come attached to this LCM. Where would you see the opportunities for the Scottish Parliament to look at proposals that are coming through? I understand that Scottish Government ministers would be able to introduce measures, and you would be consulted by the UK Government on measures that would affect Scotland. Where do you see Scottish Parliament committees fitting into this scrutiny process? If secondary legislation was used, the process that would follow would involve the committees of the Parliament. There is a wider policy implications on how we work with trade moving from paper to electronic. It is quite difficult to predict any scenarios. The powers that the UK Government is retaining have said that they are unlikely to use other than extreme circumstances. The amendments are not perfect that the UK Government has brought forward. They move much more forward in terms of recognising the role of Scottish ministers in relation to devolve matters. However, the UK Government has retained the ability to supply certain parts of the bill in extreme circumstances. For instance, if there was a cyber attack or IT systems failed and a decision was taken that we had to revert to paper for certain trade documents, they have said that only under those circumstances would they use those powers. Clearly, we would have to respond to that at the time. It is against that comforting background that we are not too concerned about. There have been many further interventions in terms of changes. Who knows? There would be instances where the UK Government would consult the Scottish Government, but it would not necessarily come to committees. However, you are suggesting that it is because it would be in extreme and rare circumstances that that scenario would come around. That is what we anticipate and that is what we have been assured by the UK Government. However, I will undertake to keep the committee informed should anything arise in relation to that. If you would introduce an LCM earlier, would you think that you would have been in a position to say yes? That is a good question. I cannot give a clear answer to it because we do not know how the negotiations have gone. As a result, just tabling the LCM at the time, we are trying to convey that it has been an extraordinary length of time and we could have perhaps envisaged a hopefully successful outcome to allow us to have tabled the LCM to give the committee its opportunity and an appropriate timescale to do its work. However, the way things have transpired, we are content to support it and lodge the LCM. I am quite comfortable with the way that you have done it. Even though it has taken a bit of time, you have arrived at a conclusion. Everybody has got round the table and talked sensibly. Changes have been made and you are now in a position to recommend acceptance. That is a mature way of going about things. Can you explain for the committee what the main sticking points were originally, and I know that they have been ironed out so that we can understand that? The main sticking point originally was the lack of recognition for the ability for Scottish ministers to be given delegated powers in devolved areas. It was essentially ignored and just for the UK ministers to override and intervene in devolved areas. In many other bits of legislation, you will all be aware of how much more controversial where that occurs. There is much more of a political argument. Clearly, what we are dealing with here is law reform. The whole reason why it is expedited in the House of Commons is because law commission recommendations relating to law reform are uncontroversial and technical. That was the background. There were two things that I wanted to ask about. First, to get a bit of an idea of what documents might be included in this, whether there are any notable exceptions that might be included and how far does it go down. For example, does it include potentially health certificates that can be part of cross-border trade and things like that? In the bill, there is a list of documents that are affected. I am just working through my papers to get the list that is on the bill. Thank you to David for handing me that. Clearly, there is a list in 1.2 giving examples. A bill of exchange, a bill of leading, a ship's delivery order, a warehouse receipt, a mates receipt, a marine insurance policy, a cargo insurance certificate and so on. I do not know if Chris, from a legal perspective, wants to comment on how wide that list would go. Private transactions are devolved, but clearly a lot of this is interacting with reserved issues. It is a very complex area because it has been built up over hundreds of years of commercial trading. One of the key points of supporting an LCM is that to get into an argument over what is devolved and what is reserved, we could be here for years because we are talking about untangling hundreds of years of commercial trading and to ascertain exactly what is reserved, what is devolved and what is billed up over. That is why the bill refers to recognising customs that have been built up over time and custom practice. Chris May wants to talk about some of the technical details. I think that it is important to know that the list in subsection 2 is not exhaustive. It is there to give some examples, but you will see the way that section 1 of clause 1 operates. It is quite a wide gloss that they are trying to apply in these circumstances. To answer the question, you would have to know what normally comes with health products and then you would circle back to see if they would come within that definition. It may be the case that they do not. It may be a simple contract whereby somebody wants to buy medical products and they get them in a straight contract. It may be the case for larger supplies that they may apply here, but it depends on the scale and what you would normally see customarily in relation to health products. If there are any particular examples, we can… I suppose that it really just comes back from over. As we left the EU in the last few years, there have been a number of examples where there have been delays in trade because of paper documents having to be used. I was wondering how far down, for the simple as I say, things like health certificates relating to food exports or something like that and how far that went down, whether that was including those sorts of things as well. Some of that has become electric but whether that is digital but whether that would be included as a standard now, but I could maybe look further into that. The other thing that I was just going to ask in terms of, I suppose, the approach that this does, does this mean that there will be a uniform approach across the UK single market or is there still the potential for different regulations, requirements et cetera, within the UK? It certainly smooths trade because it makes sense for the same laws to apply in common trade areas. Removing the obligation to use paper is clearly something that is in the interests of trade in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, so it is a perfectly sensible option. Thank you very much. Can I just ask—you said that there would be Jamie Harkell Johnson's question on different requirements within the UK. Where does the Law Society of Scotland's views fit into that? I think that they have made some comments about laws of possession that are not identical. The law is different around intangible property that does not apply in Scotland. Will that just be for the Scottish Government ministers to make the required changes in that area? I think that that reference—again, I will have to ask Chris to come in, which is legal mind—was keen to emphasise that some parts of the law society are devolved. Those references were really to explain their recognition that this is an area that crosses between devolved and reserved areas. People might think that trade is reserved, and clearly many aspects are, particularly in relation to marine maritime industries, whereas private transactions and some other aspects such as the ones that are highlighted are devolved. It would be the responsibility of the Scottish Government to make the changes in those areas, but it has to be in line with that piece of legislation. The bill with the amendments gives delegated powers to the Scottish ministers. If ministers in Scotland felt that there was a reason to intervene, they would have those powers to identify devolved areas into an act. Does the Government have an idea of whether they are going to intervene and make changes in those areas, or is that still something that is under consideration? No, because the thrust—well, not at the moment, because the thrust of the legislation is to make a very sensible move from paper to electronic trading and make sure that the interests of devolution are protected within that bill should something arise in the future for the Scottish ministers feel that they have to intervene. We are not predicting any particular snare at the moment, but it is important to protect the fact that it is because parts of the trading environment are devolved that the Scottish ministers retain the legal right to intervene. I think that it is going back to Mr Hock or Johnson's point on your follow-up convener. It is simply to note that you are always going to have slight divergence between the jurisdictions within the UK about how these documents come to be used, because you are using different courts, you have different legal jurisdictions, so there will always be different rules and ways the courts apply things around that. That being said, most of the documents listed, as you can see, are quite commonly known within the UK. Some are devolved for reserved purposes, some have been unified over time at a UK level, such as bills of exchange and promissory notes. There is a form of alignment and understanding