Chamber and committees

Registers of Scotland - Quarterly Update February 2022

Letter from the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland, 4 February 2022

Dear Ms Baker

REGISTERS OF SCOTLAND – EFW QUARTERLY PROGRESS UPDATE

I am writing to provide the committee with a quarterly RoS progress update. For ease of reading, I have outlined the latest updates against relevant headers below.

Performance

The latest performance metrics for RoS have been published on our website. In summary we are ahead of the targets we have set for: clearing the arrear, processing at least 60% of dealing with whole, first registrations and transfers of part within 35 days. We are also now slightly ahead of target on our quality metric. We also continue to make sufficient progress on delivering the benefits of a complete Land register, further details below. We are not yet able to publicly report on our 2021 Civil Service People Survey results and KPI figure, however more information can be found below within the People section of this update. We have moved to a new provider for our customer satisfaction survey and the latest quarterly figures are not yet available. It should also be noted that surveys will reduce from four times per year to two. The scoring mechanism in the new system is different and therefore we will be undertaking a re-baselining exercise when we receive our initial results and will consider whether we need to recast our customer satisfaction targets to reflect a different scoring system.

Legislation

Over the last period we have continued to work closely with the Recovery Bill team and SGLD on progressing those elements of the emergency legislation we wish to place on a permanent footing. That work is now complete, and the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill was introduced on 25 January 2022. You will be aware that an SSI was laid on 16 December 2021 which is, in part, related to the provisions affecting the role of the Keeper in the Bill, and the EFW Committee took evidence on the SSI last week and recommended it be approved. I have noted the committee’s interest in seeing the evidence that confirms that island and remote communities are not negatively impacted by the move to digital submissions. I will write to the Committee separately on this matter. Similarly, I noted the committee’s interest in understanding how we are assuring the cyber security of our new digital systems. I would be happy to address any questions on this issue at my forthcoming committee appearance and, if appropriate, to follow up in writing to provide further detail if required. We expect the full Parliament to approve the SSI in the next few weeks.

Land Register Completion

We continue to make good progress in completing Scotland’s land register. Our priority focus is on delivering the benefits of a completed land register to achieve the biggest impact from our efforts. Our estimations are that we have already registered over 80% of addresses that regularly transact, and close to half of Scotland’s total land mass. A further 6.8% of land mass is currently undergoing the registration process. In parallel, we are making significant progress with unlocking Sasines to provide greater insights into ownership of land and property in Scotland, with approximately 16% of Scotland’s land mass now through the sasines search process. We will be publishing a map to illustrate this data in the coming weeks and will share this visual with the committee when available. In total across registered land, draft registrations and unlocked Sasines information, we have collated ownership information for over 70% of Scotland’s land mass, and we are moving continually closer to the point at which we can confidently answer the question of ‘Who owns Scotland?’.

Digital

In Q4 RoS will continue its work on Register Land and Property, this enriches the use of the Digital Submission Service via the capture of structured data that enables efficiencies for both customer (less manual re-entry and greater validation), and RoS, in its work towards process efficiencies in registration.

Following last year’s RoS conference and working collaboratively with stakeholders, a digital registration proof of concept is planned for this quarter – its purpose is the creation and registration of a fully digital end to end transaction.

In October RoS released its first information API, enabling the secure, programmatic search of one of the key Registers. This represents an important milestone in the provision of data and information services from RoS.

Our digital work continues to garner wider external recognition. We have been shortlisted for two entries in the Civil Service’s Operational Delivery Profession’s Awards held to recognise the delivery of vital public services. More than half of the civil service workforce work in ODP roles with other departments represented including DWP, HMRC, and MOD.

The Digital Submission Service (DSS) (how applications are created and sent to RoS) was shortlisted for A Modern Civil Service Award. During FY21/22 over 447,000 applications have been submitted to RoS via this service.

The second nomination is for the RoS cloud strategy which has migrated over 56 million records across the national datasets maintained by RoS. This approach has removed the requirement for on-premise storage enabling a secure, remote and consequently accessible archive of deeds and documents. The RoS Cloud Strategy is shortlisted for the Transformation Award Innovation within ODP - For original thinking or technology that has improved the service ODP delivers to citizens, such as use of automation.

Geovation Scotland

Cohort 3 of Geovation Scotland have now successfully completed the first phase of the accelerator programme, during which they have identified and validated their initial proposals with practical support from the Geovation team.

The 3 start-up companies; Student Bubble, Property Price Hub, and EOLAS Insights Ltd, have now moved into the ‘Exploration’ phase of the programme, where they will engage further with their core customer segments and explore how to build out their product or service. Support with intellectual property, financial modelling and presentations skills will also form part of this phase as the start-ups prepare to pitch their businesses to a curated audience at a Showcase event in late April 2022 (date and format TBC).

Geovation Scotland will be opening to applications for cohort 4 of the accelerator programme in February, offering up to 4 start-ups working with location or land and property data the opportunity to join the programme and access 12 months of bespoke support.

People

We have recruited a significant number (circa 80) of new Administrative Officers (AO) within Registration, Customer Services, and Secretariat. These new colleagues are a key part of our strategy to keep pace with our high registration caseload and clear our registration arrear. The applicant numbers were our highest recorded at 1,300 which enabled us to offer roles within RoS to high quality candidates. We have adapted the induction process to ensure a warm welcome in a virtual environment, create a community, and increase speed to competence.

