Oral evidence: Land Reform in Scotland, HC 877-ivWednesday 12 February 2014

Oral evidence, 12 February 2014.

Witnesses

Dr Robert Barr, Manchester Geomatics, Dr Cameron Easton, University of Glasgow, and Robin McLaren, Know Edge Ltd, gave evidence.

Chair

Gentlemen, can I welcome you to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee? We are discussing land reform. You were in the fortunate, or otherwise, position of hearing the previous session so you will have an idea of the sort of issues we are pursuing. If you have seen the record of the previous sessions, you will have an idea of the whole coverage of the issues we are pursuing. Can I start off by asking you to introduce yourselves and give us a note of your background, inasmuch as it is relevant to our inquiry?

Dr Barr

My name is Robert Barr. I am a career academic, and I am a geographic information systems specialist. I have been playing with computers drawing maps since the 1970s. Currently, I am a research fellow at Manchester and a visiting professor at Liverpool. I retired about 10 years ago to take my lab out as a company. I am also a serving councillor in Warrington, which is not often mentioned. In addition to my technical interest in geographic information systems and land information systems, I am currently a member of the Cabinet Office-sponsored Open Data User Group set up as a result of the Open Data White Paper. I am very active within that. I am also on the advisory panel for public sector information, which is supported by the Ministry of Justice, and which supports the Office of Public Sector Information. I am interested both in technical issues and in practical open data and transparency issues.

Robin McLaren

My name is Robin McLaren. I am a land professional. I am also a member of RICS but I do not represent its views today; I represent my own views. For the past 30 years I have run my own independent consulting company called Know Edge Ltd, and through the World Bank family of agencies, like the Rural Bank and the UN FAO, I have advised on land policy, land administration systems and land information management across the world, in the Philippines, Mongolia, Iraq, Kuwait and a whole series of countries. A major event was in Hungary. For six years, I was adviser to the Hungarian Government on land reform, turning it from communism to a traded land market. I was a technical adviser and put in place all the information systems to drive that change in ownership of land across Hungary. I am also a computer scientist. I specialise in managing location or geographic information. I led the consultants to create the UK location strategy which was published about four or five years ago. Thank you for inviting me to this Committee.

Dr Easton

I am Cameron Easton. My research degree is in ecology. For many years I worked for the Nature Conservancy Council and Scottish Natural Heritage, largely in environmental information systems. Latterly and until my retirement, I specialised in geographic information systems, and I was head of spatial information policy for the Scottish Government. In that role I was responsible for implementing the European INSPIRE directive in Scotland, which provides the legal framework for making spatial data and information available. I created the Scottish spatial data infrastructure, which is the mechanism whereby the public sector can make its data and information available. Latterly, since my retirement I have been affiliated with the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment.

Chair

These are incredibly impressive CVs. If we do not understand this by the end, presumably that is our fault entirely. Let it be recorded that the witnesses nodded at that point.

Lindsay Roy

Vigorously.

Chair

We are looking at land reform. How important is it to have good quality accessible information when formulating land policy? Given that there are three of you, we do not necessarily need all of you to comment on everything. If you agree, it is enough to say you agree; if you disagree, we always enjoy fights between the witnesses because that helps to illuminate the issues.

Dr Barr

In my view, it is vital. There is a big divide between countries that have a formal cadastral system to keep information on land, which is usually public and fully open. Increasingly, in European countries it is fully open. We have all the information but we choose not to make it open, so in many of the questions you were asking the last witnesses it would be quite complicated and difficult to put together the evidence base on which their answers were based. They will tell you about individual transactions, but, if you wanted to look at transactions or land ownership overall, you would find that very difficult because, while the information is there, it is not made accessible.

Dr Easton

I absolutely agree about the need for openness to understand what is going on. For example, on your question about overlaying land ownership on what is now called the James Hutton Institute’s land classification scheme, the answer is that we could not do it, because the data held by the James Hutton Institute on land classification are not readily available; they are not in a format that can be looked at by a citizen. The land ownership, which is held by Registers of Scotland, again is not easily available, and certainly is not in a format that could be overlain in any sensible way, without an awful lot of processing work. In any event, the digital information we have is incomplete, because the land register for Scotland is very far from complete. The answer to your question is that, if we are to understand how land classification affects ownership, we cannot do it in Scotland.

Robin McLaren

I would argue that you cannot create a policy on land reform without first having a land policy for Scotland. Both those policies require good, comprehensive land information to drive the evidence for them. I do not think you can do it effectively without that information. The information also ties the citizen to land. What is wrong with Scotland is that we have lost the relationship between the citizen and land. We had a feudal system for so long. When was the last time you checked your land records in the land register and sasines register? Any of you? No.

Chair

I think I have a full life. I confess I do not feel the need to check my land records.

Robin McLaren

I would argue that that information is the connection between the citizen and land. It is not just about land policy; it is about engaging citizens in managing and administering land as well. We have ignored that for too long in Scotland.

Lindsay Roy

What needs to be done to establish a full land register?

Robin McLaren

Right now the register has been formed since the early ’80s, and an entry is triggered by any transaction in the property market: when you buy and sell, long leases, or when you have a mortgage. Lots of properties are not on the register because they have not been triggered to be part of that register. You could put in place legislation to complete the register.

Lindsay Roy

Is this a role for central Government or local government?

Robin McLaren

It is the role of central Government to authorise that. You could ask citizens to provide that information themselves. Increasingly, we are getting crowd-source information, so we could actually ask citizens to update the registers temporarily until it was formally registered, so there are shortcuts for doing this.

Lindsay Roy

Roughly how much of the relevant information is held by Government at the present time?

Robin McLaren

About 60% of Scotland is covered by the land register. Remember we have the sasines register, which is a deeds-based register, and the land register, which is a title-based register where guarantees are given by the Government. Only about 60% are represented on the land register giving guarantees by Government.

Lindsay Roy

Some is held by private landowners and some you just do not know about. Is that what you are saying?

Robin McLaren

Yes. It is in the sasines register, but it is very difficult to access that information. We cannot do it by an address or by map base, so elements are missing from our knowledge of who owns Scotland. Andy Wightman has tried to fill in the gaps in this, but that is informal.

Lindsay Roy

There needs to be a coherent, comprehensive approach.

Robin McLaren

Correct.

Dr Barr

It should be available to the citizen. Citizens can go on the internet, look at Google maps and see mapping. They cannot see ownership on those maps because the land parcels themselves are not recorded on there by Registers of Scotland. In England, the Land Registry does have parcel information—it is partial—but they are prevented from releasing it by Ordnance Survey, because Ordnance Survey wish to protect their earning power and their monopoly in large-scale mapping. We are in an ironic position in this country. We have the best base map—large-scale base map—of probably any country in the world. We are justly proud of Ordnance Survey because they have produced that. The logic is that we want useful information on that. One of the most useful single bits of information would be an outline of the parcels by ownership. Whether or not you reveal owners is a political decision, not a technical one. It would be perfectly possible to do so, if we chose to do it, but at the moment technical barriers, which are not genuine technical barriers but are commercial and administrative barriers, are being put in the way of doing that, because there is not adequate policy on how we manage it.