within the UK what these documents are and what they are entitled to, if you have one of those documents. How they stand to be applied or interpreted in the jurisdictions sometimes diverges, but that has always been the case. As a result, it is not understood to be any need to change that at the moment. I think that the Law Society's comments were about recognising the benefit in preserving on a UK basis, so there would not be divergence if he started to have two different regimes in place. I understand the difference between the reserved and devolved aspects. Once the bill is passed, is it the intention of the Scottish Government to move towards electronic documents in those areas, or is that something that is being considered? Does that make sense? Yes. We support the policy aim of moving towards electronic trading. The bill clearly sets course for that to be legally possible, so that is why we are supporting it. The bill itself will give the right to Scottish traders to use digital where they want to, to give them a choice. They are getting a choice, whereas a lot at the moment says that it has to be paper. Generally, it has to be paper. Therefore, it changes a lot to that. Given that you support the policy intention of the bill, it is something that you would be encouraging with Unscotland to move towards. The final question is just around the issue of consent. I am happy with the number of LCMs. It is one of the areas in which the Government has previously recommended not to give approval to LCMs because of the issue of consent. Although there has been compromise on that piece of legislation, it has not gone as far as to introduce consent as a mechanism. In that case, what is the reason for that? You have explained that it is technical, so has there been a consensus reached, has there been a compromise reached and is that a model for any future LCMs or is this one too particular? It is the issue that the committee frequently supports the Government in that approach. In that instance, we have been asked to compromise and not to give that the level of importance that it has in other LCMs. Essentially, every bit of legislation has to be looked at on its merits. As I said in my remarks, it is a technical, uncontroversial issue. No-one thinks that it is a bad idea to move to electronic trading from paper in this day and age, given all the benefits. Clearly, we know that there are disputes in other areas, so each bit of legislation has to be treated in its merits. In this case, we are pragmatic. We are, of course, open to compromise. As I said before, the amendments in the UK Government are not perfect, but they are good enough. For that reason, we are content to lodge the LCM. I have not been here as long as the minister, but is this previously how LCMs would tend to operate? They would involve negotiation and consensus. We had less divisions on LCMs, and I think that we have been more recent. I can only speak from personal experience from previous ministerial rules, one of many LCMs. Generally speaking, we listen to stakeholders, we look at the impact, and we judge each one, as I said, on its merits. In the past, I have supported many LCMs, which just made sense to allow the UK Government to take forward something. For a range of reasons, just because there is no point in duplicating efforts sometimes or because it will deliver quicker benefits, we have done it anyway, so there are just different reasons. Clearly, across Government, there are many more disputes in other areas, because ultimately, as a Parliament, we have to defend devolution. I am sure that that is the view of the committee as well, that there will be times when you think that compromise is appropriate, and times when compromise is not appropriate because devolution has been undermined, so it is just a case-by-case basis. It is recognised that the environment for LCMs has changed quite a bit in recent years, but the committee welcomes the evidence that we have heard this morning, and we will consider a report in due course. I will bring this evidence to an end. Thank you for attending this morning. Okay. Thank you very much for your time. I will brief you to spend while we change witnesses. So our next item of business is an evidence session on registers of Scotland's activities and performance. The registers of Scotland are the non-ministerial office and part of the Scottish Administration with direct accountability to the Scottish Parliament. I am responsible for scrutiny that does fall mainly to this committee. So I once again welcome Jennifer Henderson, keeper of the registers of Scotland, and she is joined by Christopher Kerr, interim accountable officer and registration and policy director registers of Scotland. I now invite the keeper to make a short opening statement. Thank you, convener, and thank you for the opportunity to meet with you today and give you an update on Ros's progress, and I am delighted to make a brief opening statement. I am joined today by Chris Kerr, who is now our interim accountable officer, and so we will be able to offer insight on Ros's finances, and also in his role as registration and policy director can speak to the detail on areas such as managing casework and delivering the benefits of a complete land register. I am pleased to tell the committee we have made progress across all our strategic objectives since our last appearance, and we will be able to accelerate this progress in the year ahead. In April, we shared with you our delivery plan for 2023-24 that provides the year 2 detail for our overarching corporate plan, which takes us from 2022 to 2027, and we have set ourselves stretching targets in particular around processing casework, which remains our top priority. The strategy that we have put in place has meant that we have stabilised the volume of open cases, meeting or exceeding our targets in processing new applications, and meeting or exceeding our targets for clearing our older casework. We have also increased our processing of first registrations by 5 per cent and transfers of part by 24 per cent, but I do want to acknowledge that we know from talking to customers that we still have more to do in terms of meeting their expectations, and we do not underestimate the concerns that having an open case can cause. I would emphasise that the vast majority of customers are satisfied with the service that they receive from ROS as evidenced by our consistently high customer satisfaction scores from both legal professionals and citizens. Last year, we implemented a more detailed customer service benchmarking system, which provides us with useful insight into what we get right and where we need to improve. On transparency of land ownership, we continue to make good progress in delivering the benefits of a complete land register, and our total land mass coverage is now 90.7 per cent and an increase of 7 per cent since we met in September last year. To support the effective and efficient delivery of our services, we have continued to build and develop our online offering. Since our last evidence session, we are now able to accept digital applications to the register of deeds, so that means that every register that we run now accepts digital applications and can provide digital extracts. Our workforce planning approach is now fully in place, and it has confirmed that the number of colleagues that we need to employ will remain broadly unchanged while we work to clear our open case work and deliver the benefits of a complete land register. Over the course of the corporate plan, as we deliver service improvements, we expect to need 10 per cent fewer people to deliver our services by the time we reach the end. Finally, I am pleased to say that we are on course to break even again this year for the third consecutive year. Thank you, Chris, and I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you very much. I will now move to questions from members. I will go first to Colin Smyth to be followed by Maggie Chapman. Good morning to the panel. Can I start with some questions on the staffing projections that you mentioned in your opening statement, particularly what that means for your current workforce? You said again that the size of the workforce is expected to fall by 10 per cent by 2027, despite, obviously, the big challenges over that backlog of work. However, it is fair to say that it has not been clear to the committee therefore to assume to your staff what your projected fall in workforce would actually mean in terms of how many people would be carrying out which particular roles. We previously commented in a previous session that your corporate plan had lots of diagrams of big people and little people in each department, but no numbers to go with those particular graphics. You have said that you do not project any reduction in staffing until 2025-26 in your most recent delivery plan. How will that 10 per cent reduction be achieved by 2027? Are you, therefore, your staff any clearer what that means in terms of the exact size of the teams carrying out the different tasks? I guess what might be useful to do is explain some of the things we are bringing in that will replace some colleagues' work, so how are we going to achieve that reduction, and then explain how we expect to deliver the reduction. One of the big things that is coming in in the next year or two will be automating some of our most simple work. The colleagues who do that work are almost junior grades. We have in place an upskilling programme so that, as that work is replaced with automation, they are upskilled to take on the more complex work. We have four grades of work that do our registration work. Our most senior grade, a huge number of those people are due to retire in the not too distant future. Over 25 per cent of our workforce is over 50 or over 55. We will