On the record

Change is in the air at Registers of Scotland, and change is beginning at the top as Sheenagh Adams takes over as Keeper from Jim Meldrum.

A varied career in the public sector (see panel) has given the new Keeper an interest in policy making which will be put to the test as RoS grapple with the impact of recession-induced budgetary issues on their modernisation plans.

Managing director for the past three years, Adams is reshaping the organisation to abolish that post. Instead, below her will be not one but two deputy keepers, one from the Government Legal Service for Scotland covering the legal and corporate services side, and one responsible for registration and customer service – a clearer structure and a more balanced one at senior management level, she believes.

Public face

Readers will be aware of the higher public profile already adopted by RoS over the past year and more – among professionals through its regular page in the Journal, and with the public by promoting its house price data. As Adams explains, it reflects the increasing requirement across government to be more open and proactive in telling people about the services provided for them.

“In years gone by it was thought that nobody really needed to know what we do – it was enough if solicitors knew – but there is an expectation right across government now that ordinary people should know what government is doing and be able to access services. And we provide a lot of services that people can access directly, not just through a solicitor or someone else, whether it be finding information themselves from our customer service centre about who owns a particular piece of ground, or what the extent of their own property is, or house prices.”

Asked to identify the next big challenges facing RoS, Adams names the recession first. “We had very prudently built up reserves to see us through the bad times. We’re certainly using them left, right and centre, so getting through the recession and then making sure we are able to respond when the market picks up again, with the right skills and competences in place to do the work when it comes in, that’s obviously a key challenge.

“The second key challenge is e-registration, making sure we have the IT systems in place that meet our needs, but more importantly meet the needs of our customers, that are easy to use and are something that people positively want to use. It’s a 10 year programme of change and we’re halfway through.”

If you think ARTL is advanced, in other words, wait till every application, whether on the Sasine or Land Register, is done electronically. “It’s back office systems that we’re working on at the moment, but we will then look at front end systems so solicitors will be able to lodge electronically without having to send things through the post, and all our business will become e-enabled. Most solicitors now are making use of ICT – it makes things much more accessible both in terms of making applications but also information about where the application is and what’s on the different registers.”

ARTL: pushing harder

Which brings us conveniently to ARTL. The figures published in the Journal show 214 solicitors’ firms now using the system (up 30 in the last three months), and several hundred automated registrations taking place every month. But Adams is not satisfied yet.

“The takeup rate is lower than we had hoped, and we’ll be doing all in our power to try to make sure that the system is user friendly for solicitors who have to use it.

“There are clear benefits both for solicitors who are using it and also for their customers, because there are lower charges, and we’re seeking to improve the system all the time and to provide training. We accept it’s been a very difficult time for solicitors with the recession, but in some ways now’s a good time to be making sure that we’re both able to go forward on an e-registration basis.”

Was there any resistance from the profession? “I don’t think so; I think there are some issues particularly on the transaction side as opposed to the discharges and standard security side, because the property market is so low compared to what it has been, and you need transactions to be taking place in the first place, and both parties’ solicitors to be on the ARTL system, and also for the property itself to be on the Land Register. We hope that as the market picks up and solicitors become more familiar with the system, we’ll see numbers picking up.”

I observe that on the published figures, the number of lenders and local authorities in the system seems hardly to have changed in the last few months. “We’re conscious of that, and I’ve written to the key lenders who are not currently using the system and offered to meet their chief executives, and we’re also talking to local authorities as our board goes out and about, to encourage them to make use of the system.”

On the plus side, Adams reports a queue of firms waiting to be signed up, and assures me that RoS is diverting additional resources to speeding up this process while there are fewer paper applications to process – “on a geographic approach, because it’s more cost effective to go to an area and try to sign up as many people as we can”. And while the fine tuning of the IT continues (as you would expect with any new system), it works, and any problems with individual case management software packages are being ironed out: “we want it to be able to work with anybody’s system”.

She adds: “I think it will gain momentum and move forward, but it is very new and you’ve got to remember that only New Zealand has anything remotely equivalent to it. So it’s not as though people are used to this from seeing it elsewhere: it is a very new concept.”

Performance issues

Relations with the profession generally, she believes, are good, despite the occasional grumble that new automated processes don’t work and are designed to get solicitors to do extra work. “We very much value the support that solicitors give us; we talk together and work together in partnership and that’s something I’m very keen to continue, both at professional level with the Law Society of Scotland but also with individual customers.” And she values and wants to continue the series of conveyancing conferences run jointly with the Society.