Lindsay Roy

Are you saying that Ordnance Survey have the intellectual property rights?

Dr Barr

Exactly. Ordnance Survey have the intellectual property rights, and the way they choose, or are forced through their business model, to administer those rights restricts access to land information.

Lindsay Roy

And that is a Government agency.

Dr Barr

It is a Government agency.

Dr Easton

One thing we could do that would increase the percentage of land covered by the available information would be a requirement for all public authorities to make their land ownership available digitally. Some authorities—for example, the Forestry Commission—already do this. It is very easy to go to a website and find out the ownership of land held by the Forestry Commission, but if you wanted to know, for example, about land owned by the Scottish Government, you could not find it, and I can guarantee that the Scottish Government probably do not know either because the information is held in paper maps in a drawer in an office. It has not been digitised.

Lindsay Roy

Do you think this requires legislation?

Dr Easton

You wouldn’t even need legislation. If there was an edict from Government to say, “It is your responsibility to make this data available,” public authorities would have to do that.

Lindsay Roy

You would be in favour of that kind of edict.

Dr Easton

Absolutely.

Dr Barr

Other European countries have put through legislation that makes these records open. We have specifically opted out of European public sector information rules that would prevent us from trading in this data. The impact of trading in this data is that, in order to protect the intellectual property rights and the trading activity, you simply have to prevent access to the data. When countries like Denmark wanted to release not their cadastre but their address base they found they had to change primary legislation; they had to change quite a lot of legislation that referred to addresses. The Dutch Government have recently made their cadastre available, and it has made remarkable things available. For example, a map was published earlier this year with the age of every single building—over 10 million buildings in the Netherlands. This is entirely feasible here either for buildings or land parcels. The reason why it is not done is the trading rules and the legislation.

Chair

Can you clarify for me what you mean by trading rules? Is that just the question of Ordnance Survey and their rights?

Dr Barr

It is partly a question of Ordnance Survey. Ordnance Survey have a policy whereby any data derived from an Ordnance Survey map is also subject to their intellectual property rights. That means that, if Registers of Scotland or the Land Registry traced a property parcel from an Ordnance Survey map, Ordnance Survey say, “If you want to look at the Land Registry’s parcel, you must pay Ordnance Survey a royalty to do so.” That is a major constraint on trade and on the freedom of the land registries in Scotland, England and Wales to release their own data.

Lindsay Roy

It is a major disincentive.

Dr Barr

It is a massive disincentive. In fact, it has prevented it. Ordnance Survey have recently blocked the release of land parcels by the Land Registry and local authorities in England.

Dr Easton

You mentioned trading status. Another complexity for Scotland is our land registry. The Registers of Scotland is a Government trading fund. Therefore, its data are an asset and it is required to get a return on that asset. Not only is there a difficulty about the data being there—they are not there digitally—but as a citizen you are obliged to pay for access to those data. Not only citizens; other Government agencies and local authorities also have to pay to get access to that information, because of the trading fund status of Registers of Scotland.

Chair

Presumably, it is not the fact that you have to pay that is the problem; the problem is the level of payment. If the payment was small enough, it would not be a barrier.

Dr Easton

There is a philosophical argument which I always had when I was working in government. If data are collected at taxpayers’ expense, is it reasonable for the taxpayer to have to pay again to access data collected on their behalf? My view is that they should not have to pay twice to access data, but that is a personal view.

Lindsay Roy

It is a cash cow.

Dr Barr

Yes, but Mr Davidson is quite right. Payment in itself is not the problem. The problem is the way the payment is enforced. Certainly in England, and possibly in Scotland, it is a payment by transaction. If you want to look at a single land parcel, you pay £4, which is not a massive fee. However, if you would like to ask the register about all the land parcels owned by a particular owner, you cannot do it, because you would not know how many parcels there would be. You do not get access to the register as a whole. If you pay by access to individual records, that sort of synoptic view of the register becomes impossible. That is quite important if you are trying to answer some of the questions that arose in your earlier evidence session.

Lindsay Roy

Dr Barr, can we pick up on your role in the Cabinet Office Open Data User Group? Can you advise us about open data and to what extent land information is part of this initiative?

Dr Barr

At the moment, I am responsible for writing our response to the Land Registry consultation in the UK as to whether the land information should be open data. We have pressed very hard, and failed, to make the address an item of open data. The address is vital, because that is the single way in which you are most likely to identify land. In Scotland, the register only has an address or the name of a parcel of land and a single point to identify the land. We failed, because one of the national address files, whose intellectual property rights include all others, has just been sold alongside Royal Mail, so it is going to be very difficult to create an open national address register. Our feeling is that the register of land ownership should also be an open register. Those parcels should be open or very cheaply available. That is quite feasible, because you could have an agency which is a trading fund that charges for services. The Land Registry charges for registering ownership of land. It can still own this information but can release it for free, or at very low cost, because that is not part of the business model. Ordnance Survey cannot do that because there are no transactions from which they can be funded. The only way they can establish themselves is by charging Government to make data open. Government can go to Ordnance Survey or the Land Registry and say, “How much do you want to be paid each year in order to make that aspect of your base map open?” and they will talk. But at the moment, Government are not doing that. The Open Data User Group feels there are very straightforward areas: an address, outlines of buildings, property parcels, administrative boundaries and location of the roads. They are open. Those are the key items. Once you have that very small subset of information that appears on maps, you can put land information systems together that are open and transparent.

Lindsay Roy

Can you summarise for us what the most important elements are of a land information system, and what the barriers are to achieving it?

Dr Barr

I think the most important element of a land information system would be the set of data I described—addresses, buildings boundaries—and those should be available in open form, which means they should be free to use. The moment you start putting in any charging mechanism, there is a major barrier. That should be regarded as a national information structure. Many of our European partners are doing precisely that.

Lindsay Roy

It is not just a charging system, is it?

Robin McLaren

These are standards, and they allow people to share information across organisations, so they are interoperable. Without those standards we will be working in silos for the next 10 years. I will be back here speaking to you in 10 years about the same problems.

Dr Easton

But the issue is not the technology. We have the technology. We have the standards. We already have information systems in place.

Dr Barr

We have land data.

Dr Easton

There is a very good information system about Scotland’s environment; as I said earlier, I can find out the land owned by the Forestry Commission in Scotland on that website. The technology is there; the systems are in place. The issue is the lack of willingness to make available in this system the key data Robert has described in terms of land parcels and addresses. The technology is there and the standards are there. It is all ready to go if we can just get people to make the data available.

Lindsay Roy

How can we change it?

Dr Barr

It needs the will of Government and parliamentary will to make that basic infrastructure into open data.

Dr Easton

Yes, I agree.

Lindsay Roy

Cameron, you were responsible for developing the Scottish Government’s spatial data infrastructure. What is it designed to do, and how does it promote greater transparency to the public?