be coming up to retirement. We have a programme essentially to replace that skill set. As those people retire, we have the right skills to do the more complex work. It is the more complex work that will be the work that still needs people, because the more simple work will be done by automation. We expect to be able to deliver that workforce reduction through natural attrition, if you like, mostly through people retiring. We have in place the plans to upskill people so that we have the right shape of skills for the work that is going to be done by people. Chris, do you want to add anything to that? Just to be clear, you are confident that the changes in the workforce will effectively be achieved through the natural process of existing staff, either moving to new roles or staff retiring. There will be no plans at all to carry out any redundancy process. None of our projections suggest that that would be necessary. You touched on the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on staff numbers. What assessment have you done on the potential of AI on service delivery? To what extent is that likely to impact on those staff and numbers? I presume that it is on-going work that you are carrying out at the moment and that the full potential has not yet been seen? We have a detailed plan for the introduction of automation. We have estimates from that of the amount of work carried out by individuals that will be replaced by computers. Broadly, over the next year, as we introduce automation, it will be somewhere between 10 and 20 people at our most junior grades, whose work could be taken by automation, which is good news because we have plans in place to upskill those people. If we were not replacing it by automation, we would have to think about hiring people in. The year beyond that, we expect to be able to extend the automation work. That will be between 40 and 60 people, which again is good news because that is when some of our more mature colleagues will start moving to retirement, so that pipeline of pulling people through. The thing that I would caveat that with is that we are in the early stages of introducing automation. We have got to prove that it works, but everything that we are doing suggests that it is going to work and it will free up those people to be retrained and move into the more senior grades. Introduce, then, your confidence that that 10% reduction, which is quite later on in your corporate plan in the final couple of years, will be achieved, but it will have no impact on tackling that backlog in the work of it. That is exactly why we do not forecast the 10% reduction until later in the corporate plan. The stock of open case work we have broadly needs more senior people to work on it. The majority of the work that comes to us new is the work that can be done more simply and by the more junior grades. If we automate that work, we free people up, we retrain them, we have more people working on the backlog, which is how we are able to accelerate it. Then, as colleagues start to retire and we diminish the backlog, we are left with the right number of people to take the complex work forward. There will always be complex work coming into ROS, but we will not have the volume of it that we currently have while we are working on clearing the backlog. I will be really happy going forward in our quarterly updates to include a specific strategic workforce plan update if the committee would find that useful, because we can give you where are we at with the numbers, what are we projecting, if that would be useful to track it as we go through between evidence sessions. Thank you. I am going to allow Graham Simpson a brief supplementary before I bring in my good Chapman. Yes, a supplementary on staffing. You know that the world of work has changed certainly since the pandemic. A lot more people are now working from home. How has it affected you? So, ROS has introduced a hybrid working policy and we have empowered our teams to work out how they best deliver the work that they are charged with. That means that we have a mixture of people working in the office, working some of the time in the office and working more from home. We have managed to retain the levels of productivity that we used to see in the office with that mixture of work. What is particularly pleasing is that we have increased our quality and we think that is because many of our colleagues, the work that they do, is very concentrating work. For those colleagues, if they choose to do it from home, they can really get their heads down and focus and we think that is why the quality is driven up. However, it has not had an impact negatively on our productivity. We have managed to maintain the productivity. For that reason, we have recently signed off on a hybrid working policy that says that this is how we intend to work going forward because it works for us. Are people expected to come in a certain number of days or is there flexibility around that? No, there is absolute flexibility because, as we have said to the teams, you all do different jobs, you work out which bits of what you do are better. I will give you an example. We had some people being trained in new work and that was better done on site, bringing people together. When we induct new people, there are opportunities for them to come on site, but it is flexible to do the work that needs doing. Thank you for being with us again today. Following on, thinking about your staffing mix, you have previously talked about the contractors that you use and the specialised work that they do. Of course, in your corporate plan, there is that planned reduction in reliance on contractors. Can you provide us with an update of how that is going? Yes. The committee will recall that we have previously discussed some of the challenges that we have with recruiting people into permanent roles to fill most of our contractors deliver our digital work. The way that we have been largely delivering that is running something called a grow our own programme, so taking people at the junior grades, another example of where we are upskilling junior grades, putting them through a very intensive programme to teach them digital skills and then deploying them into our digital directorate. It is being very successful. What it does not yet do is give us the senior people at the digital grades because it is about growing people in the organisation. One of the things that we are working on at the moment is a kind of attraction strategy for what is it that we need to do to persuade senior people to want to join us. We have had some success. We have had, interestingly, some people who have previously contracted for us who, when the opportunity to join us permanently comes up, have chosen to jump across, which is good news, but it is something that we need to do more on in the years ahead. It is probably also true to acknowledge that our most important focus is clearing our open case work, so we have been doubling down on making sure that we have the right skills in our registration staff to do that. As that is starting to get itself sorted, we want to turn our attention to this thorny problem of the more senior digital staff. Meanwhile, we have junior staff coming through and developing, so we are filling up from the bottom as well as seeking to hire in in the middle. That makes sense. It is good news to hear that people who come in as contractors see it as a good place and attractive proposition and want to jump on board. In the Cwp Plan, and we discussed this previously, one of the reasons for wanting to shift the balance away from contractors was around cost. Are those projections still what you are aiming for, the cost savings? It is both about cost and the longevity of knowledge. At the moment, we are doing a lot of building of digital systems. We need more digital people than we are going to need in the future to do that. Once those digital systems are built, it is better for us to have a greater number of permanent people responsible for the maintenance. We have had a big programme of working roles to reduce our technical debt. We have lots of legacy IT systems that we have had to unpick and rebuild. We now want to make sure that our technical debt stays low. The best way to do that is to have a decent proportion of our digital director at staff with people who are here for the longer term. By their nature, and rightly, people who come in and contract for us, they do a very specific job. Usually, they move on to something else. It is both cost saving and it will cost us less, but it is also a strategic choice around the best way of maintaining our digital systems going forward. Is there something about staff morale and the integrity of the staff team having people who are there for the long term? How is morale given what you say the successes you have had with dealing with the backlog and the increase of 7 per cent that you mentioned of the land register? Moral is good. We collect a number of different sorts of evidence to suit that. I will give you an example. Last year, we undertook an external assessment around investor in well-being, which looks at where the staff feel supported in the workplace, able to do their jobs. We came out very well from that assessment. We got our gold accreditation. We get very good engagement in everything we do. In Roswell, we recently ran an all staff event on site where people came in. Really good attendance at that to see about the future direction. Moral is good, but it is something that we are very mindful of making sure that we maintain and get the balance right. Focusing on the open case work and thinking about delivering a strategic workforce plan, but maintaining a happy, healthy workforce while we do that is very important. My last question is focusing on staff and contractors. How are inflationary pressures