Pleased with the response to the offer of performance figures for individual firms on their percentage rates of rejected applications (Journal, January 2009, 15), Adams makes one further appeal for a mutually beneficial improvement – that more firms take up the direct debit facility. “That would be very helpful for us and we think it would be very helpful for solicitors’ firms as well. There is hardly any place you can go on the high street now where you can pay by cheque – cheques are becoming a thing of the past and that’s something the legal profession will have to address too. Direct debit is one of the things that has really helped our performance, because then we don’t get cheques for the wrong amount, cheques with the wrong date, cheques not signed etc. I think people have been very happy with the direct debit service. We all use direct debit personally with no trouble!”

Denying that the likes of the PMP Plus decision on titles to common areas in housing developments (see this month’s RoS page, p17) throw a spanner in the works (“We take these things in our stride; we have a good legal team and we make any necessary changes”), Adams adds that one of her initial aims is to review the whole range of Keeper’s policies, “to make sure that we have a coherent and up-to-date set of policies that enable me to fulfil my statutory requirements and are also clear and suitable for the modern age of registration”.

Extending its reach

Two other topics come up in relation to performance and key objectives. One is the catch-up programme for the backlog of old applications, something to which her predecessor attached great priority. Now in year 3 of a four-year strategy, by the end of the current financial year there should be nothing older than October 2008 (barring cases in court and the like), by the following year nothing older than six months, “and we’ll be seeking to make improvements in our turnaround times within that”. Problems can arise not only from complex first registrations, but transfers of part where the development is not yet complete or the Ordnance Survey map not yet available – on which point the Society has agreed that it is better to wait for proper maps rather than have to revisit things when the maps do come.

Looking further ahead, Adams sees it as a further key challenge to encourage the extension of the Land Register through voluntary registrations, with the aim ultimately of being able to close off parts of the Sasine Register. “We’ve now got something like 54% of titles and 17% of the land mass on the register, and there are strong economic benefits for the country from land registration: it’s part of the World Bank’s basket of measures of how easy it is to do business within a country, so it is very important, and it’s something that I’ll be talking to Scottish ministers about, how quickly they would like us to extend the Land Register across Scotland.”

At the moment RoS can accept voluntary registrations, but is not bound to; any policy of encouragement would probably begin with the counties that are already furthest ahead: in Renfrewshire, the first county to come on the register, over 70% of properties are now registered.

At ministers’ direction, RoS is also expanding its fields of activity. Having recently taken on board the registers of SSSIs and of community interests in land, it now has in the pipeline taking over the register of floating charges in Scotland from Companies House, and potentially the register of crofts – a project to occupy the departed Deputy Keeper Bruce Beveridge in his new role in the Rural Affairs Directorate.

Wanting to be appreciated

It seems that, at heart, RoS just wants to be that bit better recognised for what it does. Slightly jealous of the fact that when you say “Registers” to the public they usually think of births, marriages and deaths etc, Adams knows that her organisation will need to work hard to raise its profile. “I think managing information and improving accessibility to it will be a key feature of our work over the next few years. We have by far and away the best information about land and property in Scotland, and we want to make sure that everybody who needs to access that can do it… there could be real economies of scale and benefit in being much more proactive about what we do in providing information and managing it.”

Solicitors should not be shy about putting in their requests: “We’re very keen to know whether people are getting the information they need from us, when they need it and in the kind of format they want. If people who read the Journal do have any thoughts on what they would like from us and how, please let us know.”

And speaking of the other registers, could we ever arrive at the situation where all titles are searchable by the public online, in the same way as they can now trace family records? “We need to do a bit more research into that, and we’ll be taking that forward to find out what information people actually want and how they want it. At the moment Registers Direct is very much information for professionals. We need to find ways of getting better information into the public domain about land and property in Scotland. And that’s something we’ll be looking at. People want to get a basic level of information so they can then take a decision about whether they need legal advice, as opposed to having to go to the solicitor to get the information in the first place.”

Profile: Sheenagh Adams

Sheenagh Adams’ degree at St Andrews University was in mediaeval history; but having decided against her initial intention of becoming a history teacher, her first job was as a welfare rights officer in the Gorbals – a challenging post, she says, particularly as regards people with learning difficulties. However it reaffirmed her commitment to the public sector, and after three years she moved into local authority housing management, at a time when the importance of tenant participation was beginning to be recognised.

Further housing related posts followed in the voluntary sector and then as a principal management officer with Falkirk District Council, before she joined the civil service in 1990, initially working in housing policy, then in rural affairs/natural heritage. More senior policy roles followed within the Scottish Executive and with Historic Scotland; then in 2006 she came to Registers of Scotland as managing director, a position she held until taking over as Keeper.