Dr Easton

The data infrastructure is a nebulous concept. It is boxes and wires, procedures, legislation and collaboration. The point of it was to ensure integration across the public sector and impose standards. I use the words “impose standards” advisedly, because we were imposing European standards in terms of the way organisations would publish their data. We used central Government funding—Scottish Government funding—to create what we call a discovery service, which is, if you like, a one-stop shop where people can find out what data are available. For example, you can go on to that site and find that Registers of Scotland hold land ownership data for every county in Scotland. It is transparent that the data are there. Where it falls down is that we were not then able to compel people to publish their data; we could only encourage them and promote the idea, but, at the end of the day, Clackmannan council could say, “I’m sorry; there’s no extra money for this. Therefore, I’m not going to do it.”

Lindsay Roy

It has been poorly implemented as far as you were able to take it forward.

Dr Easton

Yes.

Lindsay Roy

There have been barriers like the refusal of a council to comply.

Dr Easton

Yes, because there is no real mechanism to force them to publish.

Chair

You used the example of Clackmannan. You seemed to suggest they would not do it because it would cost too much.

Dr Easton

Yes.

Chair

What sort of cost are we talking about?

Dr Easton

It is one of the problems. I am not answering that question because it will vary depending on the type of data, the state it is in and all of that. One of our failures in this regard—and I regard myself as failing in this regard—is that we did not do the individual business cases adequately. We always said it was more efficient to publish your data and make it available so that it can be reused and you are not constantly answering people’s questions. It is out there so people can get the data themselves. We never really translated that into pounds, shillings and pence so that we could go to the chief executive of Clackmannan and say, “Well, sir, in the long run, over 10 years, this will save you x thousand pounds.” Those figures were never compiled, and it was a major failing.

Chair

I understand the concept, but are we talking the cost of an aircraft carrier or a cup of coffee?

Dr Barr

I can give you some idea of costs. Ordnance Survey costs £105 million a year to run and it has revenue of about £140 million a year. Of that £105 million, £60 million comes from direct public sector contracts—something called the public sector mapping agreement and the open data agreement. An awful lot of the remainder comes from various captive sources. They get that money out of selling data. Land Registry has a turnover of approximately £350 million a year, but what they are charging for is a service of registering land. Their revenue from the data they sell is a few tens of millions. It is less than that; it is almost too small to measure within their budget. It means that Land Registry can have a model where they give their data away—in fact, it would be very cheap and efficient for them to give their data away—because they have the revenue from the transactions. Ordnance Survey does not have that. I mentioned addresses and Royal Mail. Royal Mail have a total revenue from national address files of £27 million a year. It is a ludicrously high sum because, if you can map the whole country for £105 million a year, it should not cost £27 million a year simply to keep a list of the addresses in the country, only about 10% of which change each year. They now have the right to make commercial profit out of that. The sums of money compared with the value of land, land transactions and making the land market more efficient, as well as more transparent, are very small. As Cameron has said, it is not easy to put a business case to the Treasury. The Treasury says that the money paid for those data is real cash; it is real money that we will have to find. The other money is conjectural money which would appear somewhere in the tax system but could never really be measured, and may not exist. That case from the Treasury, to some extent supported by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills here, has predominated, and a similar market mechanism exists in Scotland. We are really talking about cutting off our nose to spite our face. We are producing inefficiencies in the whole of the land market, and the whole transparency of the land market, for what is potentially a few tens of millions, if that.

Chair

Our view of the Treasury is pretty similar to the view expressed on valuers earlier, but we do not want to digress too much.

Lindsay Roy

At the end, we will ask you what you would like the Committee to say in support of what you are trying to do. Robert, you have argued for the creation of a set of core reference geographies at the taxpayer’s expense. How has that been received?

Dr Barr

It has been quietly ignored.

Lindsay Roy

Good idea, but.

Dr Barr

“A good idea, Bob, but you have to be practical about where the money is going to come from.” I have the answers as to where the money is to come from. Everything is built around the old publishing model. In the old publishing model, you went out speculatively to collect data, which took a lot of money. You printed a pile of maps and you tried to sell them to cover your costs. That is fine. In an information age, there is no cost to publication, or the cost of publication is marginal. The word used is “expose.” You expose your data, which means you simply make it possible for people to look at your data or to use your data. Given that you are holding the data on a computer anyway, the marginal cost of that is almost zero. Trying to run your economy on the basis of the old paper map trade does not work very well. I have argued for a long time—I know Francis Maude and others have on occasions picked up this argument—that those who cause information to change should pay for it, which is exactly what happens when you register land, and not those who want to look at the information. If you put in a planning application which is going to involve remapping your house because you put on a conservatory, you have a mapping charge which pays for the map to be changed, but the fact that you have built a conservatory then becomes a matter of public record. If you buy a piece of land, or you own a piece of land, you are obliged to tell people you own it by registering it, and then access to the knowledge that you own that land becomes freely available. I cannot see any impediment to that, and I have not had any clear answer from Ministers, civil servants or my colleagues in the trading funds why that cannot be done. One reason given by Ordnance Survey is, “The Treasury has a little black book and they have a value for Ordnance Survey—£140 million turnover and it is a £1 billion company. You are asking us to write that off, and Treasury will not write that off.” That just strikes me as putting the cart completely before the horse.

Lindsay Roy

And you would be delighted to have our support on that question.

Dr Barr

I would be delighted to have your support. That is one of the reasons why I was very pleased to be invited, and I am very grateful to you.

Lindsay Roy

I am sure the Chair will get a summary at the end.

Pamela Nash

Dr Barr, have you done any sums as to how much it would cost someone to change the map, if they had extended their property?

Dr Barr

It would be absolutely trivial; it really would be quite small sums of money. Bear in mind that Ordnance Survey’s total mapping costs per year are £105 million. They are maintaining 400 million little bits of objects on maps—outlines of buildings, a bit of a fence and so on—and they are changing that all the time. They can do that for £105 million. Compared with that, a planning application fee would be a very small fraction. There are other nonsenses. One of the little earners Ordnance Survey has is planning application maps. I understand—this is hearsay and may not be true, but I will put it in evidence today—it has been alleged that Ordnance Survey are trying to claim back royalties from the UK Land Registry, because people have discovered you can buy online a Land Registry title plan, which might be 30 or 40 years old, for £4. You can put it in your planning application and your application may be accepted. If you look at guidance on the DCLG planning portal, it says, “No, no. A planning application must be supported by a current large-scale map,” which means an Ordnance Survey map—indeed, it used to say “Ordnance Survey”—that costs between £10 and £40. At the moment, for the 500,000 planning transactions taking place in the UK, people are paying between £10 and £40 for the map to support the transaction. Do they care? Of course they don’t; it is a £350 planning application, and £20 or £40 for a planning map is noise. When I applied for solar panels on my roof, I had a £75 letter of permitted development. I had to pay £25 for the map to support that application. People have discovered that they do not need to, because they can get it at the marginal cost of £4 from the Land Registry. If you implemented our system, the marginal cost would be zero for getting it from the Land Registry or from Ordnance Survey. The fees on transactions that would be required to support the current level of mapping and land registration in the UK would be very small compared with the size of transactions. I am sorry for an extended answer.

Pamela Nash

That’s great. Thank you very much.

