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Database on land ownership
6.1 The Land Reform Policy Group recommended the creation of a new database on land ownership in rural areas to ensure greater transparency on land ownership and make it easier for the public to find out who owns particular areas of land.
6.2 Information about the ownership of land is already publicly available in Scotland. The Register of Sasines was established nearly four hundred years ago as a record of title deeds. But it is not map-based, and is not user-friendly; and it can be difficult to establish ownership, particularly in rural areas.
6.3 The Register of Sasines is being replaced by the Land Register. It was introduced in 1981, and it is being extended, county by county, so that it will cover all of Scotland by 2003. It will in time provide the perfect solution. It is map-based, and it is user-friendly. But it only provides coverage of properties which have been sold since the Register was introduced. Complete coverage would require compulsory registration of properties which have not yet been sold. This would be very costly in the short term. After 10 to 15 years of the operation of Registration of Title in any country, most properties will have been registered on sale. That will be the right time to consider what additional measures could be put in place to ensure that all land is contained in the Land Register.
6.4 If more information in the interim is a major priority, it would be possible to take as a template a similar project undertaken for Highland Council recently. This draws upon Register of Sasines data, supplemented with information from landowners in the area. It has achieved about 95% coverage. The cost of undertaking a similar exercise for the whole of the rural areas of Scotland might be about £500,000. Ministers are considering further whether this would represent good value for money.
6.5 New legislation is unlikely to be necessary for this purpose.
Beneficial ownership
6.6 The Land reform Policy Group recommended that Scottish Ministers should be given a power to investigate the beneficial ownership of land. Although the ownership of land can be ascertained from title deeds, this may not identify the persons who actually benefit from or control the land. There may be a paper trail which is very difficult or impossible to track, and which may include an offshore company or trust. If the owner is a company, there might be many shareholders. A trust may be a discretionary one, whose beneficiaries can change at the trustee's discretion.
6.7 The various approaches examined to date suggest that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make this proposed legislation effective. Investigations are still continuing, and if a practical and cost-effective solution can be identified, legislation will be brought forward.
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