Recognising the need to have more colleagues with digital and data skills in the future, we have delivered our first Grow Our Own programme, with colleagues positioned into roles within Service Design, Product, and Digital & Data business areas. The successful candidates have completed their initial onboarding programmes and the first of their learning modules, as well as receiving mentor support with on-the-job learning. We have initiated the evaluation of the Grow Our Own Programme, which will play a key role in helping to develop and finalise the Grow Our Own strategy for 2022 and beyond.

We initiated our Leadership Development Programme to support the development of our C1 and C2 Leaders, through 360 feedback, interactive learning modules and leadership coaching. The programme will focus on critical skills that will support and enable our leaders to deliver against the corporate plan objectives and to support the level of transformational change to progress us towards the future vision and requirements of RoS.

We have signed up to the Young Person’s Guarantee Scheme including our future commitments. These include preparing young people for the world of work, supporting young people into the workplace, proving work based learning opportunities and creating opportunities for young people. 21% of applicants to our recent AO campaign were between 16-24, as were 15% of successful applicants to our Grow our Own scheme. The success of these schemes will be tracked, alongside other new programmes implemented.

We have received the results of our recent Civil Service People Survey. The outcomes of this survey, along with other data points such as Investors in People, have helped us form RoS wide themes to focus on in the coming year to help support reaching our corporate plan goals around performance, engagement, and development. Currently the publication of CSPS results is embargoed outwith the Civil Service, with a provisional publication date of 28 April 2022. I will share the results with the committee as soon as I am able to do so.

Work continues to deliver our Equality Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and I am pleased to report that one of our non-executive Directors has been invited to participate in work being organised by the Public Appointments team, to increase the number of people from minority ethnic backgrounds applying and being appointed to public body boards. I am hopeful that involvement in this work will also enable best practice and insight to be brought back to RoS via our Board discussions, such that we can fulfil our broader quest to improve the diversity of our colleague population, as part of the actions we are taking to deliver our EDI strategy.

Stakeholder Engagement

We continue to host regular webinars on a variety of topics to support our customers in making best use of our services. We are finalising plans for a series of policy and practice workshops in the Spring of 2022 and will be hosting a virtual launch event for our updated Corporate Plan 2022-2027 once it has been published in April.

As we are directly accountable to Parliament, we conduct an annual survey to measure how aware MSPs are of the work of RoS and how effective they think we are. We have now received the results of the 2021 survey (which is conducted by an independent organisation). We anticipated that this would be a more challenging year as the election in May 2021 returned a large number of new MSPs, so we had to build new relationships to raise their awareness of RoS. We delivered this through a series of well-attended breakfast briefing sessions and 1-1 engagement. Pleasingly, this approach appears to have delivered the desired results.

Altogether 69 MSPs took part in the survey and of these the majority (63%) believe RoS is effective in fulfilling its key role. This is up 3% from 2020, and up 13% from 2019. 68% of MSPs also say they think favourably of RoS. This has increased by 2% from 2020 and is up 17% from 2019. However, we did note that 4 MSPs interviewed had reason to think unfavourably of RoS. Although we know which MSPs participated in the survey, the individual responses provided are anonymous so we cannot directly know who feels this way. The survey has provided a good basis for planning some bespoke MSP engagement in the year ahead to raise awareness amongst those MSPs who are not yet aware of our work and to look at how we can address the underlying issues that may drive an unfavourable view of RoS.

Finances

In contrast to 2020-21, this financial year we expect our income (c. £95 million) to fully cover all our running costs (resource budget). We continue to drawdown a small amount of capital budget from the Scottish Government to cover the costs of developing the new registers on behalf of Ministers. At the beginning of the year, contingency was put into the finance portfolio part of the SG budget in case the housing market was less active than usual due to Covid, leading to lower income, but this has not been needed. Our current projections are that we will continue to be broadly self-financing in future years, with income from fees matching the cost to serve customers.

Other Matters

The Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land is due to go live in April 2022. Things are progressing well, and we do not anticipate any difficulties with the system being ready. A private Beta (test phase) is due to launch in February.

Early engagement and discovery work on the development of the two new Registers proposed under the Moveable Transactions (Scotland) Bill continues. We are working closely with the SG team involved in the proposed legislation and with SG finance colleagues to secure funding approval for the project.

Return to offices: RoS continues to have a number of essential workers on-site in our Edinburgh office, averaging around 40 colleagues that work to deliver business-critical activities.

Given the latest government guidance we are now moving forward at pace with reopening our buildings and introducing colleagues to new ways of hybrid working. A hybrid playbook is being created and designed to assist and support colleagues in adapting to hybrid working with inclusiveness being factored into the approach. To date we have run a series of experiments across the business to determine what the optimum hybrid working model for RoS will potentially look like in its future state. A desk booking system has been fully implemented and workspaces have been re-designed to enable RoS to embark on a hybrid working model.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you require anything further. I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to attend a forthcoming committee meeting and answer any questions you may have about RoS and the work we do.

Yours sincerely

JENNIFER HENDERSON

Keeper of the Registers of Scotland

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