Chair

You are obviously fired up about this subject. I take it that not many people speak to you about these sorts of things, and this is your opportunity to get it off your chest.

Robin McLaren

Chair, let me give you an example of what happens when a country opens up the register. I was in Croatia at the end of last year with the World Bank, and I spoke to the equivalent of the Registers of Scotland. They opened up their registers online at the beginning of 2013. They have a population of about 4.5 million, which is close to Scotland’s. There were 30 million accesses to the database on ownership in one year. That was the interest; that was the response to open data access to land information. It was overwhelming.

Jim McGovern

You get 10 out of 10 for enthusiasm, Dr Barr. You remind me of a guy who used to be on TV: Magnus Pyke. I have a question to Mr McLaren. In your written evidence, you outlined the aim for a national land policy and you also described what a national land policy looks like. Have you got actual experience of this working in practice, or was that in the example you just gave us regarding Croatia?

Robin McLaren

That was a practical example of the impact of land policy in Croatia. The land policy itself is much wider. Land information is only a component of the land policy. I have experience of working in African countries especially. A lot of African countries, through the development agencies, are creating their own national land policies. One of the major benefits is an open debate about these issues. I enjoyed the last session because it was about land policy issues. If we had that debate with citizens and a much wider engagement with them, I think we could come up with a strong, accepted land policy in Scotland, which I think is missing. It is one of the key parts of the jigsaw that is missing is this journey of change for Scotland.

Jim McGovern

How complex is it? What would be involved in developing a land policy for Scotland?

Robin McLaren

It could take a year.

Jim McGovern

A year for one person.

Robin McLaren

No. It would be a team of people who would speak to the key stakeholders. They would hold meetings like this to discuss key issues on the policy. It would be very much an engagement with citizens, so there would be a road show to go out to citizens to get their input to the land policy as well. It would be a chance for Scotland to open a debate on these big issues and come up with a solution to set a framework. Right now we have all these Government directorates and agencies working in land, but there is no cohesive, holistic policy on top of it and a framework to guide them, so they are off in different directions.

Dr Easton

It is important to reinforce that, as citizens, we do not have a mechanism to do that at the moment. Robert made reference to his work on the Open Data User Group. That applies to England and Wales; it does not apply to Scotland. We do not have an equivalent in Scotland. Therefore, to my knowledge there is no engagement between the Scottish Government and citizens, private sector, academic sector, third sector, in trying to define what its policies are and what citizens might require. I am looking at data and information, but it applies to land use policy as well.

Jim McGovern

Do all three witnesses support some sort of national land policy?

Dr Easton

Yes.

Dr Barr

Very much so.

Chair

Can I be clear? This question of open data is a devolved issue but it has not been progressed at all.

Dr Easton

It has been progressed very slowly—very slowly.

Chair

Why do you think it has been followed up more speedily in England and Wales and not in Scotland? Is there a reason for that?

Dr Easton

In my personal view and experience, it was because there were some vociferous champions at political level who had the ear of Government, of Prime Ministers and Ministers—Tim Berners-Lee for one—and were able to create this agenda and get the message over that open data were important. We did not have anyone equivalent in Scotland, so there were no champions at senior level within Government, and no champions at political level. All of this is seen very much as low-level technical stuff that the boffins do and that does not really relate to high policy at all. The main issue is lack of champions.

Chair

It is not likely to get a headline in the Daily Record, is it?

Dr Easton

No.

Chair

You think that is the basic difficulty.

Dr Easton

I think so.

Chair

That is helpful.

Dr Barr

Northern Ireland has exactly the same problem. Northern Ireland has done something extraordinary sensible that Scotland and England and Wales could follow. They have brought together the National Mapping Agency, because they do not come under Ordnance Survey, their equivalent to the land registries and their equivalent to the Valuation Office, which are the assessors in Scotland. At the moment, land information is a massive job creation scheme. Why do it once when you can do it four times? Local authorities collect land information; Ordnance Survey collects land information; the registers collect it; and assessors collect it. In Ireland, at least they have put it all together and they collect it once. They still sell it commercially; they will not make it available as open data.

Chair

When you are talking about matching all the available data, is there an issue about data protection, confidentiality and privacy involved in any of this, or is that nothing to do with it?

Dr Easton

There can be. There is no doubt that there can be, particularly when we are dealing with information that may be address-based that you can then link. Not only do we know who you are; we know where you live, because we can link your unique citizen reference number to your unique property reference number. However, we need only look at the way Government statisticians deal with data. They have procedure manuals this thick about how to anonymise data and protect the rights of the individual, so we can do this.

Chair

Fine. I am conscious that the bell is ringing for a vote and we have to go. We will adjourn for 15 minutes and we will be back as quickly as we can. Talk amongst yourselves. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—

Chair

You concluded your response on the question of privacy. Does either of the other witnesses want to say anything about that issue?

Dr Barr

The privacy issue is one that comes up very regularly. Cameron was quite right that once you get down to address level there is an issue. It is seen within the open data community as the most frequent single excuse for not making data open, and the data protection commissioner for England and Wales agrees with that. He says that, on most occasions when geographical information is said to be private, it does not fall under the Data Protection Act. Ultimately, it is up to Parliament to decide who should know what and why, and not accept excuses that land information cannot be made available unless they have been properly tested.

Chair

From our point of view, we are interested in who owns land in Scotland on a wide scale, in rural areas and so on. Are there particular privacy issues there that we ought to be made aware of? I understand the general issue about not being able to identify where people live and all the rest of it, but in many cases we are interested in who may own substantial packets of land. Are the same privacy issues there?

Dr Barr

The issues that arise are the same issues as arise with corporate information, which is beneficial ownership that can be hidden. The issue is whether or not it would be the will that that is allowable for land. Clearly, land can be held—Robin was discussing this earlier—by companies registered abroad, for example in the Cayman Islands, where you cannot work out what the beneficial ownership is. Even if you have an open register, you will not necessarily know exactly what the ownership is.

Chair

We have discussed this. Am I right in thinking that those are two separate issues? The question of beneficial ownership goes beyond simply land ownership and this sort of data provision, and maybe it ought to be tackled in another way, rather than using this as a piggyback to cover it.

Dr Barr

Yes. There is an issue within legislation of what should be acceptable as the ownership records held by the Registers of Scotland.

Chair

What is that issue?

Dr Barr

The issue is whether you can have anonymised nominees, or the extent to which you should be able to trace who owns a piece of land, because the register will not mean very much if you are interested in ownership and making ownership public and transparent. That may not be the reason, but my feeling is that the community cannot have a real say in how land is used unless they know who owns it, and can at least contact the people who own it. That depends on how the register is held.

Dr Easton

In answer to your question, I struggle to see where the need for confidentiality would kick in about knowing who owns a bit of land, because I can go along to a farmer and say, “Who owns the land next door?” and he will tell me. This does not seem to me to be a state secret. I do not see the difficulty in making information about land ownership available.

Chair

But surely if a piece of land is owned by African Dictator Nominees Ltd, knowing that does not help you a great deal.