affecting your staff and contractor budgets? Are there significant challenges in that beyond the general challenges of inflation? Chris May might want to speak to this, because it is a financial question. Some challenges, but we work hard to mitigate the impact of financial pressures. Chris, do you want to say something on the cost inflation piece? That is a fair comment from Jennifer. Cost inflation is a challenge for us, but at the moment we are projecting for this year and going forward that we will be able to meet that out of the fees that we bring in for our services. Partly that is due to the good progress that we have made in clearing the open case work and improving efficiency and delivery of those registration services, which drives the income of the organisation and is allowing us at the moment to balance that, but there certainly are challenges. In terms of pay settlements, do you see any significant issues in the next year or two? No, we think that they will be manageable. Thank you. Gordon MacDonald will be followed by Jamie Halcro. Thank you very much, convener. Just to continue this conversation, so these questions might be for you, Chris. When you appeared in front of the committee Jennifer last year, you indicated that it was going to be a surplus of 10 million, turned out it was actually 11 million, so that was a good estimate. Are you able to give similar figures for the year just completed? Yes, we can do it. Subredded to the usual caveat of the final audited accounts, we think that there will be a surplus in the region of £2 million. Can you say how that was achieved? Was it because increased income or reduced costs? It was a combination of both. Broadly, I would say, around a third in terms of increased income and the remainder from cost reduction. Okay. One of the things that I picked up in your report was your savings, and you said that using the Scottish Government's procurement methodology, you saved £1.96 million, or 6.5 per cent of annual expenditure, excluding salaries, obviously. Is that something that was a one-off, or is it savings that you can see, and how did you achieve that nearly £2 million saving? I think that due to the hard work of our procurement team, I think that we are very high performing, in combination with our digital colleagues, as Jennifer mentioned. One of the benefits of having contractors in that space is that they know the marketplace very well. We have a lot of good information in-house around what the rates are that we should be paying for various things. We are strong, I would say, in negotiations with suppliers around costs. Okay. We have already touched upon the fact that there is a huge amount of volatility in the market at the moment. We have got the high cost of living, on-going inflation, we have got uncertainty over mortgage rates and, at least today, we have had one house builder that said that there is a 25 per cent reduction year on year on the reservation rates. So, if that level of volatility is out there in the market, how does your income and expenditure projection show you being balanced using the central income projection number for your income? How are you able to achieve a balanced budget year on year? It is a combination of those efficiencies that we are delivering. A slowdown in the market allows us to go faster on the open case work, which will release additional income, so there is income there to be released. It turns quite strongly on particularly what happens to the market in a slowdown. Quite often what we will see there is that the number of applications coming to us will not reduce, but what will happen will be that the mix of applications will change in terms of whether they are transferred apart, whether they are dealings or whether they are remortgage applications. We have a range of scenarios. In our midline scenario, we are content that income will cover costs over the period of the plan. We do, of course, have opportunities to raise additional income if that is required in a very strong market crash scenario, but at the moment we are not projecting that we are going in that direction. My last question is about your expenditure. The four-year projection, you have expenditure rising between 1 per cent and 2 per cent year on year. Given that two thirds of your total cost is your staff, and given that we are in a period of inflation, it is unlikely that pay awards are going to be settled at the one or two per cent mark, I would have thought. Is the pay award going to be predicated on reduced staffing? Is that how you are going to achieve your budget? Obviously, we are in line with public sector pay policy. We are content that, in the next year, looking at the four or five per cent that the central Government has mentioned, that that is achievable. In future years, we will need to continue to model that. I think that the overall reduction in the headcount that Jennifer mentioned and the reduction in cost that that brings is a factor. There are other areas where we could look to reduce costs if we needed to, as well as trying to maximise income. In particular, driving down the open case work more quickly brings in more income over that period to bridge us to the point where the headcount reduction comes into play. Chris, on those points that you made, you talked about the slowdown of the market. You used the term unlock, but it is essentially a lock on existing case work. That brings in additional income. You talked about bridging and so on. Does that mean that you are not dealing with those cases as quickly as possible? Are they essentially being banked, as it were? No. As I mentioned to the committee last time, there are three areas where we are putting our capacity in case work. The first area is in new cases that are coming into us. The reason for doing that is to stop the backlog perpetuating. As Jennifer said, that allows us to introduce streamlined processes and automation, which then frees up people. That is why we are focusing on new case work. The second area that we are focusing on is about expedite cases. Those are cases that customers tell us to have a degree of urgency. We ensure that we meet them, and then the final area of capacity is on the oldest case work on the stock to clear that open case work. Plainly, if the case is coming in the door to reduce a number, there is additional capacity that we can deploy to expedite cases or the oldest cases. Separate to that and in conjunction with that, as the keeper mentioned, we have a plan that is to build capacity across that range anyway. A slowdown in the upfront market allows us to do it more quickly, but the plan is to do it in any event over the duration of the corporate plan. Are those cases that there is not an urgency and there is not much of an impact on the kind of historic cases? Are they the ones that are being left? All cases are important to us, but certainly they are not cases that we are being asked to expedite by customers. We are getting through them as quickly as we can. We have accelerated this year, the plan to accelerate in the year that we are just going into, to get to the position at the end of the corporate plan where we have cleared them completely. Given that the funding model has changed, you are not expecting to draw down any additional support from the Scottish Government over this plan. I just have another question on the cases. You have obviously got a number of older cases open. I think that you have covered how you are looking to achieve some of that. When do you expect to essentially have cleared the majority of those cases? I am sure that we will not hit 100 per cent. Over the duration of this corporate plan, up to 27. Are you confident that you will achieve that? I do not know if you do any economic impact assessment or with some of your client's customers on the economic impact and the impact on their businesses on the potential delays of outstanding cases. We talk to our customers all the time and we appreciate the mitigations that they have to put in place, as we do as well, in terms of expedites and avoiding rejections. Our strong preference would be that there is no necessity for those mitigations, so that is why it is our fundamental priority to clear them. We do everything that we can in that space to lessen the impact and reduce the impact on customers. The business survey that you did against the national high level of satisfaction, is that across all cases? Can that be differentiated between clients that have been waiting for some time? The survey is anonymous, so we do not definitively know who is reporting on it, but one of the reasons we moved to the greater detail of benchmarking with the Institute of Customer Services is precisely because you get that granular if you are not fully satisfied, why not? It is true to say that the speediness of the turnaround of cases is an ongoing issue for a reason for dissatisfaction and we definitely see less satisfaction in those customers who have to get in touch to chase a case. It tells us that we are doing the right thing to focus on this as our top priority. The other thing I would just say on the economic impact pieces, we are always very clear that if a customer has an open case with us it does not stop them transacting on their property, it does not stop them remortgaging and if there is any issue with that, which is very unlikely, that is where the expedite service comes in. That direct impact on people is why we are able to mitigate in that way, but as Chris says, it is why it is our top priority to get rid of it so that people are never having to chase up for a case because it is done. I suppose just on that, because obviously the engaging with your customers and looking for that feedback, particularly on the business side, is important, across all sides are important, but I take it that you would