Accuracy

The initial database on community ownership used to produce the Estimate of Community Owned Land in Scotland 2017 publication had a number of issues relating to the quality and availability of data. It was compiled by collecting data from a wide range of organisations involved in community ownership, but the data collected had not been verified with the community groups themselves or independently. This approach was taken, as it was not possible to identify community groups that own assets from existing registers.

The Scottish Government worked to address these issues by surveying the community groups themselves and matching the data with the Land Register. Despite this there remains some missing data. The Scottish Government continues to work to populate the missing data.

Through the work in improving the data on community ownership the Scottish Government has become aware of assets, which were initially included in the database, that do not actually satisfy the definitions used to define community ownership. This could be where the community group is no longer in existence or has otherwise disposed of the asset. Through the matching work with Registers of Scotland, assets were also removed from the database if they were found to be rented by community groups as opposed to being owned.

If any assets could not be identified on the Land Register or in the Sasine Register and the community group were unable to be contacted or did not respond to contact via letter and/or email these assets have also been removed from the database.

It is expected that the matching work that has been carried out in conjunction with Registers of Scotland will reduce the extent of assets being included in the community ownership database when they did not meet the criteria for being classes as community owned.

In general, until it has been established that a particular community group meets the definition of a community group any assets associated with the group will be excluded from the published data. Assets whose ownership cannot be verified will be similarly excluded.

There can be discrepancies between the area of assets defined on the Land Register compared to the area community groups themselves quote on assets they own. There are several factors which can lead to uncertainty about the area of some assets, particularly those with a very large area:

• Discrepancies over how much of the coastline is included between what is included on the Land Register and what community groups consider they own. For example, whether the boundary is taken to the high or low water mark and whether inlets are included
• Whether or not small islands and/or rocks are included in the title
• Whether or not water features, such as rivers and lochs, are included in the title
• Uncertainty in measuring area across terrain that is not uniformly flat

The asset areas used in the Community Ownership in Scotland publication series use the area recorded on the Land Register, where available.

Additionally, it is believed that these statistics will be an underestimate of the true extent of community ownership in Scotland. Whilst several different sources have been used to populate the community ownership database, covering most of the possible routes to community ownership, it should be noted that none of these sources place an obligation on community groups to report any information about themselves or the assets they own to the Scottish Government.

It is also acknowledged that community owned assets are less likely to be known to the Scottish Government where:

• the organisation of the community group is informal, with little or no online presence, especially for smaller assets
• there was no public funding used to enable the purchase of the asset, e.g. the asset was gifted or bequeathed as a legacy

Therefore, these assets will not be included in the community ownership database. This will result in an unquantifiable underestimate in the extent of community ownership in Scotland.