Dr Easton

I agree. That then takes us to Bob’s point, which is that you have to go beyond that, to find beneficial owners and so on. I fail to see why we should not be able to get this information.

Robin McLaren

Fundamental to good land governance is transparency. Look at the outcome of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland last year and the statement on land and transparency. I would say Scotland should be disclosing beneficial owners, or forcing the companies to register in the EU so that we have access to that information.

Chair

Following that, am I right in thinking from what you have said that Scotland’s record on disclosure is worse than the average in Europe as a whole?

Dr Easton

Yes.

Chair

Is that a view with which the others would agree?

Robin McLaren

For some countries, yes.

Dr Barr

I do not have that expertise.

Chair

Mr McLaren, when you mentioned a national land policy earlier, I was a trifle anxious because of the potential complexity of all that. I was not clear whether you were suggesting that a national land policy would have to precede the disclosure of all this information, whether they could proceed in parallel, or whether full disclosure and openness could be proceeded with irrespective of whether or not we had a national land policy.

Robin McLaren

A national land policy is a fundamental element of the journey you are taking in Scotland to manage land more effectively. It is probably something you build up over time, so, rather than stopping and getting a land policy in place and than moving on, be pragmatic. Have that vision of a land policy in place; agree what it is, and over time you can build that land policy through different activities, like this one—your evidence gathering. This is great evidence to put into that land policy, but make sure that it is on the horizon.

Mr Reid

The Scottish Land Information Service was supposed to achieve the objective of affordable access to data at the touch of a button. Can you explain what happened to that process?

Robin McLaren

Yes, I can. It was probably too far ahead of its time. If we pulled out the documents today and read them, we would be saying the same things. The vision is that on my laptop I can identify an area of interest in Scotland. I can identify a building or a land parcel. I can click on it and see who owns it; its value; what land use is on there; and what development control is attached to that. Are there any planning applications within 300 metres of that parcel? That was the vision of the Scottish Land Information Service. It was exactly the same, but, because it was ahead of its time, the technology wasn’t there, and the thinking about standards and open data was not there. The time has come. As Cameron said, we have those tools. We have the legal framework and we know how to deal with privacy. There is no excuse now.

Mr Reid

There is no excuse for not resurrecting that approach.

Robin McLaren

No, no excuse at all.

Dr Easton

I agree.

Mr Reid

My next question is probably for Robin as well. In your evidence you advocated a view of Scotland’s current land governance framework through the “Land Governance Assessment Framework” developed by the World Bank. What experience has there been in implementing this framework?

Robin McLaren

The framework came out of World Bank research about four years ago. They piloted it in four different countries across south America and Asia as a diagnostic to look at the health of land governance in countries. It was found to be a really good tool to identify weaknesses, and where the best places for intervention were to improve land governance in those countries. I was at a World Bank conference last year. Now, there must be about 60 countries that have undergone this process. I was working with the Iraq Government over the past two years and we used it as a tool to engage with all the stakeholders involved in managing and administering land, talking through their issues and benchmarking the country. I can see it happening in Scotland. Why not? It would be a great way to identify where we are as a nation in managing land, identifying areas for intervention, prioritising them and changing it. It has become a recognised tool.

Chair

Which third world countries are further ahead than Scotland on this?

Robin McLaren

I would say we have been left behind. If you look at countries like the “stans”—Uzbekistan—in the league tables for doing business on land, they are at the top; they have leapfrogged us.

Chair

Scotland is behind Uzbekistan in terms of land transactions.

Robin McLaren

Sorry, Kurdistan—and Georgia, which is probably one of the most efficient countries in the world for land transactions. The time it takes may be about two days. I can walk into a land registry office in Turkey and do a land transaction the same day. There is no law involved; it is all administration.

Chair

Scotland is miles behind these countries.

Robin McLaren

I would say yes.

Mr Reid

What is needed to implement that in Scotland?

Robin McLaren

The technology in the Registers of Scotland, for sure, which is behind; the legislation to allow that type of transaction to take place; and a change in mindset, so that it does not involve a complex process involving lawyers. Many countries have notaries and lawyers who have to be involved in the process to make sure things are correct and people understand the process. I would like to see a system in Scotland where as a citizen I can walk in and do the transaction, and I can do it online.

Chair

I think we are almost unanimous that any system that can dispense with lawyers is to be praised.

Robin McLaren

It is a winner. We should be thinking about simplification and lower costs for these transactions. There is no reason why we cannot follow countries like Kurdistan, Georgia and Turkey in making these really efficient systems.

Chair

Is there a template where it would be realistic for us to say to the Scottish Government, “Look, pick up this”? There is always a tendency to reinvent the wheel, but is there a template that exists somewhere and it would be realistic for us to say, “Look, why don’t you just do x?”

Robin McLaren

Every country is different. The history of land and people’s relationship to it is different in each country, so the solutions will be different. There are different tenure types, so types of leasehold and community ownership would be different, but the lessons learned and some of the tools they have can be picked up. You cannot just take a boilerplate and apply it.

Chair

But as soon as you say, “We’re different; the patterns here are not the same and you can’t read across,” you start gold-plating and tailoring to exact circumstances. The Scottish lawyers have always had an involvement in these things, and, before you know where you are, you are reinventing the wheel and it costs 10 times as much and will take 15 times as long. I am trying to identify whether or not there is anything we can look at and say, “With a small amount of adjustment, you could pick up the template which has been developed by x and apply it in Scotland.”

Robin McLaren

I would say no. There will always be a level of customisation for the country. You cannot just take a boilerplate and put it into Scotland, but you can certainly pick up a good percentage of it and bring it to Scotland.

Chair

What is a good percentage?

Robin McLaren

Seventy five per cent.

Pamela Nash

Could I ask that a different way, Mr McLaren? Are there countries you would recommend us to look at as examples of best practice in different areas of land policy?

Robin McLaren

I think some of the best land policy created has been in Africa. The African Union, the African Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa have put together a land policy initiative and a set of guidelines to lead countries to create national land policies. A lot of the action in land policy and a lot of the good land policies are in Africa. It seems ironic, but that is where it is taking place.

Pamela Nash

The only one I am familiar with is Kenya. Would that be a good example?

Robin McLaren

Yes. The process they went through to create the land policy in Kenya is good. I helped them through that process. The politicians blocked it because they had most to lose. In Kenya, the politicians land-grab; they give state land to their cronies. It is a very corrupt set-up, so they blocked the land policy being accepted for about two years. It has now been accepted. It is all very well to create a policy, but to implement it is quite a different story and that is where the problem is in Kenya, for example. That is not happening quickly, whereas in other countries like Tanzania and Ghana it is being implemented very well. There are some great lessons to be learned there.

Dr Barr

At European level, the Netherlands and Denmark are worth looking at because they have been through this journey. They had a complicated system of collecting data in many different ways. They have started reducing the number of ways in which data are held and they have also done it alongside open data policies. Those two countries are a long way along that journey.

Dr Easton

Iceland has just joined them in terms of opening up its state data.

Dr Barr

Finland is copying it. The Nordic countries have generally done well. Denmark and the Netherlands are well worth looking at.