expect if you went to the, I think it is 2,435 cases open from 2007, the proportion of those that might be less satisfied, let us put it positively, than the 2,590,598 over in 2019, you would expect probably a high proportion of the earlier cases to be dissatisfied because of the time. So why don't you collect that? So for the most part, clearly and we absolutely appreciate there are individual people, citizens at the end of those cases, but the main interlocutor for those citizens is the solicitor customer, and they will have a range of cases with us. They will have cases that they sent to us today, and in fact we are now getting cases back to customers the same day, and if that's a great proportion of what they get back, the significance of the longer standing open cases is smaller in proportion. But that's what customers are. Did it not be helpful for you to know where the concerns are, where the frustrations are? By at least it doesn't have to be, I appreciate it could be anonymous, but could be anonymous still with a marker in terms of when the case was open? So perhaps it's helpful if I add the additional, the customer satisfaction survey is not the only way in which we understand what issues are for customers. We have a team of customer relationship managers and they're very proactive in speaking on a regular basis to all our customers and talking to them about making sure they understand the expedite service, understanding whether they have particular cases that are starting to bubble up as things they're worried about. We had an example recently of a Solista who was retiring, got in touch, had a good conversation with him about when he was retiring, how we could make sure that the cases he had with us were done. So that ongoing engagement with our customers through customer satisfaction survey, anonymous regular dialogue, we run regular webinars, there's lots of ways in which we're making sure on a day-to-day basis we understand what it is our customers need as and lots of messaging about what we are doing to focus on clearing the longer-standing open case work, which I think is one of the reasons why our overall customer satisfaction has risen slightly in the most recent survey because customers are really seeing what we're doing, they're seeing it's having an impact and they've got increased confidence that it is going to get the problem resolved in the time frames we're talking about. Okay, thank you. I'm going to bring in Graham Simpson for a supplementary book. First of all, just maybe I ask, in replying to Jamie Halcro Johnston you've said that by the end of the corporate plan the backlog would be cleared completely, but in statements in 2022 you've kind of said there's no definition of a backlog, there's no strict definition and there will always be some cases that are. So what is the kind of timeframe for a case that might be still not be resolved? Is there service standards around this or what could people expect? Will there not be a backlog or is it our understanding of a backlog that will be different or what is it we're aiming towards for 2017? I'll answer this question between us, but what we want to have happen is that when a case comes to us it is constantly in work, so we get some cases, we open them up, we go this is six months work, this is six months plowing away at the mapping and the legal staff and it's going to take six months to deliver it. Other cases get done on the same day, so the goal is to get to the point where when a customer sends us a case their vast majority of cases will go back within that 35 day standard that we set, but if it's very obvious right at the beginning there's more work, we're having that discussion with the customer about how long is it going to take us when you're going to get it back and that requires us to have got rid of all those cases that at the moment we haven't got the capacity to be fully doing them all the time which is why as answering earlier to Mr Smith's question bringing in the automation frees up the people allows us to get more capacity on those open cases and reduce all those open cases that have been with us not moving because they slipped the net we've just not had the capacity to deal with them. Chris do you want to come in because it is a thorny question about how we define open cases versus long-standing open cases? Yes, I think that's right. I think that we will, as Mr Algo Johnston said in the question, it may not be 100 per cent there may be some cases that we are still working on but we expect the long-standing open cases to be cleared and as Jennifer says the position we want to move to is a position where customers have absolute certainty about how long an application is going to take and that will come from the case being one of our more standard cases which is around 80 per cent of our work that can be done within that 35-day period which aligns to the period of protection from an advanced notice that's the reason for having 35 days and where it is a case that it's not possible to do in that period because it's a you know a largest day or a housing development or there's some additional complexity to it then we have an agreement at the outset with the applicant based on their understanding of the application them and the work to be done and ours around how long that will take as the position we want to get to in order to give complete certainty across all of our applications to applicants about how long they will take us to process. Thank you. What's the longest-standing case you've got? Our oldest case is unless it's gone in the last few days, 3 February 2017. Okay. And why has that taken so long? Chris will know exactly what the case is. I maybe don't know the individual case. So when the keeper was here a couple of sessions ago she said the reason why the organisation had a backlog prior to the pandemic and we were making good progress in clearing that in the period 2018-2020. That case would have been gone but for the impact of the pandemic which slowed down the rate that we were clearing cases. So the short answer is caused by the pandemic a lack of capacity and then focus on other cases for the reasons I've given around upfront cases, around expedite cases and around other old cases. Although we are now making much quicker progress on 2017 cases in particular, we reduced them I think by 49 per cent in the year. They are coming down quite sharply and we expect them all to be gone this calendar year. And if I may just build on that, I think I'd be keen to make sure the committee is aware. Last time we met we talked about whether we would have the capacity to put some dedicated resource on to the very oldest cases. Up until that point we'd been in the position of additional capacity was focused on expedite. We have had the capacity to put some people on to the older cases which is why we're really driving down and 2017 will get gone very soon and then the good news of course is that surplus capacity can shift up to 2018 as we bring in automation more capacity comes in so Chris articulated the plan to accelerate the progress we're making that's where that acceleration is going to come from. I accept that things are improving but you know it's hard to accept that cases have taken six years and you cannot blame the pandemic for a six-year delay. You've got six years, five years, four years. How have we gotten to that position? Put very simply by not having enough capacity at the more senior grades to deal with that volume of case work that's why we're building that capacity and looking at ways to bring in automation and I think I'm personally and when I talk to solicitors the expedite service is what they want they don't want us to just start at the oldest case and work forward because then there would be cases from 2019 2020 or even in fact recent cases we do get expedite requests for something that someone's just sent us because it's that urgent they need it done as a priority so I mean it's back actually to Mr Halcro Johnson's or Mr McDonald's question about the economic impact it the economic impact of us not having an expedite service by just having everything on the oldest cases would be much more significant because then there would be cases stuck that people really need back we are very very clear that someone can come forward and request an expedite there's a now a very comprehensive list of criteria whoever has that third of February 2017 case it is clearly not the priority for them to get it back I suspect that solicitor has expedited other cases but it's not the one they've wanted us to do and it's why we want to fix the problem we don't like having a stock of long-standing open case work and we do want to make sure it's gone so once you've cleared this backlog what would be the longest that you would anticipate I realise every case is different some are really complicated but what would be the longest you would anticipate a case taking once that backlog is gone I'll defer to Chris who has direct experience of working on registration cases I mean I think in the ordinary run of events we wouldn't expect anything to be to be longer than 12 months depending on on the type of application you know you could conceive of a very large estate with you know potentially hundreds of exceptions from the estate that need to be mapped etc that may take a touch longer but generally I think that would be our expectation around 12 months okay I've just got one more question convener if it's okay I was looking through the the list of registers that you are responsible for there's 21 of them some of them sound really quite fascinating register of the great seal register of the quarter seal register of the cache seal I hope that's pronounced correctly register of service of airs has all sorts there which one of these registers takes up the most time for you and