Round Scotland from A to Z

As a busy summer draws to a close, the autumn brings an exciting series of events around Scotland. The Keeper, Jennifer Henderson, began her Ayr to Zetland campaign. The Keeper will travel across Scotland, meeting with stakeholders, including those from the legal profession, to help you to find out everything about life inside RoS.

Crucially though, we want to hear from our customers, and our planned face-to-face interactions, including workshops and faculty visits, as well as written content such as blog posts and social media updates aim to put the customer at the centre of what we are doing.

These will provide fresh news and information relating to our digital transformation, our products and services, and the arrear.

This is a time of change for our organisation. We know that this impacts on our stakeholders, and we have been working with our customers each step of the way.

You can now register for our workshops via Eventbrite – we’re coming to Ayr, Dundee, Inverness, Stirling and more to talk with you.

ScotLIS: the Keeper writes

The rollout of ScotLIS remains a key work area for RoS. We reiterated a commitment in our 2018-21 Corporate Plan to make ScotLIS the platform of choice for land and property information in Scotland, and will be retiring Registers Direct at the end of this year. We recognise that change can be challenging, but I’m confident that ScotLIS provides an intuitive service based on the needs of our users, and opens access to the information held on our registers better than any service that we have hosted before.

We’ve continued to develop ScotLIS based on user feedback, adding innovative new features that allow users to access the information on our registers quicker and more easily.

The response from business users of ScotLIS has been overwhelmingly positive, with customers reporting efficiency savings.

We recently reached a milestone in making ScotLIS the platform of choice. The last week in September was the first week that more than 50% of charged searches were done using ScotLIS rather than Registers Direct.

We now have more than 100 active business users, making ScotLIS a key tool for our business customers.

The ScotLIS team is working with end users on a weekly basis in order to ensure that we continue to pursue the right direction of travel. That’s something that we have done across the business for some time, and which I intend to do as Keeper. I have every intention of being not only visible, but approachable, and since coming into post, one of the many things that I’ve been actively pursuing is meeting with as many of our stakeholders and customers as possible.

Arrear update: turning the corner

The Keeper announced earlier this year that we were looking at ways to address the backlog of work that we have accrued, with our first target to ensure there are no cases older than two years by the end of 2018. She also made a commitment to publish regular updates on our progress in achieving this, and to review targets and processes on an ongoing basis in order to ensure that these are fit for purpose.

Our first update was published in September. It showed that our oldest case dated back to March 2016, and that the percentage of cases older than two years that we have completed stood at 17%. While we still have some way to go in order to meet our December 2018 target of having no cases older than two years by that time, we are working hard to meet that aim.

We are pleased that we have begun to match intake and dispatch on First Registrations, which is a positive sign. This is significant as it means we are starting to arrest the growth, and the age is coming in. We hope to maintain momentum on this. We will continue to update via our website to let you know about our progress.