Robin McLaren

We took the Romanians on a series of study tours, and the one they liked most was Latvia. That is a great example of a very efficient land registration and management system. It is highly automated, simple and liked by citizens. Of all the ones in Europe, I would say Latvia would be a good one to visit and recommend.

Chair

From our point of view, all of this is devolved, so there is absolutely no reason why the Scottish Government should not be trail-blazing this at the moment. Is that correct?

Dr Easton

I agree; it is devolved.

Mr Reid

A lot of the countries Robin mentioned either had been communist countries recently or were colonised, so they probably do not have a long history of complicated land management.

Robin McLaren

There is no legacy there, if you like.

Mr Reid

Yes. I know lawyers always argue that they are needed because they have to do long searches back in the past to find out complications. I know from work as a Member of Parliament that sometimes they get it wrong, they miss things and the person comes to their MP. Is there complexity in Scotland because of this long history that perhaps you would not find in some of the countries you mentioned?

Robin McLaren

Yes; you are right. The ex-communist countries had a clean sweep; they could start again and write new laws and regulations and pick up on new technology, whereas maybe we have been left behind and have not upgraded. They had that opportunity to rethink and gain from best practice round the world. The World Bank will give money and expertise to those countries too, so they will get the best knowledge to create new systems and leapfrog people like Scotland.

Mr Reid

Despite that, you still feel that there is no reason why Scotland could not go down that route.

Robin McLaren

None at all.

Dr Barr

The incentive in all those countries was to create an efficient market where there was no market before. There are inherent inefficiencies in our market because of the way the information is handled.

Chair

Could I turn to evidence given to us by a previous witness? Professor David Adams of Glasgow University told us that the ownership of 12% of vacant and derelict land is unknown to the local authority. Does that surprise you?

Dr Easton

No, and I am aware of local authorities that have sold land that did not belong to them because they did not know who owned it. I cannot comment on the figure, but it certainly does not surprise me.

Chair

If in my constituency I wanted to find out who owned all the land in a particular parish, or around a housing scheme, would that be possible? How easy would it be, and what time, cost and effort would I need to devote to that task?

Dr Barr

I cannot give you the answer in the Scottish circumstances. I can tell you what the answer would be in England. The first question I asked the land and property people in my borough, when I took over the property portfolio, was, “Who owns the land here?” They said, “No member has ever asked us that question. We don’t know.” The next question was, “How do you find out about land ownership?” They said, “We go on to the Land Registry website exactly the same as any other citizen and do individual transactions at £4 a pop to find out about each individual area of land.” The answer is that, if you wanted to find out about a whole parish or estate, you would have to do as many hundreds of transactions as there are on that estate. At the moment, in England at least—I will be corrected about Scotland—there is no mechanism to draw a line around an area and say, “Tell me about all the land property parcels here,” or, if you did, it would be totted up at £4 a throw. It means that for an authority like Warrington with 100,000 land parcels, it would cost £200,000 to buy that information. That is too much. I asked our director of regeneration, who said, “If I could get it for 10K, I’d buy it because we would use it all the time, but it is not worth £200,000.” The problem is that the whole system is designed for individual transactions on individual land parcels.

Chair

As the MP there, how would I know what a parcel was? I can identify an individual spot, but how do I know what parcel it is part of?

Dr Barr

In England, the Land Registry would tell you, because they have drawn a computerised line around every parcel they hold but will not reveal to you. They are now supposed to be revealing it under the European INSPIRE legislation, but there has been a hiccup on that with Ordnance Survey. I do not think that is the case in Scotland.

Dr Easton

No. You would have to know which particular area you wanted and then make a request, usually on a grid reference basis.

Chair

I could think of a grid reference for a particular spot, but I wouldn’t know what parcel or package it was part of. Would they then tell me, “Oh, that belongs to this parcel, and that will be £4, please”?

Dr Barr

That may depend on the local authority. Land registers would not necessarily tell you that because they would not necessarily hold it; Cameron can answer that. For a local authority, it depends whether the people who keep the address records of the local authority have captured what are called basic land and property units, which are the equivalent of ownership parcels, but this is part of the duplication. Local authorities are capturing those parcels because they have not been able to acquire them from Registers of Scotland.

Dr Easton

I agree.

Robin McLaren

There might also be some fieldwork involved, because the search would not throw up all the parcels—not all the parcels may have been registered. There would be some other investigative work to find out who owned those properties.

Chair

Why would a parcel not be registrable?

Dr Easton

The mechanism for Registers of Scotland is that, in the digital land registry, a record is initiated or triggered only when a transaction takes place—if property changes ownership. If a property has not changed ownership, there is no trigger. Andy knows the figures, but about 20% of Scotland is owned by public authorities, and most of that will not be registered because the land has never changed hands. Therefore, it will be sitting in paper title deeds in the register of sasines but it is not in the digital record.

Chair

If land is inherited, it might have stayed in the family for several thousands of years but it will have changed from generation to generation. As it changes from generation to generation, does that generate a record?

Dr Easton

Not to my knowledge. I do not think it does.

Dr Barr

It does not in England and Wales, so inherited land can stay off the register.

Robin McLaren

That is a good one, because if you look at the large infrastructure projects—for example, the A9 widening—how many kilometres of road is that? We have to find out about the compulsory purchase of land right up the A9. With a modern information system, trivial; with the current system, a nightmare.

Chair

On the A9, if it was difficult to identify who owned the land packages, presumably when you were assembling this digital record it would be difficult to identify who owned the land, unless an advert was put in the paper saying, “Unless you identify yourself, you lose it,” which would concentrate minds. It is genuinely difficult, isn’t it?

Robin McLaren

Currently, it is; yes.

Chair

I can think of circumstances in my own constituency where tenements have been demolished and owners of some of the houses cannot be found. Therefore, theoretically air is owned by somebody who had previously been the owner of a tenement who cannot be found. Presumably, some of these things will end up having to be left blank almost for ever.

Robin McLaren

They go out to the field and ask, or they go to the sasines register and try to find the deeds which fit with that area.

Dr Barr

You have made a very good point. In 2001, we worked for Glasgow city council, which was challenging the results of the census. One of the tasks was to do a field check as to whether certain addresses existed. We went out looking for tenements that had come down. There was no record of the date on which the tenements had ceased to be occupied and whether or not they were occupied on the census date, because you register ownership and sale but you do not necessarily register demolition.

Chair

That is helpful.

Jim McGovern

Professor Paul Cheshire told us that the Valuation Office Agency stopped publishing land price data in 2011. Can you tell us how important the data on land values and prices are, and why has it stopped publishing them?

Dr Barr

It was stopped from being published because the revaluation was kicked into the long grass, and that was the main reason for collecting those data. The Valuation Office agency collected an enormous amount of data on land and property in order to allow them to make those valuations, but when the revaluation was no longer required they stopped holding the data.

Jim McGovern

Are we missing something that is potentially important?