are there any that take up no time the land register and the saizine register by a very long way are the biggest amount of registrations the next set of registers that take up about 20% of our time it are in fact interestingly the register of the great seal the register of inhibitions and the register of the court registers the register of judgments they take up a bit of time but they're dwarfed by the volume of transactions other registers very few and far between in terms of applications and therefore take almost no time but we clearly maintain and deliver the service for them so I don't Chris if you wanted to add anything on that okay thank you thank you Michelle Thompson morning thank you for attending today you've mentioned it already but I just wanted to dig a wee bit deeper in terms of your expedite service now looking at the the percentage success rate of applications to use expedite service I can see for the record that you know years ending 2020 2021 it was 52% were approved the following year 2021 to 2022 was 49% and then 2022 to 2023 it jumps to 77% which is obviously good so I wanted to explore with you what was the the reason for that has it been more purchasing power a volume throughput if you like have you changed the criteria for by which cases can be expedited that be useful to understand so this was a really good example of a detailed conversation with a variety of customers where when we first launched the expedite service we said it's about if you're going to suffer financial personal hardship request an expedite what we've done in the last year which I think has resulted in a greater success rate is being much more explicit about a set of examples of what that might look like types of deed you might be registering circumstances you might be in whether or not we need to see evidence which things we don't need to see evidence for so there's much more comprehensive guidance on our website now so I think people who are requesting an expedite are much clearer on what qualifies do they need to supply evidence because one of the reasons originally that a number of expedites weren't successful was people just go can I have an expedite please this is my problem and we would say well to make this a fair process for everyone we need to see some evidence and they'd go well here you go and send it in again and then we would be able to expedite it so I think that's the reason that we've been able to help customers really understand all the sorts of examples of things we've seen for expedite but I think again I would emphasise we will always consider an expedite request if something we've never seen before has happened to someone and they want to come forward and explain the circumstances and say this is why I want to expedite the list on the website is a set of examples of things not a comprehensive basis on which we would expedite and I'm aware that you've seen the letter submitted from this from Mr Keith Robertson and in it I have to refer to it because he also refers to me when the question I asked last time and I'll just put it on the record I had asked and I quote for the record then you are saying that if solicitors who lodged cases in 2017 come with you come to you with a request expedite because of the time that they have already taken you will agree to that and the answer you gave was yes 100% now the assertion by Mr Robertson is and again I quote this is quite simply untrue length of time since submission is not and never has been accepted by Ross as grounds for expedition so can you clear up that is he correct is he incorrect what exactly is the position there was a little disappointing but in his letter I was quoted with half of what I said so for the record I think it would be useful if I repeat what I actually said last time where I said in answer to your question about if someone came to us to request an expedite for a 2017 case I said yes 100% the numbers that Mr Robertson will be quoting in his letter will be expedite cases whether submitting solicitor has come along and said this is a priority now could you please get this case done and we've got it done so I think my emphasis was length of time we've had it is not a reason to expedite but as just if we've had it since 2017 and someone comes along and explains why it's a priority we would expedite it in the same way as we would expedite a 2018 or a 2019 case okay so I suppose though that takes you into kind of delay territory because I'm thinking about an example where there's been a delay because there's been a change of circumstances with a solicitor or with the person well they always will a client always be able to draw on the necessary data required to meet your criteria to be able to expedite it after that length of delay you know I'm using an example from 2017 I mean it may well be the case that a problem arises because we've had it a long time I mean a classic case could be a sad situation where somebody dies and the executor needs to now deal with their estate and having the title fully registered helps that process and that's absolutely the sort of example where an expedite would be appropriate so something may have happened in the passage of time that makes an expedite now appropriate but simply the passage of time in and of itself does not mean a case needs to be expedited the example I gave earlier of a solicitor retiring that's a good example where completing the set of cases from that solicitor are a good reason to expedite because it would cause that solicitor significant personal inconvenience to have to think about what to do when he's retiring and he's still got open cases but it's at the point in time that someone has a circumstance where getting that title complete and the evidence to support that I don't know Chris do you want to expand on this because you're more day to day involved in the discussions around this I think the thing that I would add is generally that expedites that we see is a current and present difficulty that the applicant is having perhaps around a future transaction that they are wishing to sell on and the purchaser is not keen to complete without a completed application so the challenge tends not to be a historical one it tends to be a present one and therefore evidencing that is generally in our experience not a difficulty although you know as the keeper says we are continually speaking to our customers about that and if there are things we can do to improve that service and following those conversations then we would do so and it's interesting to hear you're clearly exercising judgment in that and looking at the kind of circuit you know the three criteria excuse me the three criteria you set out actually a couple of those examples don't appear to me to fit into those criteria but you're I mean I'm not having a pop you're clearly exercising judgment so is it fair to say that at this point the process or rather the criteria for expedition are still developing as you get more data and understanding of particular issues is that a fair comment I think the set of examples of what constitutes a personal hardship or a financial hardship are you know we're expanding the sort of list of things that sit underneath that to help people understand this is an example of something where an expedite might be appropriate but we still stand by the sort of headline criteria are there is some personal or financial difficulty that either is arising or theoretically could arise we absolutely accept expedites where people come forward and say I'm I don't know I'm about to do an equity release to very specialist mortgage I know that that mortgage lender really wants titles registered I would all like my title registered I anticipate financial difficulties if my title isn't registered and we could provide evidence and we would get on and do it so I think it's right we are exercising judgment and we work with solicitors it's back it's back to my description of the customer relationship managers when we say no to an expedite we don't just say no and put the phone down there's then a dialogue with the solicitor that says just explain a bit more kind of what about this and you know what can we do to help more broadly so it is a service not a kind of send it in we decide we send it back or not and by last question in terms of do you see then or do you have the data are you able to map it where this expedition process and it being more fulsome will eventually feed into starting to target the backlog because you have mentioned that some are historical cases where folk are saying look you know we do really need to crack on now have you explored that link so I think expedite cases are in general cases in the backlog not always sometimes they're things that we so they so getting expedite cases done does help with the backlog but what's really going to help with the backlog is having all that additional capacity able to target cases beyond the expedite which is why as I said earlier we now do have the capacity to really drive down on the 2017 as well as keeping on top of all the expedites the single thing customers have said to us is it's really important the expedite service works in fact part of the feedback we had in a recent dialogue with customers which is why we provided a bit more guidance on the website was it really matters to us that when we request an expedite we get it back really quickly so could you reduce the time for an expedite so we were and I'm I will follow up in writing if I don't quote the figures correctly I think we were at 22 days for an expedite we're now at six as the average and customers said to us that really matters because when we want it back we want it back but on top of that we've now got additional capacity to be bringing in from that oldest cases so what I hope will start to happen is before someone thinks oh I need to