Ayr-Zetland: the tour continues

The Keeper, Jennifer Henderson, continues her roadshow as we progress through the autumn, travelling the length and breadth of Scotland to update legal professionals and other stakeholders on our work.

Jennifer started her tour in Orkney and Shetland, and has so far visited Ayr, Dundee, Dumfries and Peebles, with more dates on the agenda. While we want to let customers know about the direction of travel from our perspective, an important part of this autumn campaign has been opening up the floor and giving our customers the opportunity to share their views and experiences. We consult with our customers on an ongoing basis, both formally and informally, so we haven’t been surprised to learn that the arrear, rejections, and Land Register completion continue to be areas of interest. We are taking this on board and will make every effort to provide up-to-date information and data on these topics when we are engaging with external audiences.

We hope that customers will take the opportunity to feed back their views, not only through this programme of external events, but at any point in the future where there’s something that you think we need to know about and address.

ScotLIS: one year on

Last month marked the first anniversary of the official launch of ScotLIS, Scotland’s Land Information Service.

From before launch and beyond, the ScotLIS team have been hard at work developing an innovative new service that effectively meets user needs both internally and externally.

Over the past year we have added numerous new features to the service, including new registers, new layers and improved usability. These have been met with positive feedback from users, and ScotLIS is now well placed to be Scotland’s platform of choice for land and property information as we approach the decommissioning date for Registers Direct on 30 November 2018.

We’ll be continuing to add new features and improvements to our business offering of ScotLIS, and the team will continue to make these priorities visible through their public roadmap. In the next few months we’ll also be working on ScotLIS for the public. We’ve refreshed our proposition for this, and our mission is to create a service that is developed around the tasks that the people of Scotland are looking to complete with regard to land and property in Scotland.

Reining in the arrear

The Keeper made a commitment earlier this year to arrest and eradicate the arrear, and said that she will publish monthly updates showing progress towards meeting our targets, and indicating progress.

An initial target was set of having no case older than two years by the end of December 2018.

Our most recent update shows that we have now processed 27% of cases that were older than two years. This progress is down to the hard work of our registration staff, who have embraced new policies and procedures to address the backlog.

This was an ambitious target, and while it looks as though we may not achieve 100% completion by the year end, we are pleased that we are now processing first registrations more quickly. We want to see similar improvements in other types of applications, and are confident that we can use the lessons we have learned to make progress in those areas.

While we want to bring in the age of the arrear, we are also working to make sure that any cases that require special attention are addressed as a matter of priority. A newly formalised expedite process for such cases has been introduced, and we will hold good to our commitment that no case that has been with us for longer than three months will be rejected unless it absolutely, legally, has to be.

As promised, we will continue to let our customers know about our progress, and are continually reviewing our internal practices to improve our processing on an ongoing basis.