Dr Barr

We are missing something that is enormously important. In the United States all the functions we are talking about are city or county functions and, a bit like Northern Ireland, you find that the tax register, the ownership register and the administrative register are all held together. Those are all aspects of a property that you would want. Interestingly enough, when your earlier witnesses today were talking about valuation, they said that all of those things were relevant and important. The public task follows a public need, so if you are not going to revalue there is no reason to keep funding the Valuation Office Agency to collect data the Government are not going to use, even though they might be of use to citizens or people in the market.

Dr Easton

It is so patchy. For example, the other day I went on to the website of our assessors and was able to find out the rateable values and rates paid by all the businesses in my high street. I was able to find out the proprietor and the tenant, with the addresses where they were registered. This is publicly and freely available, but the problem is that the data on that website do not talk to the Registers of Scotland website or to Scotland’s environment website, where this information is published. I need to be able to put in a postcode or address to find out about the high street in Linlithgow and get the data there. Therefore, in answer to your earlier question, I need to know what I am looking for to get the information I want; I have to have a hook to get into the system. It is a good system and it is open and available, but it does not talk to any other system, so it is there in splendid isolation maintained at the taxpayer’s expense. I cannot do a read-across. I cannot take that address and relate it to, say, a planning application, because I have to come out of that and then go into another one. Local authorities are not talking to the assessors who work with them, and we are losing a lot of opportunities there.

Jim McGovern

It sounds frustrating.

Dr Easton

Yes, it is.

Chair

What sort of costs are involved in having these IT systems made able to talk to each other? I used to be on the Committee of Public Accounts, and the record of Government IT procurement was not the best. I am not clear whether we are talking here about having to spend huge amounts of money creating, as in Latvia, a system from scratch, or whether £30 would enable systems to talk to each other, or whether we are talking millions and millions and 10 years. How feasible or practical is it for us to be recommending that this sort of system be created?

Dr Easton

I created the first model of the Scottish spatial data infrastructure for nothing, with the help of a masters student from Edinburgh university, who did it in two months in terms of the coding. The system I talked about where people can go in and find out what data are available and then, in some cases—not all—see the data, fed by the organisation that owns them, cost me £30,000 to develop over a couple of years, in partnership with British Geological Survey. In terms of an individual authority publishing its data—exposing them as Robin described—that could effectively cost nothing, because all you are doing is asking them to meet a certain standard, which they may well meet anyway. They have to publish their data anyway, so there is no additional cost. It may cost £10,000; it may cost £100,000. In the case of Registers of Scotland, to move from the current state of its digital land register, I suspect you would be talking a large sum of money. I do not know what that would be.

Chair

What is a large sum of money?

Dr Easton

Of the order of £1 million.

Chair

In my constituency, they helped to build the aircraft carrier, and a large sum of money there is £1 billion.

Dr Easton

It is not quite the same as aircraft carriers. For example, Scotland’s environment website that I talked about follows the principles of the spatial data infrastructure. It is not a central bureaucracy; it collects data from individual organisations, but it is not just data. There is textual information and reports, and there is a massive amount of material there. That was funded by a European Union project, which I think was something like €2 million over five years, to put that in place. We are not talking of huge amounts of money. Some are big, but some are not.

Robin McLaren

The technology is cheap—ish. The effort is in the data cleansing, because over the years they have used different parcel postcodes and abbreviations for addresses. It is a mess. To make it squeaky clean and improve the quality is labour-intensive and can be quite expensive. A lot of the costs will be on the data side rather than the technology side, but the best way to improve data is sunshine. Expose it and get feedback from citizens and users, and you quickly change and improve the data. Don’t wait until it is perfect; get it out and get it used.

Dr Easton

We have been very bad at making the business case for that. A very good example is when Scottish police forces merged their backroom offices several years ago. The Scottish Government insisted that they use our national address gazetteer, which the local authorities had created. Initially, they were very resistant because we have databases, but then they realised they had something like 20-odd individual address gazetteers across the Scottish police forces, and they did not necessarily talk to each other. They began to realise that a single address gazetteer meant that blue light services were going to the right address, not the wrong address. The business case almost made itself for that sort of thing. There was a lot of money in data cleansing, but it was a very easy business case to make because of cost savings in the long run.

Chair

As a final point, can you explain briefly what INSPIRE is and its significance? Is INSPIRE being implemented in Scotland in accordance with the directive?

Dr Easton

For those of us in the spatial information world, INSPIRE is incredibly important. It is a European directive which is designed to promote, encourage and support data availability and sharing. Originally, it was data sharing across national boundaries in relation to big environmental issues like flooding and so on, but it is really about making data available outwith the public sector—to citizens, the private sector and the academic sector—so that it can be used. It establishes a set of standards so that, as Robin said, everyone knows what they have to do. It is interoperable and the data can be used many times. Is it being implemented? Sort of. It is being implemented in bits. For example, if we focus on the organisation we have talked about, Registers of Scotland, one of the top priority datasets within the directive is cadastre parcels; it is one of the 10 top priorities. The data had to be made available and downloadable and so on by December 2012, among many other datasets. Registers of Scotland chose to implement the directive in the most minimalist way they could get away with, which was effectively to have a centre point and a reference number. That was the data that, technically speaking, fulfilled the requirements of the directive, because they were making available data about property parcels. As is blindingly obvious, that is not of any use to anybody but it fulfilled the minimum requirements of the directive. In some cases, environmental information, like conservation boundaries, designated areas, woodland grant schemes and so on, is being made available readily, and it is open and transparent. Some personal data is not available but boundaries are available. In terms of land information and some other datasets, there is grudging minimalist adherence to the directive. It was a major source of frustration, because there was no way the Government could coerce these organisations. “We are implementing the directive, so what are you going to do about it?”

Chair

One of the issues we often come across is agencies in the UK gold-plating EU directives. This is the opposite. Presumably, this could be overcome by the Scottish Government instructing public bodies to collaborate to a certain level on the directive.

Dr Easton

I agree.

Chair

Gentlemen, unless I am mistaken, that has just about covered all the issues we have, except one. I am reminded that the Scottish Parliament passed a Land Registration Act in 2012. To what extent has that improved transparency and access to data?

Robin McLaren

Not at all; it was a waste of time.

Chair

Get off the fence and tell us what you really mean.

Robin McLaren

It was a wasted opportunity.

Chair

That is helpful.

Dr Easton

I agree with that.

Lindsay Roy

Why has it not been pursued?

Robin McLaren

Why are we not pursuing it? We are; we are here today.

Lindsay Roy

You are pursuing it in this venue rather than at Holyrood.

Robin McLaren

This is one of the venues where we can voice our opinions and maybe change things. The last Act before that was in 1980. Was it? I think it was 20 years before. The opportunity to change the Act does not come around very often. A great opportunity was missed.

Lindsay Roy

Have you expressed your concerns to the Scottish Government?

Robin McLaren

Yes. I brought my evidence. It was ignored.

Chair

Why was it so useless? What opportunities were missed?

Robin McLaren

The idea of the citizen having easy, free access to information was missed; and the idea of land grabbing and being able to put in a claim for land and it being yours within 10 years, not advertising the fact that a claim has been put in. Why not put up a website with all the claims? Why the secrecy? Beneficial ownership was not changed. Lots of things about transparency just were not changed.