request my case from 2018 actually it's done it's back with them because the capacity we've released has done it anyway that's where we're seeking to get to where we're overtaking the expedite requests if you like. I'm going to bring in Colin Smith before by Jamie Halcro Johnston. Can I just ask a follow-up question that you mentioned that you worked with solicitors to try to tackle some of these particular challenges? I notice on your that the most recent quarterly update to the committee in February you explained the fact that you had an engagement event with the president and chief executive of the Los Asiatic of Scotland what was the mood in that discussion what were the issues that they were raising with you direct? At the time that was the relatively new president and relatively new chief exec so that meeting was really to bring them up to speed on what we were doing in terms of our strategy in Rawls so clearing the open case work getting on getting to the point of bringing in digital services they fed back that they had picked up that the open case work was an ongoing concern for their members and we said we're absolutely aware of that and that's why we are out talking to customers about that but I think it was a it was a positive meeting where they were pleased to hear everything we were doing and supportive of the engagement we were having with them within the law society we talk very regularly every month to their property law committee who are the people who are I guess hearing from members in the property sector about what we're doing. I suppose another point on customer satisfaction I notice in the the corporate plan and the delivery plan that there's a number of KPIs relating to customer satisfaction you obviously mentioned that the sort of citizen survey but the KPIs relate very much to the satisfaction of businesses as opposed to I suppose that wider group of citizens if you like and you know that citizens survey did show that the satisfaction score had fallen from 91.1 per cent in October 2022 to 87.8 per cent in March 2023. It is a reason why you don't have a I suppose a KPI for that wider group of people you only have a KPI for businesses. There has been a reason I suppose in that we the vast majority of the people who deal directly with us are solicitors so you know most people who have an application for registration it's their solicitor who sends us sends it in but that's also the reason why we measure both things because we are very interested in where a citizen has a direct experience of coming to us for something usually to request information how satisfied are they with the issue until we started with the customer institute of customer services we didn't have an ability to differentiate between business customers and citizen customers it's that new way of surveying that's given us the ability to split them out so I see no reason why going forward we wouldn't want to set a KPI around citizen satisfaction now we've had a year of sort of benchmarking but prior to that we had no benchmark for it so I think it is something we could look to introduce as a KPI going forward because it is as important to us that the citizens who deal directly with us are satisfied with the service as the professional customers so having two KPI's would be something we could definitely do. Thank you I'm going to change the order of questions a bit and I'll ask the next question around rejections of applications now there is a commitment to not reject applications after three months unless it's legally impossible not to do so but the rejections over three months have steadily increased there seem to be a slight drop in the most recent year but there has been an increase over the years so that there's now over 4,000 applications that are over three months old that have been rejected what do you think the reasons are for that I think you've indicated it could be solicitors inaccuracies or and how do you resolve the issues that are causing the problem I'll start at a high level but I'll ask Chris to come in on the details so bluntly when we reject an application it's because it is not legally possible to proceed with registering it in the form we have it in so we as committee will remember we removed a rejection we used to charge a fee for rejecting so we're interested we don't yet know we haven't got enough data to know is there some sort of link between the fact there's no longer any kind of penalty from a solicitor point of view for having something rejected has that caused the slight rise we do everything we can to educate solicitors about what mistakes we are typically seeing what people are getting wrong why we're having to reject we run a regular webinar called how to avoid rejections but I'll get Chris to come in on the detail on more you know typical reasons for rejection and to illustrate to the committee why we have to send things back yeah well let's just add it to that Chris before you come in I've been interested in the reason about why you think it's increased year on year is it you know since 2018 it was 476 and the most recent year it's 1042 so I do understand you're taking you have webinars and you're trying to educate people how to use the system but the numbers are still going up rather than reducing it yeah so I think there's probably a couple of things to look at so as you mentioned the commitment is not to reject applications after we've had them for three months so what we say is there is in general and in principle a one-shot rule for applicants they should get their application right first time the keeper's duty on that side of the equation is to complete the the upfront check very quickly to make sure that we are content the application can proceed so you have applications being checked at solicited offices and then checked at the keeper's office and then in most cases then we will identify the problem at that stage and the rejection rate there is running at about 10 per cent and those are cases where the applicant the solicitor has made some form of mistake sent in the wrong documentation perhaps the deed is not properly signed in terms of the requirements of writing act that rate I think is too high for us we think the rate should be much close to 4 per cent more than that if possible and that's the word the keeper refers to around trying to improve the quality of application to we're getting in because pushing applications back the way is not what we want to be doing and that uses our capacity that could otherwise be clearing applications out of the process the other the other issue then is what you might call late stage rejections so rejections that happen when the application has been with us for a while and we appreciate the difficulty that they can cause and we want to do what we can to to minimise and reduce them so every single one of those rejections there will be a conversation between one of our senior advisers or senior registration officers and the submitting applicant about the best course to take with that application and sometimes the best course to take is to is to start the application again and that will generally be agreement reached between between our colleagues and the submitting applicant in some cases that can that can be avoided through submission of additional information and where that's possible we do that and then I guess that the final the final line if you like of defence on that is if there is some if there is some scenario some intervening or supervening event that has happened which means it is difficult or impossible for the solicitor to provide the keeper with the additional information she would ordinarily require it is open to the keeper to to take a view and register the title as it is and that is what we would do in those cases and have you had to I think we previously did discuss this with the keeper the issue of the loss of initial registration date that can be difficult for that you're suggesting it's a small number of people and that there are special measures in place and have you had to use small number of people but have you had to use these kind of special measures or different options yes so we'll be using those those measures and the rejections in that case will be will be highly context specific so it depends on what's the nature of the transaction what's the nature of the problem with the application and what's the nature of the kind of supervening event that may have happened if you know whether it's bankruptcy of the seller or sequestration of the seller or some difficulty like that so it will be there are low in volume it will be very context specific and we have employed those kind of mitigations and discussions with submitting applicant where we need to okay thank you if I may just add one additional thing we do to try and help solicitors avoid rejections part of the design of our digital systems is we try and design out the possibility of people getting things wrong so one of the issues we have is solicitors can sometimes sell us send us the deed that is not the deed that actually relates to the thing they're trying to register we can't clearly proceed on that basis other things we can do in the way we design our digital systems to make sure you cannot upload the wrong deed or you at least are asked are you really sure this is the deed you want to send before you hit submit and things like that so we are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to not make the mistakes that mean we have no choice but to reject thank you now can i ask about completing the land register is that having the advantages over the say sign register because we've discussed this before so the original plan the policy launch in 2014 was to complete the land register by 2024 but it's become clear that that target is not going to be reached anytime soon but i think in previous