Transparency is vital for public organisations, and it’s something I’m passionate about at Registers of Scotland. In recapping what I’ve been up to in August, I’m going to focus on how so much of the work my colleagues and I do revolves around transparency.

The clear example of ensuring transparency is customer engagement. It’s a feature of what I do every month, and during August there were several examples. For instance, I met with members of the Law Society of Scotland, who I meet with regularly to discuss our mutual work and maintain this important relationship. Topics covered included progression in our ongoing work to clear our registration arrear.

Also in August, I joined a meeting of the Professional Support Lawyers (PSL). The PSL are a vital part of the legal profession in Scotland, and as such it’s another group both colleagues and I, such as our Customer Relationship Managers, keep close ties with.

It is the role of the PSL to act as central support within their firm, which includes researching points of law, knowledge sharing and keeping colleagues up-to-date with changes in property law and market practise. I shared an update on how Registers of Scotland is performing so far against our Corporate Plan.

Internally at RoS, a big highlight was the August meeting of our Board. This meeting was the first meeting for one of our new Non-Executive Directors (NED), Andrew Miller. Our Non-Executive Directors provide an important external perspective on the work we do and ensuring that we are meeting our performance targets.

They are extremely supportive of our ambition to be transparent around how we are performing and have actively encouraged our new approach to publishing our key performance indicators on a regular basis. At the same time, it’s important that our new NEDs understand our business, so this month we hosted both our newest non-executive directors Andrew Miller and Andrew Harvey at our Edinburgh office, to give them a closer look at our processes and the work we do.

RoS is accountable to the Scottish Parliament, and engagement with MSPs is something we put a great deal of time and effort into.  We correspond regularly with MSPs in relation to questions from their constituents and have recently started producing a bespoke MSP newsletter to keep them updated on ROS and the most common issues raised in correspondence.

Next month, we’re hosting an event for MSPs where they can meet RoS experts and learn more about the subjects that matter to their constituents. I look forward to sharing more on the event in my September blog, but this month I’ve been working closely with colleagues across the business to ensure the event is a resounding success.

And finally, two news items that are hot off the press. Firstly, we’ve just released our Annual Report and Accounts for 2018-19. This document provides an overview of our activity for the year, and is a cornerstone of our transparency agenda. You can access the report on our website.

Secondly, I’m delighted to confirm that we’ll be following up our campaign of events in autumn 2018 with a series of three conferences in November and December. What’s more, we’ll be joined by a number of partner organisations such as Ordnance Survey and the Law Society of Scotland, to provide our customers with truly insightful and engaging events.

The event details are:

• Inverness: 13 November at the Kingsmill Hotel
• Aberdeen: 19 November at Pittodrie Stadium
• Glasgow: 3 December at the Royal Concert Hall

Registration details are available on our website. I hope to see many of you there.