Chamber and committees

To date, £32.2m funding committed through the Memorandum of Understanding has been spent. A breakdown of this figure, along with explanatory detail, is provided below:

Details are provided in the following table.

Registers of Scotland is a non-Ministerial Public Body answerable to the Scottish Parliament.

RoS formally surveys its customers (professionals and citizens) twice a year through the Customer Services Institute to benchmark customer satisfaction and customer effort. RoS uses the information provided to make improvements to RoS’s services. RoS consistently achieves customer satisfaction scores and customer effort scores that are significantly better than the public sector benchmark.

In addition, RoS adheres to the Scottish Approach to Service Design (https://www.gov.scot/publications/the-scottish-approach-to-service-design/) with activity including research sessions. Around 250 such sessions were held during the last year along with 20 live webinars for customers spanning 14 topics of customer/user interest.

RoS have a monthly accessibility clinic working alongside colleagues from the Scottish Government and regularly research with customers to ensure their services follow the web content accessibility guidelines, (wcag 2.2 www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ ).

RoS also maintains an effective network meeting regularly with key stakeholders including lenders, UK Finance, and The Law Society of Scotland’s Property Law Committee ensuring visibility and opportunity for lenders, solicitors and conveyancing professional bodies and individuals to contact them with questions, improvement suggestions or service delivery concerns.

I have asked Alison Byrne OBE, Chief Executive of National Records of Scotland (NRS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

NRS is a member of the Institute of Customer Service and participates in an annual Business Benchmarking Survey. The survey focusses on evaluating customer satisfaction levels. In 2024, 85.7% of customers were satisfied with the services delivered by NRS, set against a public services national average of 73.6%.

When exploring any changes or improvements in service provision, NRS engages with customers through appropriate survey channels. NRS monitors customer use of services through quarterly reporting. NRS operates various social media platforms that are used to engage with the public and gather feedback.

NRS also continues to review its KPIs on a yearly basis to reflect use of services.

Registers of Scotland is a non-Ministerial Public Body answerable to the Scottish Parliament and Digital transformation and modernisation of the Registers of Scotland systems are the responsibility of the Keeper.

RoS is delivering a significant programme of digital transformation and modernisation. This has moved RoS’s registers to the cloud; enabled applications to be submitted digitally; and enabled customers to self-serve digital information from the registers; as well as significantly modernising the internal digital tools used by RoS to process applications.

The Scottish Government sets out the Digital Scotland Service Standards which RoS adheres to and RoS staff have taken part in training and development from the Scottish Government’s Digital Academy.

Registers of Scotland is a non-Ministerial Public Body answerable to the Scottish Parliament.

The following operating costs figures are provided from RoS annual report and accounts (which can be accessed via the RoS website www.ros.gov.uk)

In Scotland, there is no funding out with the advertising spend that is allocated for community radio stations. The selection of the stations for campaigns is determined by the target audience and reach. Information on individual advertising spend per radio station is not available to us as this is deemed commercially sensitive.

The distribution of doctors in training is managed by NHS Education for Scotland (NES). This has traditionally worked within a distribution model of 50:25:15:10 for the West, South East, North and East respectively.

Aligning to Scottish Government commitments, which include the remote and rural and island initiatives, NES have been reviewing alignment to population health data, consultant and GP vacancies and an increased need for generalism. This review is leading to a redistribution of where doctors train recognising the changing locations and demographics of our population.

The overall cost of training Foundation Year 2 doctors from August 2023 to July 2024 was £56,590,177.

I have asked Alison Byrne OBE, Chief Executive of National Records of Scotland (NRS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

NRS has differing processing times depending on the nature of the request. NRS monitors these timescales through robust Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are regularly reviewed and refined, taking into account customer feedback through all of our channels.

Currently, all the timescales are being met at 98% and above. Details of KPIs and the latest associated performance measures can be found on page 13 of our Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24.