discussions it's also been anytime soon means possibly never because what the ambition is now is to deliver the benefits of a completed land register but you saw the two systems operating so it's never just an update on where we are with that and also there has been a change if i'm correct to the way in which registers properties are registered that the property addresses had been dropped and the one to landmass has been retained so that quite recently that i might explain why that decision is being made and what the impact of that could be thank you will answer the question between us um i guess perhaps just useful to recap what we're doing to deliver the benefits for complete land register so there's two purposes of having a complete land register one is about a transparency of ownership of land in scotland and we realised some time ago that not all the land is going to come on to the land register either through sale or voluntary registration and that's something without our control so we asked ourselves what can we do with the information we already hold to provide better information for citizens in scotland to get that transparency of ownership and that's where we're very fortunate to have the saizine register the problem with the saizine register it doesn't have a map so it we started to think how could we create the mapping for the saizine register that would allow people to look at a map of scotland understand the ownership so that's what our unlocking saizine's work is about and that's how we're now at having 90.7% of the landmass of scotland where we have that link between a shape on a map and ownership information and one of the things the committee may have spotted in our delivery plan for year two is now we've got that this is the year we're going to start releasing that data for people who want to consume it and use it and make policy decisions so that deals with the who owns scotland question we fully acknowledge it's not as perfect as if everything was on the land register but it's it's as good as we can do given we don't control everything coming on to the land register the other reason for completing the land register is to make sure that if something is likely to transact it's already on the land register and we that's where the number of addresses comes in and the reason we've currently dropped that as a kpi is because the number of addresses is constantly increasing because every time a house developer gets permission to build a new set of houses it gets a bunch of new addresses issued but we haven't got those addresses to register so there's always a mismatch between how many addresses are out there and how many we could be receiving to register so we still track that internally but it's a it's not a very meaningful thing externally because it can go up and down if ordinance survey add 10 000 new addresses the percentage can drop but it's not because things have come off the register it's just because we haven't yet been given those 10 000 things to register um so the moment it says that it's paused does that mean it's it's paused as a kpi while we work out what's a more meaningful thing to keep reporting on because what's actually i think a meaningful thing to report on is how many new addresses have been created in scotland and how many new addresses have been added to the register and are you seeing that tracking up in parallel um and where we want to get to in terms of getting everything on to the land register that might transact is so that if you have a transaction it doesn't it sails through it's invisible to you whether your property's been on the land register forever has just come on or hasn't come on but i think chris will speak a little bit to the challenge of what do we do as we start to reach the limit of properties that haven't solved for a very long time wanting to come on to the register and how we make sure that's being there. I'll just pick up very briefly on functional completion. I think that the keeper is right in her assessment. It's not an intuitively simple thing to understand, I think, is what we've found with stakeholders and customers. We were using addresses as a bit of a proxy measure for is this property likely to transact or not and as the keeper mentions the numbers there are fluctuating all the time so we think the better approach is to to monitor that internally and to say well the benefit of a land register title is the application is quick and consistent and as we improve the position in first registrations then they will be equally as quick and consistent as dealings with land register titles which is the way that we will resolve that problem. In terms of land mass coverage i think we are close to probably reaching the limits of what we can do with unlocking sayings we think there's probably around another three or four percent that we can add through identifying sayings search sheets which relate to areas of land and giving them a kind of spatial extent for people to look at. Beyond that I think we are right into the margins of titles which are pre the sayings register so land ownership that stems from prior to 1617 I think it was on the ancient universities and other things where we've got no source data on that at all and we would obviously require to speak to those landowners and the other kind of challenge area will be small slivers of land that are between larger states that may have fallen by the way side of either title and I think we probably will and you of course need a discussion about how much effort do we expend in trying to identify ownership of those areas and the value of doing so because it gets very difficult and time consuming when you're when you're in the margins there I think. Just because you mentioned finance is it correct so this work the voluntary registrations and the keeper induced registration was partly funded by the financial reserve model that you had previously and now you've heard early in questions that's not the financial model for the organisation so it's just to you in terms of resource and this piece of work is that you've said now you're going to be getting to bits of land that is quite difficult and quite resource intensive that will mean financially commitment as well. So I think there is resource allocated to complete the unlocking sayings work that we've mentioned and we are not currently spending any resource on keeper induced registration voluntary registrations attract a fee although there is a reduced fee for them so as and when voluntary registrations come in we do process them but yeah I think I've returned to kind of keeper induced registration which is really really the lever that the keeper the only lever the keeper has will be dependent on making sufficient progress in the backlog will be dependent on whether it's affordable at that stage and will be dependent really on whether the titles we are looking at are susceptible to keeper induced registration keeper induced registration is we have used so far to kind of plug the gaps in housing estates where the boundaries are clear we know that historic pattern of ownership and we can envision what a title sheet looks like quite simply slightly more difficult to envision how you would do that for more complex land holdings so I think it's probably unlikely that keeper induced registration carries much weight there game Simpson did you rush double supplementary yeah really it was around what the convener was asking about the rejection of applications and if I heard you right you said that 10% were rejected often because of mistakes made by solicitors which strikes me as quite a high number that one in 10 applications are rejected because the solicitor makes a mistake that is a that has to be a huge concern do you keep do you keep a list I wouldn't expect to publish a list but do you maybe keep an internal list of who are the worst offenders and do you also have a list of what what are the top mistakes that are being made both and we particularly on the sort of reasons for rejection aren't we get a detailed report every week and we actually share that report with the law society not not named firms but as in what are the top reasons for having to reject so just to you know top reason at the moment is that the witness hasn't signed the deed I mean that is a fairly straightforward thing that would need to be done but we have to send it back but there's a sort of league table of the different the different reasons and it's all the same reasons which is why we run this regular webinar which is one of the things that aren't got correct but yeah we do we do have we do know which firms have which issues and our customer relationship managers do have conversations where appropriate to say you are making this you are you know not getting this correct more often than other people so that people can think about whether they want to change their processes in their firms to iron out those issues it's extraordinary I mean it just seems so basic of signing something that should be bread and butter to a solicitor you would have thought now I know you said you don't charge if if a solicitor has made a mistake but do you do you think the solicitor is charging their client I can't I can't speak to that I mean we did used to have a rejection fee so we would make a charge for the you know having had to look at the application say we're going to send it back and we we got rid of that charge because we got to the point where the administration of the charge was you know not worth it for for the processes but I can't speak to what what the solicitors may be doing in terms of what they do when they have to correct something okay okay thank you and thank you to Jennifer Henderson and Chris Kerr for coming in this morning much appreciate the evidence and I would briefly suspend the meeting to move to private session