Who Owns Scotland: the fit-for-purpose rural land register

The Registers of Scotland (RoS), the nation’s land registration and cadastral agency, is responsible for the registration of land rights in Scotland. Since 1981, the agency has been incrementally replacing the Sasines deeds-based register with a new, title-based Land Register. However, as of January 2025, only 55.9% of Scotland’s land mass was registered in it. Although the RoS intends to eventually complete full coverage of the Land Register, the current objective has been reduced to ‘functional completion’, which means that mostly land and property that regularly transacts in Scotland will be registered. This has left the majority of rural Scotland, predominantly covered by large estates, unregistered. This article describes a private-sector initiative to fill this gap by providing access to land ownership information in rural Scotland through a land information service called Who Owns Scotland.

The RoS manages and maintains 21 public registers relating to land and property ownership in Scotland. The most important are the deeds-based General Register of Sasines, which is the oldest national public land register in the world dating back to 1617, and the title-based Land Register introduced in 1981:

• Sasines Register

Since the 1870s, properties in the Sasines Register have had chronological lists of deeds called search sheets. These provide a description of the title, current and previous owners’ names, all recorded deeds that affect the title, current and previous mortgage entries, and the price paid for each transfer or sale of the title. A parcel boundary map, at varying scales and accuracy, may also be available in the deed itself. The deeds themselves have now all been digitized in monochrome and are handwritten prior to 1920, typed originals until 1940, as Xerox copies between 1941 and 1995, and as poor-quality microfiche versions from the early 1990s. All  are available to inspect (for a fee) at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh.

• Land Register

Introduced in 1981, the Land Register provides property owners with a state-backed guarantee of title. It is a map-based register and uses the Ordnance Survey GB map at the largest available scale (1:1,250, 1:2,500 or 1:10,000) as its base map. The parcel boundaries are adjusted to new versions of the digital maps, where appropriate. It is available for public viewing online for a fee.

Transition from Sasines Register to Land Register

The Sasines Register is progressively being replaced by the Land Register. The triggers for the RoS to add a property to the Land Register from the Sasines Register include when a property is bought, sold or re-mortgaged, and when the current owner undertakes a voluntary registration of the property (for a fee).

The Scottish Government set a target of completing the Land Register by 2024. However, this target was unrealistic; as of 2023, only 52.6% of Scotland’s land mass was registered (and only 55.9% by January 2025). For some properties, such as social housing or some large rural estates, registration is unlikely to happen for a long time. In these cases, the land details will not appear in the Land Register unless the property owner voluntarily registers the property. This situation is reflected in the current composition of the Land Register which includes only a small percentage of rural land properties.

The RoS, in collaboration with the Scottish Government’s Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID), has initiated the Indicative Sasines project that provides a spatial index into the search sheets of the Sasines Register. This makes it visually more helpful and accessible to fill the gaps in the Land Register. Field boundaries submitted by farmers for agricultural subsidies have been used to define the parcel boundaries associated with the Sasines Register search sheets. The service provides an indicative boundary and a probable search sheet number with a confidence level. However, this does not provide direct access to the ownership information; users still have to analyse the search sheets. The majority of the land coverage of Indicative Sasines data (boundaries and probable search sheets) were obtained from the Who Owns Scotland service. In January 2025, this service transitioned from a pilot phase to become an integral part of the RoS ScotLIS Business service. Searches on the Indicative Sasines are currently free of charge.

Although the RoS intends to eventually complete full coverage of the Land Register, the aim is now ‘functional completion’. This means that most land and property that regularly transacts in Scotland will be registered. According to estimates, just under 2.5 million properties were functionally complete by the end of 2024. This leaves much of rural Scotland, predominantly covered by large estates, unregistered in the Land Register.

