Blog post by Fiona Mckie, Head of Land Register Completion.

In May 2014 ministers invited us to complete Scotland’s land register by 2024, including all public land by 2019. Such ambitious timescales have meant collaboration is key and since that announcement over 4 years ago work has been going on, behind the scenes, to ensure we do everything we can to achieve it.

Completing the land register is not something we can do alone – the stakeholder list is well over one hundred and we have been working closely with public, private and third sectors, interested parties, as well as our partners at the Law Society of Scotland, RICS and Scottish Government (SG).

You can read about how we are doing in our blog on visualising Scotland’s land register completion.

Key milestones: Registering Newton Estate, North Uist

Newton Estate on the Isle of North Uist was a large scale voluntary registration (VR) that formed part of the SG Rural VR project. SG Rural own around 1.4 per cent of Scotland’s land mass, with the Newton Estate making up 5,796 hectares, or 0.07 per cent of land mass.

The initial application arrived with RoS in October 2016, with an additional area of ground submitted for registration in June 2017. As with any large estate, property sales continue, so a number of Transfer of Parts (TPs) also arrived in between to complicate matters.

This estate was so large that over one hundred deeds arrived in a box, was split into a further five titles and included 26 layers of supplementary data to incorporate the burdens and servitudes.

Close collaboration with stakeholders

This estate was the last public sector application we had to complete from 2016 and the complexity of the mapping and legal examination of this estate required a joint effort – RoS colleagues, from various teams, worked together with solicitors acting on behalf of SG.

Close collaboration is a model we advocate for large scale titles as it allows for a smooth registration process – it helps avoid misunderstandings, enabling us to get the registration right first time. – Avril Watson, Land Register Completion manager.

More about our processes

Don’t know your burdens from your servitudes? You can learn more about the registration services discussed in this article.

Keep up to date on our progress

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