Improving the transparency of land ownership: consultation on draft regulations

Chapter 3 – The User Experience

75. The creation of a new Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land is intended to benefit individuals and communities across Scotland. It is therefore essential that the Register be accessible and usable by those individuals and communities. We will work with Registers of Scotland in advance of the Register's creation to ensure that the Register is user friendly in its format and systems – both to enter information onto the Register and to access it. This will include execution of a 'discovery' process used in the development of new Registers which involves extensive user testing.

76. Additionally we will learn from the experience of Companies House in administering the People with Significant Control Register which reveals information about the persons who control UK companies and other corporate bodies.

77. A key element of our proposals is it will be free to search and to access information in the new Register. Users will not be charged for either function. This will deliver an easily accessible and open register for the people of Scotland.

78. In October 2017 Registers of Scotland launched ScotLIS – a new map-based, on-line land information service.

79. The public offer for ScotLIS can tell users:

• When a property was purchased;
• How much it was purchased for;
• Whether a property is registered in the Land Register and, if so, it's title number; and,
• The mapped extent of the property on an Ordnance Survey map.

80. In addition to the public offer, there is a paid-for service aimed at business users such as legal and conveyancing specialists.

81. ScotLIS continues to be refined and improved based on RoS' customer research. In the public space the availability of an interactive map and how this might be used by members of the public is one such topic of research.

82. Where research identifies a need to do so, the addition of extra datasets will also being considered so that ScotLIS will allow for easy access to a wide variety of data held by public sector partners.

83. Part of the 'discovery' activity for the new Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land will include how this information can be accessed. We will use outputs from research to validate our assumption that this should be available via ScotLIS and to further determine how to display this information meaningfully to both public and business users.

84. The Land Register will remain the chief source of information about the legal owner of a piece of a land. Entries in the Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land can be read alongside entries in the Land Register to complete information about the ownership of the land.

85. As we have set out above, we are proposing that for some categories of owner there will not be information recorded in the Register, such as UK companies. In that case, an individual who wished to identify information about land owned by a UK company would first consult the Land Register to identify the UK company as the legal owner of the land before searching for the UK company on the Companies House website, where information about the company's people with significant control will be stored.

86. We recognise that this will require users to consult different sources of information, and are committed to making this as easy as possible. To that end we have made some initial proposals below. We are keen, however, to take views on this issue and draw on usable experience elsewhere, wherever that would be helpful.

87. Measures that may particularly help would be:

• Publishing information about the available sources of information, either on the Registers of Scotland website or elsewhere; and
• Publishing guidance about how to access information about land ownership including control of land owners in Scotland.

Q 29. What measures, if any, do you think we should take to inform and publicise information about land in Scotland?