Making sense of Scotland’s land data

Scotland’s land data. When you talk about this with those not steeped in it, the reaction is nearly always the same. “You’d think we’d know about all this by now, wouldn’t you?” The thinking goes that surely someone, somewhere, has access to all the data that exists on land ownership and tenancy? 

Well, the answer to these questions is, “it isn’t quite as simple as that….”

Land Register & Sasines

Among other duties Registers of Scotland (RoS) maintain two databases (or registers) central to land ownership. The older of these is the General Register of Sasines.¹ Established as far back as 1617, this provides detail to claims on land in the form of search sheets, land deeds, property descriptions, and ownership transfer records. It may, or may not, also include a plan (or map) for the land in question. This has been gradually replaced over time by the Land Register. First established in 1981 and progressively rolled out on a county-by-county basis² until 2003, the Land Register records property ownership, map boundaries, title numbers, proprietors, mortgages, and legal burdens with a state-backed guarantee.³

Following the Land Registration etc (Scotland) Act 2012, Scottish Ministers set an ambitious date for completion of the Land Register of 31st December 2024. The idea being that all land in Scotland would, by that time, exist in a single place in mapped form. While this target has not been met, it has been described as “functionally complete” in the sense that all land which is regularly transacted has been registered. 

In advance of this date work commenced to look at data held in Sasines with a view to producing a coverage which could be used to indicate ownership boundaries. This was originally known as “Unlocking Sasines”.⁴ It has been replaced by a product known as “Indicative Sasines” which is available as a background layer through RoS’s online portal ScotLIS.⁵

Data beyond RoS

Beyond datasets maintained by RoS, other sources exist. A review of land ownership data in Scotland⁶ undertaken as part of the Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme in 2024 cast an eye over 18 different sources of data on land ownership and tenure. Examples included data collected by the Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID) from land managers in their applications to be part of various agricultural payment schemes. Or the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) who until 2021⁷ collected detail on agricultural tenancy arrangements as part of the June Agricultural and Horticultural Census (JAC). Then there are organisations such as Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), the executive agency responsible for managing the country’s national forest estate which amounts to around 9% of Scotland’s area. Beyond these are public bodies including the Crofting Commission, the 32 Local Authorities in Scotland, the Crown Estate, the Ministry of Defence, and many others in an extensive list.  

Last, but certainly not least, there is data collected and maintained by a private citizen. Researcher, writer, and land campaigner Andy Wightman has, over many years, collated data from several sources to generate his Who Owns Scotland⁸ dataset. It remains the most usable dataset on land ownership we have. Coverage is ~75% of Scotland’s land mass, focussed on rural areas, with data available on a subscription basis.

So where does this leave us?

Each of these datasets has been built for a different need to fulfil a different purpose. With the Land Register not yet complete,⁹ the overall picture is one of a complex patchwork of partial data, at various levels of detail, held by multiple organisations, in different places, often under restricted access. And if you can access data held you almost certainly can’t share it. 

“A single source of truth”

In data terms, we often speak about maintaining a “single source of truth”. One central data location containing core data, from which all other services derive. 
 

Examples include the Ordnance Survey’s National Geographic Database¹⁰– a single store of authoritative mapping data for Great Britain. Or engineering firms conducting complex infrastructure projects such as Balfour Beatty and their work improving the resilience of Skye’s electricity transmission infrastructure.¹¹ Considerable effort is invested in the private sector and beyond in the creation and maintenance of their core data. Mistakes cost. Accuracy matters.

Isn’t it time we had a single source of truth for Scotland’s land data?

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025

The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025  brings renewed attention to the importance of understanding the extent of landholdings >1,000 Hectares,¹³ since those landholdings will be subject to provisions in the Act such as the creation of Land Management Plans and lotting decisions when sold.¹⁴ To support this, the size of all landholdings must be known, and to support the connected persons element,¹⁵ we need to identify landholders, not just landholdings. 

Crucially, the Land Register is a register of land, not a register of people. And that difference is critical in assessing the utility of the Land Register for the purpose of identifying landholders. It means, for example, that it’s not possible to say whether a John Smith who owns property A is the same John Smith who owns property B. And that’s a big problem when it comes to identifying connected persons. The question then becomes, could “people” be brought in?

Could “people” be brought in?

The Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land (RCI) was established in 2022 following the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016.¹⁶ The register “shows who controls the decisions of owners or tenants (for more than 20 years) of land and property in Scotland, where this information may not be publicly transparent elsewhere”.¹⁷

Crucially it offers a method by which title identifiers in the Land Register may be linked to individuals in the RCI. The problem is it lacks teeth. It is a system with modest penalties for lack of completion while anecdotal evidence suggests that enforcement authorities perhaps aren’t always aware of their responsibilities.¹⁸

However, combining these data, along with other registers held by RoS and other data sources outlined above could form the basis of a land information system fit for more than guaranteeing ownership.

The Benefits of a Fully Open and Complete Land Register

There are benefits far beyond meeting the requirements of the 2025 Act. Other areas of public policy development rely on knowing who the actors are and where they operate. Whether that is taxation and fiscal policy, housing and regeneration, public access, peatland restoration, public sector asset management, or community empowerment – all are topic areas for which understanding patterns of land ownership is key.

Summary

Land data can get very complex very quickly. Simply put, the underpinning data isn’t yet in a usable state where we can access it, free at the point of need, for all users.

At whichever point on the spectrum of views on land reform you might find yourself, the ability to access accurate underpinning data without restriction is vital to both inform the debate and provide the basis on which decisions on public policy may be made. Only by knowing who has ownership and control over land can we begin to unpick the complexities around how we might address some of the bigger picture goals and long-term aspirations. It is a long-standing need which, arguably, has never been greater. 

Other nations have managed it. Can we?

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About the author

Dave Miller is a spatial data scientist with 20yrs+ experience applying analytical mapping technologies to solve real-world problems. Often working across the science-policy interface, he has worked in domains including land use, agricultural reform, climate change, sustainability, and, more recently, land reform.