Dr Easton

The requirement for public authorities to publish their ownership data in their holdings was not carried out.

Robin McLaren

The whole acceleration of the completion of the land register was not put in place. There was an opportunity to say, “Here’s a target for 2020. Let’s complete it by 2020.”

Chair

Do I take it that there is available a list of what should have been done? We are going to have to make a series of recommendations about this. As you may have identified, we are not experts in this, nor is it likely to become our life’s work, so we want to try to identify where we can simply pick up something that allows us to make a series of recommendations. I think you are saying there is evidence submitted in the context of the Land Registration Act in 2012 that would enable us to identify the opportunities that have been missed and what should be progressed now. Is that fair?

Robin McLaren

If we wanted to be a Latvia, we could have done it in that Act; we could have changed that Act and started to move to a modern land registration system.

Chair

Do colleagues have any other points they wish to raise? As I indicated earlier, we give all our witnesses the opportunity to tell us any points that they think we have not covered. Is there anything?

Robin McLaren

When you recessed we came together and said, “What are the three points we want to make sure you do for us coming out of this discussion?” The first is an open data policy for Scotland. We feel that not just land ownership information but these key datasets that Bob talked about—those core reference geographies—should be part of that open data policy. We have to move ahead with that. The second we have not really touched upon: institutional reform. Bob mentioned the amalgamation of agencies in Northern Ireland into a land agency. I made a list of some of the agencies involved in land: Scottish National Heritage; local government; the Crown Estate; Forestry Commission; the defence infrastructure organisation; Historic Scotland; assessors; Registers of Scotland. I could go on. All this land information is being created by these agencies in isolation. Some are talking to each other; most are not. One way to solve it, as in many countries like Singapore and New Zealand, is to create a land authority, as in Northern Ireland, to amalgamate it. If we take land management seriously in Scotland, maybe we have to talk about institutional reform to bring together the resources, capacity and the wider view of managing land in that type of agency, rather than just narrow views of parts of land management.

Chair

You are suggesting that all the organisations you mentioned should be merged.

Robin McLaren

No, I’m not saying all. I just gave that as an example of how fragmented it is.

Chair

If you are not suggesting that, which I can see is a somewhat large bite to take in one go, it is entirely practical to have all the data management resources or functions put together.

Robin McLaren

There could be shared services, but that is an example.

Dr Easton

For example, why should Glasgow city council have an entire IT department managing its land information when there is an organisation in Edinburgh whose day job is managing land ownership information? Therefore, why can we not pass that information across to Registers of Scotland to manage? You would have to change the way Registers of Scotland managed that and the relationship in terms of the data. It is not merging anything; it’s not creating any new bureaucracy; it is simply managing the data better across all these organisations.

Chair

That was the second point.

Robin McLaren

We have been talking about land today, but we cannot forget marine. We have to broaden that concept to land and marine.

Chair

Sorry. Could you clarify that for me? I was under the impression that the Crown Estate covered virtually all the marine estate.

Robin McLaren

But, once again, to manage our land and marine assets holistically I suggest we have to bring together those functions. Why is there separation of marine and land? We have leases and fish farms. The same type of problem is to be solved.

Lindsay Roy

Apart from the marine, the Scottish Government have powers under devolution to do that now, so where there is a will there should be a way.

Dr Easton

Yes.

Chair

Was that the third?

Robin McLaren

The third point is that this is not just a public sector issue. Increasingly, we have access to information and datasets in the private sector. I am sure you all use Google maps, for example. There are lots of other land and property information systems that the private sector has built to compensate for the vacuum in the public sector. When it comes to engagement, it is engagement with the public sector, yes; but it is also the private sector and, most importantly, the citizen. The citizen has a lot to offer here, and this reconnection between the citizen and the land comes through that information and connection as well. Those are the three things. I would also like to talk about community ownership. I know it is not part of the key agenda. I feel very strongly about the need for community ownership in Scotland. I had a bicycle ride across the Moray Firth last year. When I went there in 1985-86 there were bustling fishing villages. When I went through them, they were ghost towns. We have to revitalise our rural landscape. One of the key ways of doing this is to allow access to land, which means access to wealth creation for those communities. Like the previous experts you had before you, I feel strongly that is a key part of the future of Scotland. Without it, our rural communities will continue to dwindle and disappear. Ownership is the way to do it. I do not like leases; that is just temporary. We want to change Scotland for ever. We want to create energy in the rural communities, so I am a really strong advocate of access to land for communities. It is a difficult job. They said a community had three different factions. Of course it will. The reason is that we have not asked communities to do this before. We have lost the capacity within communities for them to manage land and assets by themselves. It is something we will have to learn. We cannot stop it just because we cannot do it. We have to take them on that journey and make sure they can manage their land assets effectively, generate wealth and pass it on to the next generation. I am a very strong advocate of strong communities. It is not just rural; it is urban. In Edinburgh I am trying to convince my community to take ownership of a woodland in Edinburgh, and they want to do it. It is not just about rural; it is about urban too. It is about getting closer to the environment and managing it to the quality and standard that they want and that is not being delivered by local government, so the whole model of how we manage land and who does it has to change. I am passionate about it.

Lindsay Roy

I can tell, very much so. Is it your argument that to revitalise communities the key factor is land and it is not about encouraging more immigrants to come to Scotland?

Robin McLaren

I think Scotland should have an open door to immigration. We need to increase the gene pool and our skills, but we need to build capacity in communities and make people want to stay there, and have decent jobs and create wealth.

Lindsay Roy

The Scottish Government are saying at the moment that the key to revitalising the rural community is to bring more immigrants into the country.

Robin McLaren

That may be part of the solution, but they have to have something to do there. They can bring them in but they have to have something to do.

Lindsay Roy

If we do not have land reformation, it will be tough.

Robin McLaren

In all the land reform projects I have been involved with worldwide, access to land is only one part of the package. You have to build other skills and capacity; you have to teach them farming, fishing and new skills about forestry and land management. You cannot just give them land and say that is the job done. A whole package of services has to go within that.

Dr Easton

Land policy.

Dr Barr

I will be brief. I was a founding member of the Association of Geographical Information and I wrote the mission statement, which has endured for a very long time. The mission of the AGI is simply to maximise the use of geographical information for the benefit of the citizen, good governance and commerce. If you substitute “land information” for “geographical information,” that would be a good way of testing the suggestions that have been put to this Committee. The biggest impediment to that is institutional intransigence. Institutions work, first, for their own benefit and, secondly, for the citizen, rather than the other way round. That is why the sorts of reforms Robin has suggested—bringing institutions together in order to bring information for beneficial use—are a real problem. That is why I very much welcome this inquiry. Thank you for inviting us.

Dr Easton

I agree with that. Now I am a citizen instead of a civil servant I just ask: who is representing my interest? Who is asking me my opinion? Who is listening to my opinion? At the moment, in terms of data and information the answer is no one, so greater engagement with the citizen is very much required.

Chair

Thank you very much for your views. I am sorry for being a little late in starting the session. I hope we have not held you back unnecessarily. Can I close the session? Oral evidence: Land Reform in Scotland, HC 877-iv 20