You can have this Information but it will Cost You £630

Regular readers will recall my blog of 21 November 2025 where I expose the growing practice of entering “Implementation of Missives” as the consideration in deeds transferring ownership of land in Scotland. The practice is prevalent particularly in what appear to be high value sales.

Due to an error by the agent (Lindsays) who submitted the application for registration of the Scatwell Estate to Strathconon Estates Ltd, I was able to discover that Strathconon paid £25.2 million for the 3535 ha parcel of land. Once land registration is complete, however, this figure will disappear from the publicly available Land Register and the consideration will be entered as “Implementation of Missives”.

As I discuss in the blog from November, the true value is submitted to the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland under a field in the Application Form entitled “value” (rather than “consideration”). But this information is not available to anyone examining the title (£3 + VAT). Only by buying the Applciatiopn Form (£25 + VAT) can one discover this information.

In light of my previous blog, I submitted a Freedom of Information to Registers of Scotland requesting the information contained in the value field (and other fields) for 21 landholdings that had been sold in 2024 where “Implementation of Missives” was the consideration.

Registers of Scotland denied the request citing section 25 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. This exempts from the FoI regime any information that a requester can reasonably obtain other than by requesting it under FoI. This includes information made available by a public authority where it charges a fee for the information.

To obtain the information I want will cost £30 for each of the 21 landholdings which totals £630.

I do not have that kind of money to spend and so will not be availing myself of this offer.

Having reviewed relevant cases in the past I do not think there is any prospect of this decision being reversed on review or appeal. When you think about it, this is inevitable. Over the past year I have spend over £10,000 on fees for access to the Register of Sasines and Land Register as part of the www.whoownsscotland.org.uk project and if I could avoid having to pay by submitting an FoI request I obviously would have.

Thus, for the time being this information remains (effectively) unavailable to the public on account of the exorbitant fees.

In this context it is worth noting that the Scottish Land Commission (SLC) published its valuable Rural Market Data report 2020-2024 at the beginning of December. The data underpinning the report was obtained from Registers of Scotland for a fee and this year the data included the information I am seeking (the sum of money included in the value field). SLC obtained this data under licence, however, with restrictions on divulging the data to third parties. If I submitted an FoI to the SLC I doubt I would be able to obtain it.

The SLC did, however, publish one small clue in this blog which noted that the highest value associated with a 2024 “Implementation of Missives” sale was £28 million for 11,572 ha of land. Given that the largest parcel of land sold in 2024 was the Dunbeath Estate in Caithness (pictured above) extending to 11,534 ha in the sales brochure (10Mb pdf), this sum is almost certainly for Dunbeath. (The next largest sale in 2024 was Dorback Estate at 6080 ha.)

As highlighted in my previous blog, I have identified over 100 land sales totalling 121,225 ha where the consideration is given as Implementation of Missives. Having made enquiries with trusted sources within the legal profession, I now know that this term is being used to conceal the purchase price being paid.

This is all lawful.

The only way to avoid having to pay hundreds of pounds for this information is for Scottish Ministers to amend Section 12(2) of the The Land Register Rules etc. (Scotland) Regulations 2014 (which requires the consideration to be entered in the title sheet) and place an additional duty on the Keeper that were there is money changing hands, the sum must by law be disclosed.