The Who Owns Scotland LIS

As an authority on land governance and ownership, Andy Wightman has been lobbying for three decades for the completion of records on who owns land in Scotland. With the RoS changing to a ‘functional completion’ strategy, and with the Indicative Sasines project not providing direct access to ownership information, he decided to implement Who Owns Scotland (WOS), an ambitious fit-for-purpose rural land register. The service was launched in September 2022, the third iteration of a project that had begun with his 1996 publication Who Owns Scotland. This land information system (LIS) provides land ownership parcel boundaries on Ordnance Survey GB 1:50,000 mapping to within +/-5m, and associated property information pages (see Figure 2). This covers around 74.9% of rural Scotland (March 2025) and documents the ownership of over 3,600 landholdings plus the National Forest Estate across rural Scotland. This typically includes estates larger than 200 hectares, but smaller estates will be included over time.

Sources of land ownership data

34% of WOS records (54% of the geographical coverage) are derived from the Sasines Register. The remaining 66% of the records (46% of the geographical coverage) are obtained directly from the Land Register. Data can occasionally be derived from other sources, including organizations such as Scottish Natural Heritage. Interpreting the Sasines Register deeds and matching RPID field boundary data for owner occupiers with search sheets is not an easy task. This parcel boundary data and explicit land ownership information is how WOS significantly adds value.

Data quality

WOS does not provide an alternative service to that provided by the RoS. No warranty is given on the data, and it is not recommended for any legal or commercial purposes. However, it provides an excellent entry point to RoS services to check and validate the WOS data and can be directly used for a wide variety of applications, such as policy evaluation and infrastructure planning (see below).

To reduce costs, expedite the solution and make it more accessible, a number of compromises around data quality have been adopted in the WOS solution, including:

• Some of the information will always be out of date. The aim is to have all data current within one year. Since rural estates rarely transact, the currency is less significant. The date when the Sasines Register and/or Land Register was last searched by WOS is provided.
• When the owners are trustees, the full list of names is not provided.
• The associated address provided is the one most likely to be relevant for making contact, e.g. through a website, rather than the address on the deed.
• To reduce data volumes, the parcel boundaries have been generalized and simplified when digitized. Boundary points are recorded approximately every 10m.

Users and uses of WOS

The reasonable annual subscription costs for access to the WOS platform have encouraged its wider use, attracting a broad range of users with a variety of use cases. For example, many individuals use the service to identify landowners as part of building up knowledge and awareness of land use in their locality. Some are involved with climate projects or environmental projects for which knowledge of land ownership is important. Other users may be involved in research projects, such as monitoring the distribution of plant species, and would like to obtain the support of landowners.

Large and small business users include renewable energy companies scoping potential sites for new projects, environmental consultants seeking new business opportunities, telecoms companies involved in installing communications equipment, and outdoor recreation providers who, as a matter of good practice, wish to inform landowners of activities on their land. Other typical users are researchers investigating land use, suppliers interested in finding new customers among those who own land, and regulatory bodies who need to quickly obtain land ownership information related to site-specific incidents.

The WOS data has also been used to analyse the character and pattern of land ownership in Scotland. This has enabled politicians to better understand the potential impact of proposed land reform measures as well as provide insights into the operation of the land market. Additionally, the platform is used by those who wish to buy land, providing them with details of who currently owns it so that they can approach them about its potential sale.

Conclusions

The Who Owns Scotland LIS is a great example of a fit-for-purpose land administration solution in the developed world. Without the intervention of WOS to augment the limitations of the LIS provided by the RoS, the question of who owns Scotland would have gone unanswered for a long time. Instead, this innovative solution will support much-needed investment in rural Scotland, and above all help to shape and promote future land reform in Scotland, where just 421 people currently own half of the land.

Further reading

1. Wightman, A., 2024. The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got It. ISBN: 9781780278834, Berlinn Ltd.
2. Wightman, A., 2025. Who Owns Scotland 2024, accessed 18 March 2025 https://andywightman.scot/2025/03/who-owns-scotlands-2024/
3. Wightman, A., 2024. Rural Land Sales 2020-2022, accessed 10 March 2025 https://andywightman.scot/docs/Rural_Land_Sales_2020_22_rev2.pdf
4. Wightman, A. and Hollingdale, J., 2023. Forest Ownership in Scotland Ten Years Later, accessed 10 March 2025 https://www.forestpolicygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/FPG_Forest_Ownership_Nov23_Report_1.pdf
5. Access to the WOS platform https://whoownsscotland.org.uk/subscribe/